Peck your eyes out

Imagine if Michael Peck didn’t grow up in Melbourne, a city that has embraced graffiti as an art form. Would he have gone on to discover oil paint or would he have been marginalized by society and bereft of a creative outlet?

I'll try not to slip into a passionate ode to Melbourne and instead focus on the immensely talented Peck.

I originally thought that his slick oil compositions were inspired by the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, so it was surprising to discover that his works predate these events.

Reservation, 2009, oil on linen, 143 x 143 cm

Birds feature throughout the series. With a bird for every beast, it’s almost as if the unidentified beast is lurking in the edges of the frame. The images are smouldering with a sense of foreboding that this “beast” will strike forth.

Sound, 2009, oil on linen, 61 x 61 cm

The silence of the faceless subjects is deafening, yet they appear inherently innocence and evoke a sense of warmth within this otherwise bleak post-apocalyptic world.

Dorothy, 2009, oil on linen, 137 x 137 cm

Untitled, 2008, oil on linen,167 x 167 cm

You can catch Michael Peck's work at the Dickerson Gallery, Sydney from October 20th.

Milling the garden

I've fallen head over heels with Brevity. A website budding with creative nonfiction. Sounds like an contradiction doesn't it? How can you be creative with the truth? Read Brenda Miller's short piece below and be blown away with the beauty in the descriptions and fleshed out emotional landscape of her memories.

More importantly the metaphor of mediation as a Japanese Garden slapped me hard in the face like a wet fish - the impatient noise and boisterous complaints that ring in her head during mediation is exactly what happens to me when i slip into the mood of self-improvement and attempt to zen up my life.

Unfortunately i'm an impatient gardener, reluctant to work for reward. As evident by my lack of progress with the garden beds for the upcoming gardening competition.

With that in mind i'm going to flounce off to yoga and ignore the rambling overgrowth of weeds in my head and front lawn.

Japanese Garden: Portland, Oregon

By Brenda Miller

Once, a long time ago, I walked in the Japanese Garden with my friend Pat. And with us: his girlfriend Nancy, who would be his wife in a few years’ time but not yet, and so as I walked between them I could feel their love just budding, the giddiness of it. I remembered how it had been with Pat and me, years earlier, in our bed in Wyoming, that love waxing a cocoon between us and the rest of the people in the house. We snagged the only real bedroom in the place, and we spent a lot of time there—in love with each other, yes, but more in love, I think now, with our youth, with the possibilities not yet squandered. Sex, back then, was a kind of meditation, a way to hold the present in your two hands, cupped there, brimming. But that was years ago, and as I walked in the garden with Pat and his future wife, I felt nothing, really, but a dim happiness.

It was fall in the garden, not yet winter, but entering that season of scarcity. Already we could see the bare lines that hold a garden together, the limbs beneath the already fading leaves, the rocks in the sand surrounded by bits of twig. Out the corner of my eye I saw a stone well—ornamental, I thought—no water, but the promise of water in its tilted bucket and wooden crankwheel. We kept moving, not urgently but steadily, all of us humming a little beneath our breaths. It made me think of that suspended time after sex, the contentment, the nowhere-to-go-but-here feeling that kept us in bed a long time, our minds moving in synch, so that conversation became a piecing together of fragments: small bones that yield a whole person, given time.

I began a meditation practice not long after Pat and I split up. Meditating, I thought back then, would be pleasant as walking in a Japanese garden, where the bends in the path reveal one lovely vista after another, all the branches trimmed, the red maple set off by a flowering plum behind it. I thought meditation would be a quiet place, save for the faint tinkle of wind chimes, the creak of a rope at the well. Maybe I would smell a flowering cherry, or breathe in the scent of distant smoke from the temple fires. I imagined myself silent and still as a stone Buddha who sits inside the changing seasons—immutable and temperate, even under the gathering snow.

But meditation turned out to be a noisy place, filled with scratchy clothes and loud, remonstrative voices in my head, full of complaint. A place where the well remained empty and the bucket clattered wildly against its sides. A garden that had not been tended in a long, long time and so the trails led only into dank underbrush. Occasionally, a chime would sound, and I would hear it, but for the most part I just kept stumbling along, brushing away the branches and leaves that waved in my path.

These days I have a whole room for meditation; all that resides there is my cushion, an incense tray, and a tiny brass Buddha who perches on the windowsill. This room is upstairs, tucked under the eaves of my house, and out the high window a Hawthorne tree provides flowering branches in spring, red berries in the fall. Sometimes I sit there and know that Japanese-Garden feeling: my body permeable, swaying on those branches, shimmering here and there in the light. In spring the birds make a ruckus in the leaves, coupling even while the female holds grass in her beak, bits of the future nest. Below me, the bedroom sits empty, my bed neatly made, no dishevelment among the sheets. From there, too, I consider the Hawthorne, but those low windows frame only the trunk, winding out of the ground. It’s an old and gnarled beast, already half dead, but the tree seems not to notice; it pulses out fresh leaves and blossoms above, as if death were only a mirage.

May Showers

Beautiful.

