6 September 2020
Inmates without doctors
This came from an odd experiment the other night. I had seen something in the sky I wanted to re-create so I had gone out to paint with this idea in my head without paying attention to the motif in front of me. Basically, I wanted to impose a visual idea upon the session, and this is already an il-fated proposition. But because this idea had come out of something I really liked the night before, I couldn’t erase it from my head. Maybe like a delusional person, I so wanted something to appear that I imagined it would magically the following night.
So, on my palette I began preparing for a sky which would have a few olive coloured clouds I’d seen the previous evening. I was so sure they would re-appear that funny enough they actually did briefly at the end of the session only to quickly dissipate at dusk when I had already finished and had even forgotten about them. But even still, I left with this study that for some strange reason reminds me 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 a 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 in his warm swag on the beach each night in an oval shaped foxhole that he’s dug out of the sloping dune and he reminds me of a crab because he’s continually digging away at the ever encroaching sand. But he does it happily, and I’ve come to admire him, he’s like Sisyphus, but when it rains, he raises 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, ones where stars fell under his magnetism and who put him up for weeks at a time in mansions aroound the globe. Yet here he was, sleeping on the desolate beach at Brunswick Heads. And like so many places, Australia, in the end, is a small pond where all the minnows know each other, so through various friends I eventually had him figured him out. But despite all his fabulations, he might have actually know several big shots around the world but maybe just had a falling out with many of them. I say this because he and I eventually had a falling out. But despite this, I had sort of liked him in a certain way because I like many eccentric folks trying to thrive in 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. Me, on the other hand, I had only just arrived here and I really 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 like I would a stray cat.
So the other day, he had come to say hello while I was painting and 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 for a bit, 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 fabulations 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 only 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 and many of them are ‘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 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 wonder to myself if painting this mysterious sky night after night is any different than watching for UFO’s?
All artist’s I know, need use of their wild imaginations, but at the same time, they still need to be tethered to earth and have a roof over their heads with enough money to buy food each day.
But I’ve wondered also just how long can all this last? Rents are impossible, and I don’t know many poor souls who could live in a foxhole on the beach for too long. We are soon 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, and like they say here, “They’re doing it on the tough”.
Meanwhile, I continue to exercise my own sort of madness as I try to glean something from the sky. I like this picture from last week. There is some mysterious about it. Is it the darkening winter light? But it works for me.
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