in which the fish speaks about nicer things

Cofa Spring Fair: printmaking department

So.
Evidently the black is too black, I see I will have to work on happier endings, won't I?
Perhaps the longer version of would have been more appropriate, more redemptive. Just thought I would give it an airing and some literary type may have given me some free editing. However, I seem to have alarmed everybody instead. Don't worry, blossoms!

In other news, the Spring fair was fun, so very very hot and I was covered in a crust of something by the end of the day. I vacillated between impromptu floor talks and forgetting I was even in public, so engrossed was I in my work that I was discovered hanging off the easel like a baboon attending to the top corner with my eyes all unfocussed.


The highlight of my day was when I looked up and saw my female cub come around the corner, having travelled for hours by public transport alone, to "see mummy". Very sweet, considering it was 33 degrees and she could have been at the beach.
In fact, she said, her resolve wavered somewhat when, waiting for the ferry, she saw all her friends diving off the end of the wharf in their bikinis and she had to tell them she was off to paddington to watch her mad mother paint and give talks.
We went down to oxford street after the fair, me having painted like a lunatic for five hours straight, and ate Indian and looked at the bookshops.

I am still suffering from the too much to do thing, I am wondering if it is not just my mad schedule but my work practice: I write everything out in longhand initially. This is rather an ingrained habit: at the parents house on friday night, I discovered this, my notes on les Murray, and I remembered very appropriately, falling in love with "Spring Hail". Here is the first thing I ever wrote on Les Murray:



and here is the last page of notes I wrote on Les murray just last week:





the funny thing is, at conferences even now, I do the same thing. Loads of neat writing. It's probably more legible than my typo-ridden typing, truth be known. I like writing, it seems to confer ownership of some kind.


I have had to travel around Sydney a bit in the last few weeks. Some places have always given me a strange feeling that I cannot always deal with, just a sense of time travel and the loss of old landscapes as well as other things.



Its strange when you are suddenly reminded of something which you realise has shaped the way you do things. Although I try to dwell in the present, the past dictates sometimes the strange paths you take, and why you are happy, desperately so, for the good things: like silver light upon the sea, mango lassi on a hot night with one's daughter, turquoise paint upon your brush, seaweed on the sand.