May Showers

By Jennifer Anderson

Like this, the man says, smoothing a dollop of salve across his wife’s shoulder blades, over the rashes blooming there like teacup roses. With two fingers, he works the cream in circular motions down her rib cage, along the row of black stitches lining the curve of her spine. Look here, he says, and here. He pauses at each new sore – every petite scallop, hot and red and raw – and his fingers linger.

Morning May. Clouds hang low and thick, rain steadily. The bedroom is dim, curtains slightly parted. The woman lies in the center of the bed. She’s in her early eighties. Her hair a mass of silver curls, bare legs tangled in the top sheet.

His fingers are clumsy and stiff in his ninetieth year, but he is gentle, careful around the incision.

The woman sighs.

Then he sits down beside her on the edge of the bed, and the circles he traces widen. A minute passes. I know that he’s forgotten about me, the young nurse’s aide hired to bathe his wife three times a week. He brushes his palm over her spine, as delicately as he would a petal, over each wound, flushed from the shower.

His hands move down the arc of his wife’s hips, as if it were the first time they touched. Five years earlier. Their wedding night. Both spouses dead for years, exploring the dips and secret places of each other’s bodies. Now the woman lies on her stomach, head in the bed linens, and the room is soft in the morning light. The May clouds, the rain. And she is calm. Her eyes close.

I could almost sleep, she murmurs. I don’t want this to ever stop, she says. To ever move again.

If only for this moment, she no longer worries about the things she says keep her awake at night – the surgery, the diabetes, the knowledge that something could happen to either of them at anytime. What would they do? Thoughts that cause her heart to beat 150 times per minute, that send her to the emergency room in the middle of the night, because she thinks she’s having a heart attack.

The cream on the sores on her back is white and cool. Like summer frost.

Her husband purses his lips and blows on the nape of her neck, cool breaths along her shoulder blades and down her spine, soothe the stinging, hot sores. His breath barely a whisper. There now, he says.

And the May shower thrums against the windows.

She breathes deeply and stretches, curling her fingers around the edge of the mattress, before letting go.

Track

I was nervous by four. My stomach started to knot itself. I hoped that the grey skies would break open. I didn't want to run. By five i ate fast and unsure. By six i was in the car. But by seven i felt like i was at long last home.

Running training started again.

Tonight was all about fumbling with stopwatches, finding my feet and catching my breath. The feeling of the bouncy track underfoot was glorious. My brain is already reeling at the possibilities of tempo runs and Saturday long runs.

Home, sweet, home.

Feast of Festivals

I feel like i've accomplished alot for a Sunday evening.

I've basically obliterated my bank account, but it's never felt so good to be so strapped for cash.

Besides securing tickets for Sunset Sounds a fortnight ago, I have just bought tickets to Glastonbury AND Benicassim! 2011 is shaping up to be the year of music festivals. Fingers crossed for the impeding line-up announcements.

Note to self:

For Glastonbury buy some Wellies.

And a boat.

For the Spanish summer buy some sunscreen.

That boat will come in awfully hand at - Aquarama!! Awww yeah.

Tea(ser)

I stared out the fogged up kitchen windows this morning in dismay. Torrents of rain was bucketing down. Certainty not the weather to attempt to walk twenty five kilometres over the Seven Sydney Bridges. With no sign of respite, I decide that the only reasonable action to take is to pretend that i'm in London.

Kettle on the boil, i pop "Singing in the Rain" in the DVD player and let the loose leaf Earl Grey infuse. Delicious.

Only later do i venture out to Bourke Street Bakery. Double delicious.

Oh i do like to be beside the seaside!

Half arsed kicks and pouncey punches were the order of the day as I flounced around this morning, failing to find my groove with a peppy "celebrity" trainer aerobic workout.

After ten minutes I flopped onto the couch, performed the last high kick of the day by ditching my joggers and decided that a more sedate pace would be a more suitable match for the drab, overcast sky.

To match the mood of decadent laziness, my partner-in-crime and I hit the highway. Destination Berry. A south coast town, with a population of a million "Good Food Guide" recommended cafes and boutique home ware stores. We had nothing else planned but a glutinous spot of lunch. Which we succeed in flying colours, I think I’ll be reminiscing about the chocolate bread and butter pudding with caramelized figs for the rest of the week.

Berry also boasts a beautiful sewing/craft shop. Between fondling of Amy Butler fat quarters and bemoaning my lack of crocheting know-how, I stumbled across this gem:

Featuring 15 designs, I was instantly armored by more than half of them, particularly the bag pictured on the front cover.

I think the bag would be the perfect canvas to showcase a classic Florence Broadhurst print. The only problem with a Broadhurst print, is trying to decide which one to use..

Lena Santana's beautifully fresh, fun designs look nothing like standard cut and paste patterns, but reflect her unique background. Santana was born in Salvador (Brazil), studied fashion design in London and lived in Rio de Janeiro before returning to London.

Check out her website for some of her collections - I particularly like The Flowers - the others are a bit hit and miss for me.

Now I’m pumped up, ready to roll up my sleeves and get crafty. Perhaps Berry has brought my groove back?

ps. RIP Tony Curtis. Some Like it hot indeed.