'Don't over think it.
That way lies madness.'
Having opinions is very over rated, especially in 2024 when opinion is considered to be 'news'.
Absorb my paintings in an art gallery setting whie allowing yourself to be lost in the world of imagination with like minded people and feel something shift within your soul to a more positive place where you are moving forward through a different socializing, energizing space as you view my paintings.
If you want a live viewing of my work, contact me so that you can visit my run down flat in Footscray and enjoy an art exhibition of sorts, seeing my paintings first hand, maybe I can organise for a group of people to peruse my paintings at my flat at the same time and we'll turn it into an art gallery exhibition opening of sorts.
I can pour you a glass of your wine (you have to BYO) or I can brew you up a coffee in the coffee pot and we can mellow into my paintings together.
I love to be hijacked by the moment, to become lost in instinct and imagination.
In my opinion, anxiety is a switch in the brain and when you contemplate and meditate on my paintings, the anxiety switch flicks to off, because that cerebral need for opinion switches off.
Art is always about fashion so why not create that fashion, have others follow your fashion, a fashion that you can love and cherish, a fashion that feeds and sustains your soul.
Anyone can create an Art fashion, all you need is three Art collectors and the truth.
Copy and paste this link in to Google for my Facebook page:
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The magic of somersaulting, ricocheting, spinning downwards, sideways, upwards on whatever cosmic pathway life takes you on.
To have conversations that weave and wend languidly through the day then then ricochet, somersault crazily without warning.
I'm in to this thing called 'cycle touring' and i I love to hear people tell their story, while we cycle a gravel road through State Forest, as we cook coffee in coffee pot on a camp stove, as we relax over dinner in a country pub.
Type this web address into Google and so that you can join this group and become part of it's conversation about cycling and chatting your way across the countryside, along trail through forest or linear suburban creek parkland or maybe just a ride to a local micro brewer to discuss the 'big issues'.
My paintings grow out of conversations with my friends.... if we've cycle touring for the weekend you might notice our conversations appearing in a newly written Blue Thumb blurb on Monday morning.
I'm a Magpie really, your story, secret stories, hidden stories, hidden in plain view, I add them to my ideas, my paintings.
I was cycling through Muckleford State Forest a while ago, Courtney Barnett and Dope Lemon playing on the Doof Box that fits snugly in a bidon cage, the bike club had stayed the long weekend at an Airbnb in Newstead.
It wasn’t that long ago that I sneered at Courtney Barnett and Dope Lemon and yet now it seemed the perfect accompaniment to an undulating gravel road through a Central Victorian State Forest on a long weekend in Newstead
Sometimes you have to make a decision to love something new, and then when you embrace it you realise it's just so right for you in the here and now.
I was musing on a weekend in Vaughan Springs, just down the road in the Castlemaine, Central Victorian Goldfields, it was a perfect sunny weekend in early Spring.
I was reflecting on what a rich life I live as I float from day to day through economic precariousness, while I walked the river gorge of Vaughan Springs, on a perfect sunny arvo.
We travelled by separate trails from Castlemaine station at separate times, meeting in the evening at Vaughn Springs to cook dinner together and talk into the evening until it got too cold and we called it a night.
Vaughan springs is a small oasis.
A small river gorge with the Loddon River flowing through it.
On one side is a steep cliff face.
There’s a walk that goes up the steep rocky side of the gorge, and then along it.
I think the miners from days of yore cut a water race in the side of the cliff and it is now a walking track.
Great view across the Vaughan Springs picnic ground and then the gorge widens in to rolling hills.
The trail then curves back across an old wooden bridge further down stream.
The bridge has been closed to traffic because it is semi derelict but the locals keep it open for pedestrians.
The river is infested at that point with a hybrid mix of birch, yew and eucalypts but somehow it looks just right on a sunny arvo in early Spring.
The trail then goes up another hill, overlooking the river, through some old pine trees.
I was reflecting on what a rich life I live on almost no money in this hybrid river gorge ecosystem on a perfect sunny arvo.
$20 for train fare, $8 for delicious cake at Fig Café in Castlemaine and that’s the sum of my costs for the weekend because camping is free at Vaughan Springs.
