Artist Purgatory

Another month's slipped by.  I've been busy, no time to go to work, don't know how I ever fitted it in.  The weather has been perfect for reading on the veranda. I'm going to need more books.

If you ever wondered about the composition and techniques of a painting, I can recommend reconstructing it from 1000 pieces. Some call it a jigsaw, I tell myself it's study.

I've got some drawing and mixed media work done, and framed.  I also finally got around to framing some things I brought back from Paris last year. A French map of Scotland?  I think so.

I live in a sort of artist purgatory: I was married to a man who wouldn't hang things on the walls, and now I'm not supposed to hang things on the walls in this house. 

I've also had time to play with some of the photos I took on that trip. I'd frame them too, but...

(Not Disneyland - Tower Bridge)

Despite planning an interstate move later this year, there are just some things you can't leave behind when you see them laying about. And my lovely neighbour brought me a care parcel of bits left over from her house renovation.





















I'll be flogging the Tupperware from the kitchen cupboards at a garage sale, but packing the jars of sunbleached bones. And my skull collection. Some things a girl just can't leave behind.

Out and about in Paris and London - Part 2

My sadness, the tear in my eye and my trembling lower lip on leaving Paris was somewhat assuaged by first class passage on the Eurostar to London.  More leg room, a table for the free lunch.  Not as exciting as having the compartment on the train from Amboise to Paris - something I wanted to do since reading things like Sherlock Holmes as a child, and watched all of those old films, not to mention Harry Potter in both book and film - but exciting enough to appeal to my shallow side. 

The driver of the black cab to the hotel barely survived the effort of lifting our bags into the cab while pretending they weren't heavy, but cheerfully announced that he expected them to be heavy, since we were women.  Not only strong, but smart, those black cab drivers. I can but hope he wasn't hospitalised after lifting them out again. 

Spring was just starting to come to London, the weather was warmer, the blossoms and the bulbs were starting to appear and there was so much to do and see. So many old things in markets and museums, red buses, black cabs, the stuff of English crime fiction and literature, and the mix of the very old architecture with the very new gave the place a sense of living and breathing and evolving and moving. Paris is romantic history, but London is living it.

I loved the river - as I love all water, the oceans,rivers,interestingly shaped puddles.  I wanted to get to Greenwich, but time got away.  We went on a pub crawl in Wapping, where the pubs were older than Australia. We walked around on the streets which used to be on Monopoly boards when I was a child.  We saw the Prime Minister's car whiz past several times, preceded by motorbike policemen who slid sideways to stop oncoming traffic.  

Everyone had a brother who lives, or had recently lived, in Australia.  Everyone knew that  Australians live surrounded by death - redback spiders, crocodiles, funnelwebs, a host of venomous snakes.  They seemed surprised that we had survived long enough to get out of the country.  Some people thought we were from New Zealand, where life is reputedly slightly less dangerous. 

Although there were less optometrists and hairdressers than in Paris, I was glad to see that the UK has warmly embraced vintage, and there was no shortage of charity shops. They ranged from the traditional to the recycled designer specialists, priced accordingly.  I saw one right behind the Big Palace, from a bus, but couldn't get back there on foot. A vintage tuxedo shirt in a vintage shop on Portobello Road - exactly 4 times the price of  almost the exactly same shirt in the charity shop around the corner.

 

even the dentists have fashion sense

Vintage markets abound and we know how I like those.  So much taxidermy, so many darned import restrictions. It's probably just as well, or I would be surrounded as I type by stuffed pheasants, hedgehogs and a budgie in a cage - I kid you not.  Not to mention hares, rabbits, deer.... Haggling seems to be expected, but it helps if you know the difference between actual vintage and faux old. 

I found lots of little treasures and trinkets at various markets, but left so many behind. Some of the prices were, in the parlance of The Castle, dreamin'.   The UK postal people really haven't kept up with the whole sending mail overseas thing, pricewise.  Compared to other countries, an English postman could fly out and drop off my parcel for the price.  Perhaps they do.  Why does it take less time for a postcard from France to get to Australia than one from England?  Slower planes?  

Before I go again, I will be checking freight options.

normal transmission will be resumed....

Been a bit busy. Being forced to watch people blatantly discriminated against, harassed and bullied really disturbs my ability to be amusing. Apparently, ethics are optional.  Who knew? Vale the world where honesty, fairness and loyalty used to exist.  I miss it.

So here are some pretty pictures of the road from Perth to Albany in Western Australia, last weekend. it's the end of Perth's official hottest summer, ever. Things are pretty dry.

The next installment will contain happy news of a newly discovered and highly recommended Perth tipshop, new salvage yards, and thrifted and found fabulous things.  I promise.

This guy gets extra points for ingenuity....well done that man!

a long goodbye to the busted flush....

Having spent another torrid week with Phillip Marlowe, I've found time for a few little jobs.  The temptation to sit on the shady veranda and read was awfully strong.







I looked after this:

(although she ate my favourite and most comfortable pair of Camper shoes.  She was very sorry but unable to stop herself, apparently.)







I did some work on this:

And was quite pleased with the outcome so far. 












 I also got this:

cleaned up and inside (where there is just NO room for it!).  Still some work to be done but on the upside you can get to the back door now.  Casters?  Legs?  Hmmmm....

