Mixed Media on wood, ready to hang.

Signed on the front.

Portrait of a girl that taught me to draw in the second grade in the Central Queensland town of Capella. Spent a lot of time drawing and colouring instead of paying attention. So much did I enjoy drawing I took my pencil case full of marker pens, pencils, crayons and a bucket of chalk and drew all over the tables and chairs, the walkway along with the big green steam train in the park on a fine Saturday afternoon, even signing my name to my fine workmanship. My two buddies and I won a free ride in a police car with a complimentary tour of the Capella Police Station jail cell out the back for that. Not bad for a six year old. What bothered me about that cell/brick shed with bars was the silver toilet. It had no seat and a big green frog in it. Anyway, spelling and punctuation sure, sure, sure, but colour by numbers was the bomb. Those fresh ethanol-scented print-out sheets with the purple ink. And the clag glue tasted great! Rock on.
Then overnight without warning I was transplanted to another part of the state.
Fast forward twenty years.
Seven thousand kilometres from home, and through an acquaintance of an acquaintance in a random city of the world I was invited to come for a job interview to fill in for an employee that had left her position the previous week. With little money and little to do I obliged.
So, on that night with the sky filled with horizontal electrical lightning set against deep blue I walked into this College, and there out the front of the entry was an A-frame billboard. On it was a picture of the pretty hazel-eyed girl smiling, the very one that taught me to draw so long ago in that little mining town school.
She was who I was replacing.
Curse the fates.
The chances out of six billion people x time x places x potential for variables.
The randomness of life. Or is it random at all?
Perhaps there is a unseen predetermined order in the chaos around. An order to the who, what, where and when and how of what goes on in what we do.
Are we puppets being jiggled around on invisible strings by God?
One that throws a spanner here or a spanner in the works there
Just to see what we will do?
And if so, why?
Are we ants?
Ants being toyed with by a benevolent sometimes malevolent giant standing over the nest?
Watching to see which one he’s gonna squash,
Like the mangled bodies in the newspaper,
Of passengers on the doomed Turkish Flight 981,
In 1974.
A body in the wreckage,
Well dressed with socks pulled up,
Not knowing they were the last socks he was ever gonna put on.
Or perhaps it is random.
Perhaps it is nothing.
Perhaps all interactions are episodes of blind, stupid chance. Episodes that because we are so pitiful we try to juice some kind of meaning. Like a mouthless man juicing water from a rock to quench his thirst.
But then what about he who is struck by a car? Or has a branch fall on his head? Or chokes to death on a broccoli stem while Great Uncle Joe, survivor of three wars,blows out 101 candles on his cake.
Is there meaning in that?
What is the meaning when a child gets cancer?
What is the meaning in a ninety year-old, chain-smoking a packet a day for seventy years?
Is there meaning in anything?
Are we truly equal to ants?
Ramblers roaming, never stopping for rest.
Never a pause to reflect.
Onwards, upwards in service of that black machine they call Economy.
Forever crashing into one another on our random roads to nowhere,
Chugging up the wall as we inch toward the ceiling?
Or are we in control? Masters of our own destiny?
Truly a Gump of a question.
Truly a question without answer, because
Who knows?
Just another mystery.
Mystery of this forked-up sim.