Inmates without doctors

6 September 2020

Inmates without doctors

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 31 August 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This came from an odd experiment the other night. I had gone out to paint with an idea in my head without paying attention to the motif in front of me. I wanted to impose a visual idea upon the session which is already an il-fated proposition. But because this idea had come out of something I had seen in the sky the night before I couldn’t erase it from my head. Maybe like a child, I had wanted something to appear so much that I imagined it would magically re-appear again the following night. 

So on the palette I was also trying to prepare for a sky of a few olive coloured clouds I had seen the previous evening. I was so sure would they would re-appear that funny enough they actually did briefly at the end of the session, but quickly dissipated at dusk when I had already finished and even forgotten about the clouds. But even still, I left with this study that for some reason reminded my of a sticky date pudding.

But I like it anyway, it feels compact and centered around the nebulous block of sea that I had just left in its deconstructed state. I packed up a little early because the sky had died out but to be fair, I was also distracted by an eccentric fellow who has dug out a small camp not ten metres down below where I paint in the dunes. He sleeps on the beach each night in a kind of foxhole in a warm swag, and when it rains, under a colourful canvas top that distracts me. He has showed up these last few years for several months at a time. He is fabulous fabulist, and for a while, he had me going. He was a secret millionaire, a yachtsman, a learjet pilot, an entrepreneur with several properties around he world, etc, etc. He amazed me with a steady stream of carefully crafted name drops , one where stars fell under his magnetism and who put him up for weeks at a time on visits. But, Australia, in the end, is a small pond where all the minnows know each other so I through friends eventually figured him out soon enough. Yet I liked him at the start because I like eccentric folks in this square world.

Sadly, he was always trying to get away from this ‘horrid’ country and back to some unnamed Italian town on the Amalfi Coast. I, on the other hand, had only just arrived here, and I love Australia. But somehow, through his charm and my laissez-faire affection for oddballs (not unlike myself), I left ajar the precarious door to reason and let him into my life likeI would a stray cat.

So the other day, he had come to say hello while I was painting. He quickly launched into a nervous pitch about how the skies were crawling with UFO’s. Apparently, he watches them intently each night from his small foxhole and he loves to tell anyone about how amazing they are. When I arrive to paint in the afternoon I’ll hear about how fast they move until “they stop on a dime” hovering over the horizon but then, just as quickly, they’ll zip back overhead glowing with colour. They return to repeat the same patterns again, and again, much like his fabrications, over and over again.

So as the weeks and months have gone by and the UFO”s have gotten bigger and faster. I smile and feign interest because, like I said, he was kindly, a little crazy, yes, but a gentle soul I thought nonetheless. There are lots of curious souls who inhabit the many small corners of life around here in Brunswick Heads. They are off the grid, as they say and ‘doing it tough’ like they say here in Australia. 

As I move through this contemporary life of craziness, I discover that it’s often hard to discern the bona-fide inmates from the straight civilians in this seaside town. And, I sometimes wonder if there is there a doctor in the house, and would they even make beach calls? But at the end of the day I look at my own life, and is painting this mysterious sky any different than watching for UFO’s each night? 

Like all artist’s I know that Imagination is pretty much everything but not everything at the same time. Somehow, we need to be tethered to the earth if even to have a roof over our heads and enough money to buy food each each. But I’ve wondered also just how long can all this last? Rents are impossible, andI don’t know many poor souls could live in a foxhole on the beach for too long. We are coming up to the end of winter and there are too many young mothers with children who sleep in cars and camper vans around here. It’s heartbreaking. Like they say in Australia, “They’re doing it on the tough”.