The first hurdle.

Yesterday I gained an inkling of understanding into one of the most venerated cliches of all time - the impoverished artist. I have some shocking news. Artists are not starving in their Parisian attic boltholes because they have chosen to live outside of the bourgeois confines of a capitalist society. Nor are they living on a cup of coffee a day because their artistic genius has gone unnoticed by the self-involved, self-satisfied, rolling-in-ready-cash potential benefactors of the world. The reason they are six months behind on the rent, starving, unkempt and generally grumpy is because they had to spend all their money on paint.

I trotted off to the art supply store yesterday all starry eyed and filled with dreams of perusing the aisles for hours, filling my (probably wicker) basket with goodies, pausing occasionally to adjust the rakish angle of my beret and discuss the merits of cadmium yellow over burnt sienna with the charming & helpful store assistants. Hah!

It turned out that buying paint requires the kind of sums of money that make you reconsider whether your child really needs lunch every day this week. Will it be this teeny tiny tub of paint? Or bread, milk, eggs, a trip to the DVD store, a gelato and some new Bonds undies? Seriously. The whole found object artwork thing suddenly makes a whole lot of sense. I am not sure if I can afford to nurture a creative process that involves paint. I mean really, how hard can it be to manufacture paint? Why is it so expensive? Are Oompa Loompas involved? Or is it a conspiracy of the capitalist structure to break the spirit of emerging artists and send them back to work in retail jobs where they belong? Either way, my hopes of chucking around vast quantities of paint died a very sudden & unexpected death yesterday. Sigh. I think I need a cup of tea.

I spy.

One day I will have a library.

Garden state.

Tex and I went to the Mt Annan botanical garden today. It was ace. We rode our bikes around in the rain and things got very wet and very funny but we persisted and the sun came out and everything was beautiful. There was heaps of space and light and green and a lake and flowers and awesome prehistoric trees and ducks. And there was a tree from the Blue Mountains that had been so encroached upon by humans that it's entire species had been reduced to one single tree and the Mount Annan guys & gals took seeds from the last tree and planted it in their botanical gardens and then took seeds from their tree and started planting back into the wild. How amazing is that?

But that's not all. On the way to the gardens, I was struck with a terrible piercing disappointment because I had forgotten the camera. The disappointment abated somewhat after riding my bike in the rain and eating my excellent picnic lunch in the sun (what kind of birds don't eat lettuce?). However, it was not your standard 'oh I won't be able to take any photos of my handsome husband on this adventurous outing' kind of disappointment. Oh no. It was the 'jesus shit god damn there is going to be some kick arse things here to take pictures of and I wanna take pictures' kind of disappointment. Can you see where I'm going here? I think it's starting to work. By making myself engage with the world in a more creative way, well, certainly in a more photographic way, I am starting to look forward to experiences not just for the joy they bring, but also for the opportunity to make cool pictures.

Don't get me wrong, I am fully aware that I am no great maestro of the photographic medium. But at the moment, it's not doing it really well that counts, it's just doing it! And today I really felt that.

I spy.

Rock star red.

I spy.

Pretty like a sponge.

Poetry alert.

I have been trying to come up with the goods in the poetry department: I had set a goal of one every two weeks. This is actually quite achievable, however the standard of the poems may become questionable. Although, of course, the standard may well have been questionable in the first place, so maybe it won't make any discernible difference. It is pretty hard for me to feel like something is finished enough to put up in public after only two weeks work on it. Usually I circle around poems for pretty lengthy periods, coming back to them again and again to fiddle and change and shift. Truthfully, this can sometimes go on for years.

So today I am posting what is possibly my first ever poem written in one day. I woke up with the seed of it in my brain yesterday, scrawled some notes through the haze of my post Good Friday champagne brain, and then spent three short bursts working on it today. In between I went to the markets, where I scored a double album of Ella Fitzgerald singing Irving Berlin, and bought a fabulous leek & mushroom quiche so I don't have to cook tonight. Oh, and Tex bought some home made tomato relish from the nice old lady who likes to have a chat about the weather. So this poem is a little bit of an experiment, based on the premise that maybe too much fiddling can prevent something from coming to fruition. And these days I'm all about the fruition.

Sixteen.

She is unprepared
for the freedom
the power
the hot wind
that catches her up
in her ship of skin.

She sees herself
a feathered vessel
a heron
long limbs poised
possessed by the shadow
and the secret of flight.

She gives in
grey eyes glinting
and peels away
her last layers of girlhood
arms up, hair down
like a long held lucky charm
lost in a heart shaped hill
of fabric on the floor.