I only went to 2 garage sales yesterday, one was a farm clearance (and you know how I do love those!).  We got quite a lot, really - so much the guy who helped to carry it to the car didn't think it would fit.  It was a very small car.  Some neat packing and we made it home safely and even with room to spare.

Amongst the treasures:  boxes, boxes, boxes

and this:

which is now this:












and this (well, it will be soon.  Are you thinking what I'm thinking?)

I also now have enough ginormous bolts for several interesting rustic hat/coat/key racks.




The second one was a friend's and also proffered treasure, however the excitement was such that I seem to have forgotten to take some happy snaps.  I'll try to do it this week.

I'm nearly out of Phillip Marlowe, but I understand that a bunch of Travis McGee novels are winging their way towards me.  Just in time, really.

Eyes like strange sins

To all those women who walked into those sheds on Saturday morning and said, in a disappointed voice, 'oh, it's all men's stuff' I say : pfffft.  Oh happy days, sheds full of old, rusty, grimy boxes of stuff.  I was down to a couple of skiploads of the stuff, so I was more than happy to top up the supplies.

As a side product, I have one container of airbrush bits, and a box of car bits like new fuel filters, spark plugs, and so on.  Maybe I can swap them for something interesting, since I have neither vehicle nor airbrush.

Yesterday, friends delivered an Albany Advertiser (newspaper) from Thursday November the 8th, 1934.  Fear not, they are not the world's slowest paper persons ( for paperboy would be both politically dubious and 50% gender-incorrect) but had found it when pulling up the lino in their lovely old house.  Today, a very nice lady brought me forty - forty! - that's four zero - maritime charts.  Primarily Western Australian coast, with Northern Territory ones as a bonus.  I barely know where to start. 'Thank you' doesn't even start  to cover it.

As it happens, I've been spending the weekend with Raymond Chandler.  There's a lot of terminology which would probably be seen as politically incorrect now, but as a lyrical description of the time (in this case, 1943)  it holds it's own.


"A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes.  She had eyes like strange sins."

"From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away."

Pure gold.

Pinterest, ideas and addiction

I have a confession to make.

I was googling about the interweb, as one does, and I weakened and had a good long look around on Pinterest.  Oops.  Now I'm addicted. (I institutionalise easily.  Who knew?) 

So now I have boards to which I can pin all sorts of interesting things, and other people can look at them, and I've been sort of surprised that others have similar interests and tastes and like or re-pin my pins.  And I can look at other people's stuff too. I can highly recommend it as a way to find and exchange cool new ideas, and avoid doing housework.

I was explaining this to a non-Pinterest friend, which led us to a really interesting discussion about creativity as we hurtled about the burg looking for garage sales and tip shop bargains in this week's hideous heat and humidity.

People say to me that I'm really creative, but I think mine is just a visual creativity, in that I make things which people can see.  I think that others are just as creative, but express it in different ways, and don't give themselves the credit they deserve.  There's creativity in making a home, whether it's minimalist or eclective, like mine.  There's certainly creativity in raising children, cooking, and gardening, let alone doing all that and working 9-5 at the same time. Clever people are creative in whatever work they do, because of the way they approach it. If you let yourself accept that whatever you're doing is in it's own way creative, because you're expressing yourself, you can perhaps look at yourself differently and give yourself the credit you deserve.

If you aren't being creative on some level, then you're just going through the motions of living.

That's not to say that creating isn't difficult. Art is hard.  I spend lots of time (and I do mean LOTS) looking, researching, planning, and recording ideas, themes, thoughts, and inklings.  

Brainpickings (a truly excellent source of interesting things)quoted artist Chuck Close: "Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.”   


Maybe some people think that ideas show up fully formed, and because they wait for that to happen, they don't start?  If you wait for something to inspire you, you'll just keep waiting. Go out and inspire yourself.  Look, experience, experiment, feel, touch, think. Write. Work out how it's done. Find things that make you smile.

My fave quote is from Einstein:  "Creativity is the residue of time wasted."  Certainly, for me, the time I 'waste' looking around, reading, combing through other peoples' junk, informs what I do when I try to make or draw something.  I keep scrapbooks and photos and notebooks (and now virtual pinboards) as memory joggers, planners, idea generators - I suppose I immerse myself fairly constantly in the 'creative process'.   Someone asked me what an item was when I bought it at the tip shop.  My response was that I didn't know - I didn't - but I could see what it was going to be.  I said it without really thinking but having said it I thought some more about it. Sometimes I pick things up because I have a plan.  Sometimes, the plan comes later, but it's informed by something I have. Sometimes, I knock things over and they fall in a way I could never have planned.

Which is why I love my books - and magazines and bits of paper and ribbon and string and fishing lures and all the other stuff that I have about me.  The colours in a magazine's photo shoot can be the inspiration for something completely unrelated to fashion or travel. Stuff is stuck on the fridge (no, not the dust)because it's an interesting shape or there's something interesting in the colour or the composition.  I would die in a minimalist environment, I'm a visual person.

So much as I'm loving Pinterest, I'm not giving up on my visual diaries, corkboards, and things affixed with clothes pegs to other things about me. The Pinterest stuff is accessible and tidy, and very very neat, but I need my stuff about me so that I can waste time being residually creative.