Oh and by the way...

......that whole that write-a-poem-every-two-weeks malarky is so not happening. Just in case you were wondering about the notable lack of poetry being posted. Or, you know, not.

About last night.

Last night was painting class number four. I drove through crazy insane weather, complete with zero visibility fog and rain combinations, to arrive at Studio One filled with renewed zeal and a strong urge to slap some paint on that canvas. I'm still working on the pears. And I am sorry to say that they are still not resolved (painter talk for making something look like a three dimensional object that actually lives in space). Well, two of my three pears are nearly resolved. Becoming resolved. Existing in a semi-resolved state. But I am super happy because last night I had my first painting breakthrough.

Yes, an actual flash of genuine insight into the process of painting pears. Okay, so it might not sound so insightful in the cold light of day but last night under the regulation fluorescent lighting, with a paintbrush clenched between my teeth and a roll of paper towel under my arm, it was extremely meaningful.  (Shouldn't there be some kind of rule about fluorescent lights in painting studios?) My mind boggling revelation was -  PAINTING IS NOT DRAWING. Yeah? Are you with me? Painting is not just drawing with paint. Painting is building, it is construction, it is layer upon layer upon layer like a really good baklava with the super thin flaky but crispy pastry that all combines with the smooshy honey & nuts to make one delicious three dimensional baklava object that lives in space! Haha! Baklava! Just like a painting!

And then, this afternoon I went to the launch of a quite wonderful art exhibition at the Campbelltown Arts Centre. This exhibition has been organised by my friend and colleague, the wonderful Katishe, and it is a forum for the work of local folk who are impacted by living with mental illness. There are some cracker works there and it was just great to see so many artists at the launch gaining some recognition and raising the profile of mental illness in the community. I bought a drawing that I totally fell in love with in about two seconds. It will be coming home to live with me. And even though I drive past it every day, I never get tired of looking at the beautiful Arts Centre building, whether from the inside or the outside. So all in all it has been a winning 24 hours. Oh, and I didn't take the photo of the Arts Centre, I just thought you might like to see it so I nabbed it off the dodgy Council website.

Cheeseworld.

Today Briony and I made the cheese. She was the cheese mistress and I was the dodgy assistant. It was amazing and funny and seriously time consuming. It took us pretty much all day but we raised a bumper crop of baby cheeses. Along the way I learned how incredibly easy it is to make ricotta and have sworn to never buy shop ricotta again. The process of turning the milk into cheese was fascinatingly alchemical and tactile and slightly stinky at times.

It started with 16 litres of milk.....

...which was kept at precisely the right temperature and fed some rennet....

...and mollycoddled and sung to and generally encouraged until it set and turned into curds and whey. This took a long time.

Then we had to stir it for a long time and do some tricks with it's temperature. After that, we got in it up to the elbows and used our hands to press all the curds into a silky substance which was piled into hoops (cheesemaker jargon for squishing containers).

Then it got boiled in the drained off whey (the stinky part) and when it came out it had magically taken on the recognisably rubbery texture of haloumi. We folded it over with a mint leaf inside and viola! Traditional home made haloumi cheese. We made kind of a lot; Briony took hers home in a tub.

Thanks Briony, you're the Cheese Queen.

I spy.

I had a lovely time at the Growers Market this morning. The last couple of weeks my regular Friday market pit stop has been thwarted by work commitments, so I was especially happy to be back amongst it today. And I got to say hello to my friend Lara who is usually so inundated with people buying bread at her tiny stall that it is impossible to even shout a greeting at her through the heaving mass. Saying hello to her added to my happiness. I amassed a huge pile of goodies, nearly giving myself some kind of shoulder hernia transporting them all to the car. The prize of the morning was a sourdough turkish which is the size of a foundation slab and tastes of olive oil and chewy sour goodness.

Oh, and I bought some apples and then took photos of them.

Library envy (part two).

Hello Eames.

Three strikes.

Okay. So you may have noticed that I have been suspiciously silent on the topic of painting class number three. This is mostly because I wasn't there. I know. Such bad form. But I was really tired and I knew that if I forced myself I would run the risk of tainting the whole affair with drudgery and chore-like-ness. And I knew that I wasn't gonna be able to paint for crap. So I stayed at home and hung out with my family and wore my comfortable pants and watched telly. I was the anti-creative.

But tomorrow I am going to do something entirely new on the creative pursuits spectrum. My friend Briony is going to teach me how to make cheese. Yes! Cheese! Made by me! Fashioned with my own hands. It's going to be haloumi cheese because apparently this is the cheese that cheese making novices are least likely to ruin. Luckily Briony has plenty of cheese making chops so I'll be taking notes. I may even take some photographs so that I can share the cheesy joy with you.  I feel assured that even though I ditched painting class, making cheese exists somewhere on the creative pursuits spectrum and will be an allowable substitution. And you can't eat paint so, you know, points for cheese.

