we need to talk about Reg...

This is Reg Mombassa's "Self Portrait With High Pants",
which he submitted for that particularly Sydney slagfest, the Archibald Prize.
He thought that this would be close to "what Bon Scott would have done as a self portrait".
I rather like it. Actually, I like it lots.




He is mostly known for his irreverent "larrikin" style graphics used by mambo designs. (His contribution to the Sydney Olympics was a fly-infested backyard bbq scene in the Closing ceremony: hilarious and bewildering).
Originally from New Zealand, he is a lovely painter who explores nostalgia and half remembered places, investigating the landscape from the perspective of the perpetual traveller.

and here he is with Dog Trumpet, playing "Lili Marlene." Monday night at NGArt in Chippendale.
Absolutely Brilliant.




This was the unexpected bonus for undertaking that military style operation called "going to an exhibition opening across town when you have small children and a densely tangled life."
Well, the boychild and I were amply rewarded.

Listen to the South Pacific guitar riffin' jangles. I defy ANY of you, if you are australian, to deny the presence of a few of those vibrato chords,deeply embedded in your psyche, those twangly guitar riffs, traces of any old "Mental as Anything" song played in a pub or an RSL club, or on the radio on a long car trip.

This was the best exhibition opening I ever went to.
Gosh it was fun...
( TWO doses of miss jane on the ONE day. AND her work was sold..go miss j.)

And the fishspawn had the best of all times too.


Go there: NGArt: "There's No Place Like Home" features artworks by Reg AND brother Chris O'Doherty, (not to mention the lovely Miss Jane.)
Little Queen St Chippendale.

Sybil

This is an old friend of mine, Sybil.
She is from Delphi, originally, but now resides in Rome. Rather high up in the Sistine Chapel, as it happens, quite a posh address.

I have been to visit her a few times, one time I lay on the floor to have a leisurely chat, but that was frowned upon and anyway, someone stood on me.

I own a book with her face printed in it, she is rather a famous friend and doesn't really have much time for chats. I did try and do this drawing from life, but I was compelled to instead purchase a picture and sit nearby and copy it. Which is sort of a strange concept and brings up thoughts of Walter Benjamin and "authenticity" and the aura of the original object. But I did render her , I thought, rather cautiously and carefully, reflecting my reverent attitude towards her.

So, I witnessed the authentic, the real, and produced a reproduction of a reproduction and then I gave her a lovely background of Winsor and Newton Bronze metallic gouache. To make her special and holy: Michelangelo would have been rotating in his crypt like a barbecued chook, given all those efforts he made to create volume and space and here's me giving her a very retrograde byzantine icon-style makeover.

Nonetheless, I have always loved her. Plus, being a Sybil, I was hoping she may have been forthcoming with a few portentious comments about my future, but she stayed mute on that side of things, sadly.

drawing in the air

Last night in the heat, the sky outside was lit from a distance, everything else was shadow,
the suburban industrial estate where I paint was quiet and still.
Listening to Allegri’s Miserere while painting a stolen fragment of Renaissance sky, I
looked up outside, and a huge albino fruit bat sailed directly overhead,
a white bat.
The miserere was written to be sung during Holy week. How appropriate! A week of painting is holy.
Midnight was long gone when I returned home, I wish I could stretch the days longer and longer.
Except that I love to sleep, I would never close my eyes on the day at all.

What I like to do, is live vicariously on a wild sea coast, where it isn’t hot, an imaginary place assembled from a few fragments of image. It simultaneously exists on a blinding blue coast, where it isn’t wild and cold. But I was hot to the core today, I felt like a blacksmith, and no thought of windswept rocks or rushing tidal straights could cool me down. So I only existed in one place, really, like a usual person.

I used to draw pictures in the sky with my finger,
Very complicated pictures, in an act of creation so completely engaging that it rendered me immobile , one finger pointing at the sky. Or at the roof of the church hall, where I was supposed to be doing some idiotic physical culture routine like all the other girls.
What IS that stary-pointing thing you do? would ask my mother, horrified at my isolated stillness among the moving bodies.
“Drawing,” I would reply, squinting out from between my messy plaits. Its just that my drawings were only visible to me.

I still like drawing in the air.