kangaroo

February 28, 2015

Passion Exists

There’s a rumbling in my core when I need to paint. If I ignore the call, I suffocate slowly and sink to an untimely death like an ant in thick treacle. This sounds melodramatic but ask my housemates or former lovers, I am hell to live with when I am fermenting sour unexpressed passion.

When this finally erupts I intently stalk my surrounds for canvas, brushes, linseed oil and a pile of rags to mop up spills, stained hands and footprints on the carpet. There is nothing like it. Putting my hands in clay is joyful, stalking through the bush barefoot to capture kangaroos on my SLR is fun and writing alternates between block and flow, both being rather obsessive but compulsive. However everything is pedestrian in comparison to the witching cauldron of the brush dipped in titanium, cadmium and cobalt.

i am posting a painting that erupted like hot magma when I was living in France. To illustrate my point, the heart was torn and then reconstructed in an act of faith, as was mine. Today new works are glistening wet in the alcove that separates my volcanic activity from the concentrated geophysics of El Eco’s academic endeavours and the peaceful landscape of New Housemate’s domain. Sometimes the noise is too much to bear. Sometimes the sun is too bright. But Passion Exists.

February 11, 2015

Life is stranger than fiction

Ok, I really did ditch the dating site this time. Both of them. The first one was easy. Not a single suspect to thicken the plot and an overloaded internet connection, due to La Dina’s last minute uploading of her vegan adventures before packing her blender and heading off for a Fruit Festival in the tropics. I ended up with a profile that was bordering on breatharian when the site crashed and my carefully selected photos vanished into thin air. So it wasn’t hard to let that one go. The second one took me another week before I finally got over the thrill of the chase. I dropped a PM to a cute guy with a creative bent then pressed delete.

Now I am looking at a clear creative path ahead of me. I suddenly have more time to contemplate my navel rather than wondering what someone elses looks like. This morning I woke up after a less than ideal amount of REM, buzzing with enthusiasm. I reached for the notebook by my bed and began my next work of narrative non-fiction before heading to the kitchen and avoiding the fall-out from last night’s dinner party. I have to admit that I am a sucker for memoir. Call it narcissistic but I reckon there’s a good story in my obsessive self-reflection. We’ll see.

And what am I doing with a photo of a headless kangaroo? That was my prompt for yesterdays writer’s block. Honestly, life is stranger than fiction.