 

I think we might look a little bit like this whilst we make the cheese.

I spy.

Skyflakes II.

I spy.

This technically breaks the rules of 'I spy' by not being in the immediate vicinity of my home. However it was in the immediate vicinity of my friend Jessie's home, which I consider my home by proxy. Four of us had eaten vast quantities of breakfasty treats and were playing with Jessie's nifty new school polaroid camera, which as you all know, is never not fun. In this photo are Jess and Ruby. Ruby will be having a baby in just a few short weeks, and yet still she manages to sport the best ever tights vs shoes colour combinations known to the Inner West. On this day the tights were a sort of bright violet puce and the shoes patent pink. No really, it was rocking.

I haven't really payed much attention to the photographing of humans, it seems like a much harder call than photographing inanimate household objects. Catching the lemon juicer from an unflattering angle is not really that much of a big deal. And whilst I don't imagine this shot will be winning any portrait prizes, and even though technically it's a wee bit out of focus, there was something about it I just liked.

I spy.

My husband's family introduced me to these crazy Filippino crackers called Skyflakes. They have the best packaging ever. They don't actually taste that special but I just love to eat them because of how they look. Each little cracker has two lines of perforations that allow you to snap it into three perfect tiny rectangles. Everything about Skyflakes pleases me, including the trip to the Asian grocer to purchase them. And if they are on special, you can find huge mountainous displays of Skyflakes with amazing repetitive packaging patterns that make you feel a bit like the circus has come to town and put up the big top inside your eyeballs.

 

A grinding halt.

Oh my goodness. I can now, with authority born of experience, tell you a couple of things that do not contribute to the amount of time & energy one has available to devote to creative pursuits. They are, in no particular order -

• not getting enough sleep
• being in charge of your workplace's accreditation processs upon which the reputation and funding arrangements of said workplace are based
• hunkering down for the cold weather in a small warm space with your teenage son who really wants a lot of your attention and is willing to launch regular wrestling attacks to get it
• deciding that you need some warmer clothes and the best way to facilitate this is to search etsy for women's sweaters (currently returning 11,360 results)
• buying a bunch of excellent books at the op-shop and needing to read them all as soon as is humanly possible

My last week or so has been filled with distraction, tiredness and busyness in equal parts. The result? No photographs, no poems & a frustrating painting class where everything I touched turned to mediocre verging on ordinary. Blerg. However I have read one very good book and am slap bang in the thick of another one. I know that does not even vaguely count as creative process but it has been mighty satisfying.

You may recall that in an earlier post, during a helpful moment of self-therapising, I admitted that it is possible that reading is actually a form of distraction or even procrastination in my universe. So, just quietly, I've been attempting to reduce my compulsive reading habit and get busy with a bunch of other crafty tasks. I am not especially sorry to relate that this has been an epic fail. I just ended up drooling on the Bookshelf blog and posting pictures of other people's libraries. Not to mention furtively perusing second hand book stores whilst I was supposed to be doing the grocery shopping. I mean, I love a bit of a crochet, but really, where is the narrative drive? The admirable structure & beautiful character development? The oh-my-god-I-never-thought-about-it-that-way-before-and-I-certainly-wouldn't-have-used-that-adjective-to-describe-it moment? Lacking, that's where. Absent.

So I am openly declaring my return to the book. I love them. I don't want to live without them, or even with just a few less of them. I want them all. Except the Bryce Courtney ones. And the Raymond E. Feist ones. And I can probably do without the entire Stephen King collection. And I was never a big fan of Delia Falconer, or Tobsha Learner. Okay, I don't really want them all. But I do want a lot of the good ones, and the time to read them. And one day I will have a huge and expansive library with white painted floorboards and enormous windows and beautiful sofas and I will invite you over for a cup of tea and you will see that it was all worth it.

Mmmmmm...

Look at these beauties. So good. The second one is from the wonderful Bookshelf blog.

Library envy (part one).

I want this one.

 

 

Second class citizen.

Today is Tuesday, which means that last night was Monday night and I went to my second painting class. The one where we actually got to paint something. I had such a great time, partially because I made it into the studio without walking into the wall this time. I swear the desk guy was watching me with a here's-that-loser-chick-I-wonder-if-she'll-walk-into-the-wall-again glint in his eye. Hah! Disappointed much, desk guy? 

Mostly though, I had a great time because I was mixing colours and talking about complementary tones and measuring things with my eyes squinted up and my paint brush handle waving around in the air. Just like Fiona taught me. So artisty. And then I learned about triangular composition and breaking objects into simple shapes and blocking in so there is no scary white canvas left. Awesome! This Fiona lady knows so many heaps of things about painting. I like her even if she wears questionable shoes.