The landscape in that part of the world is very damaged by mining and yet stuff has grown back, sometimes it is the native eucalypts, sometimes it is the birch and yew infestation, sometimes it is the gorse infestation and really the weed infestation is getting worse but sometimes you put all that aside, as the bike rolls along the road or trail on a sunny morning and say, this hybrid ecosystem damaged/ recovering landscape is beautiful… maybe it’s that best green grass of early Spring.
It was also a brief cathartic even maybe intoxicating moment or maybe just poetic moment of coming to terms with the weed infestation and evidence of a very damaged landscape that we see everywhere.
I suspect that Vaughan Springs is an old Aboriginal camp site, it would make a lot of sense, in a gorge protected from the weather, a river flowing through, spring water.
It was probably called Warrn Springs (as in Warrnambool) or Warren Springs, (as in Warrendyte), the aboriginal word for flowing.
The Welsh miners anglicised the name into Vaughan Springs, in memory of the Welsh hero Henry Vaughan.
But they still found space for a Chinese cemetery.
It is a landscape of hidden and harsh stories.
As the landscape recovers, finding a new sort of beauty, albeit sometimes a weed infestation beauty.
Trying to create a problem solving narrative that ends with no solution but a brief sense of poetry... hmmm, ... I hope you're not rolling your eyes now (LOL)
I'm not saying 'love the thistle', I just want to find a moment of peace with the landscape, thistles, eucalypts, Indian mynahs, the lot, so the landscape can intoxicate me now ... then the coffee brews ... getting me extra buzzy (LOL)
Sometimes you have to make a decision to love something new, and then when you embrace it you realise it's just so right for you in the here and now.
Eucalypts with elms and thistles, Courtney Barnett, and the paintings of yours truly, the artist who created this page.
My paintings don't try to be something that is nice to hang on the wall, they try to be a dynamic that jolts your brain out of a spiralling place and in to a more diffuse place, a healthier place where those hidden pathways, hidden in plain view, seem to be everywhere, beckoning to places of therapy and regeneration, or maybe just your first good night's sleep in years.
Away from the log jammed highway, an alternative cosmic pathway, not much money here, but you'll find a new energy, it's a JOMO place that keeps your head calm, JOMO, Joy of Missing Out.
Time to jolt out of FOMO, time to jolt out of looking back, time to jolt out of nostalgia and wondering at all those Gwyneth Paltrow 'sliding door' moments, switch to Liza Minnelli in 'Cabaret', as she takes to the stage like a drag queen determined to make an unforgettable scene on the stage in the early hours of Sunday morning, Liza on stage, sober, sharp, but at the edge of humiliation if she trips or fluffs her lines.
Her audience safe in the cocoon of woozy, sleepy booziness.
Liza Minnelli, careering across the stage like a drag queen who wants to get lost in the music, lost in the moment, lost in the rush of performing, to forget another brutal, harsh week.
I hope my paintings can be 'the glue that holds it all together'.
Go on, try it, try buying one of my paintings, make a decision to love them and then realise they are just so right for you in the here and now.
Become a collector of art by local artists and watch others follow your lead.
Instead of envisaging how they will look on the wall, think of buying them and learning to live with them, getting them out from time to time on a Saturday arvo to contemplate them as you mellow out over a glass of wine, thinking, "I'll hang this on the wall for a minute', then one day realising that that painting you thought you'd hang on the wall for a minute has been hanging on the wall for a couple of years now, it's a part of your life, your living space, it's not the most beautiful painting, maybe not the nicest, maybe not a painting that you can show off to the neighbours while you chat over a cup of tea and cucumber sandwiches, but it is some sort of essential 'glue that holds it all together' in life.
Or maybe it’s a 'forbidden fuit', a painting that you keep stacked away discretely until you need a little 'pick me up', before you go out on a Saturday night.
You pull out one of your 'forbidden fruit' paintings by that new artist Edmund West, contemplate it while you have a glass of wine, then pack it away again, then go out for the night on high heels, feeling so in control.
Weaving and wending through life, finding pleasure as I uncover stories, hidden, supressed and then often hilarious, deciding to love and embrace something new, enriching life.