So I went ahead and painted my three pears with some fabric and a bit of table and it was unreal and I loved every minute of it. And they were even quite pear like and I was totally chuffed with myself. They aren't finished quite yet, I have to put in my moody mood lighting shadows next week. The thing that is most amazing is that I have had this feeling for such a long time that I would love painting but always told myself that it was a foolish, fanciful delusion that was in no way achievable. But last night I had a little breakthrough and realised that anyone can probably paint if they have someone like Fiona to help them understand the process. I'm in no way convinced that I am capable of producing great art, or even good art, but I can paint a pear that looks like a pear and I can love doing it.

 

Sunny Saturday.

 

Saturday was a beautiful day at my house. It was gorgeously sunny in that it's-not-really-summer-any-more-but-what-the-heck kind of way. On Friday night I had indulged in a toasted cheese sandwich film festival for one, which had kept me up late, so it was a bit of a slow start on Saturday. After noodling around for a while I decided what I really wanted to do was hang out in the sun and paint. I also decided that, whilst I understand the necessity for quality equipment, it is perfectly okay for me to experiment with cheap paints whilst I get the hang of things. I mean really, I cannot imagine that any of the first fifty or so paintings I turn out will be even vague contenders for public viewing so who cares if they eventually crack and yellow? They will be locked in the basement like all good experimental creations. And then if they're really lucky, they may one day be painted over and given another moment in the sun. But they will probably just moulder away down there in a funk of dissatisfaction and lost potential, plotting and scheming to overthrow the heartless wench who consigned them to such an undignified fate.

So I went to the shops and bought an armload of cheap paint. And then I set up a little factory on my back deck and got right down to it. I went ferreting around in the shed and came up with a bunch of board and ply that I prepped and can now paint onto and that was super satisfying. Then I actually made a painting. And it turned out really bad. And no, I will not be showing you a photo of it. But, despite the clear and present badness, it was still really fun. And I don't even care that it is bad. Because I already learned some things from it. And it was sunny and I was happy and it made me feel peaceful and focused and like some really friendly bumblebees had landed in my brain and were making a contented buzzing background noise that lasted all day.

And by the way, speaking of toasted cheese sandwiches (way back in paragraph one), has everyone seen the ultimate toasted cheese sandwich blog which is written by a very committed toastie lover? Check it out, it is such good fun and filled with cheesy, meltedy amazingness.

I spy.

In the closet.

Flying first class.

I went to my first painting class on Monday night at Hazelhurst Gallery. Lots of it was great and some of it was kind of kooky. When I turned up it was all dark and gloomy and I couldn't find any humans and I nearly left before I busted out a single virgin paintbrush bristle. But then I found a good and helpful human and was directed to Studio One, although I had quite a bit of trouble finding the door which was not as straightforward as it may sound. I think the helpful human may have been laughing at me the second time I walked into a wall.

In my class there is a nice lady called Cheryl and a very knowledgeable man called Bob. And there's me. That's all. Just three little squirrels. Bob makes quilts. He's a quilter. Cheryl likes watercolours and isn't too keen on all this modern art business. She likes decorating and last year she went to Egypt. The teacher's name is Fiona and she is cool. She made us cups of tea and told us about the names of the different parts of a paintbrush. And we learned about tonal qualities and how to mix paint properly and clean brushes properly and how to use the colour wheel and we made paint charts, which was equal parts tedious and weirdly therapeutic.

And the best bit was when the previously mentioned helpful human opened up the gallery for us and Fiona took us through the exhibition and talked to us about the paintings and the techniques that had been used in them. Bob and I liked the same painting best. And I got to get all up close and personal with four works by the amazing Tommy Watson. They were just astonishing and beautiful and incredible and amazing. This one wasn't in the collection but is a bit of a favorite.

Next week in painting class we are going to actually paint. Fiona is going to set up some fruits and we are going to paint a still life. I am actually totally excited to paint the fruits. Especially because right at the moment I am just loving the work of Polly Jones who paints still life works that I really enjoy looking at. You can look at her paintings too, on her blog. She does genius things with fishbowls.

So painting class seems like a winner so far. Next week, fruits ahoy. I'm gonna bust out that filbert (that's a kind of paintbrush - see, with the learning) and go nutso bananas on my canvas kingdom.

I spy.

Good morning.

Oh my.

This is hilarious. Yes, it is all crochet. Find it (of course) on Etsy.

I spy.

I am starting to really get into this project of photographing something in my immediate surroundings every 48 hours. I am trying to confine it to the interior of my home at the moment, just to make me think a bit harder. This is my favorite from yesterdays efforts.

And I quite liked these as well.