The Angel Boy

It's me. When I was young. With wings. For some reason.

I mean.
I wasn't really... angelic.

I was, in truth, a very, very, VERY bad boy.
Then of course I went mad. Which threw a spanner in the blanket.

PAUL IS A LITTLE TOO AWAKE

It swings and burns and riots inside me sometimes – sudden tastes uncertain and anomalous – each sense fitted up and mis-wired with invention.
Show me that synchronous similitude: Following Orpheus as he follows Eurydice into the dark. The dark that I have been sucking, gulping into me since I first lifted my wide wide gaze to the moon. Rising ancient and cold. Eating darkness and it tastes….
Human like you, yes!
Let me exist as you, I want to sear your mind show me where you hide your kindness so that I can rip it from you with my red real teeth.
Sad and soft sounds sticking in my throat, in the softness behind my words. Behind my panicked, violently blue eyes.
I once… I made a man cry with my work – triggers in his own bruising mind clipping sore and real and true. A strong man and brave.
Women and men have shed tears at my work. They have I have seen them I was there I saw I saw and my memory is quick sometimes and it frightens me with clarity so sharp and real.
I trace the path of their tears in the air before me.

AND I ALMOST SOB.

Triggering a violence of stillness in my mind. Everything STOPS. The room darkens and cools for an illusory moment, a passing bird fashioning shadow between self and sun. But it is night and the light is fierce and false and constant.
The other side is here, nowhere but a distortion buckling and deforming everything I perceive.
No no no no no no I know I know this and I am –
I am afraid. Click. Twissssssssssstttttttttt.
The room -
I am certain of none of what I see and hear. I strain towards music the sweetness of sudden and ubiquitous chords then press my palms to my ears. I do not know if this is music that anyone else can hear. Perhaps. Yes. I believe I could share its ache and wash with another.
And that other sound… was that me? Were words spoken aloud in the silence of the cool and virulent morning?
Did I sigh? Was there a gasp and breath human and warm in the night?
Less sane perhaps to talk to yourself than to hear your own voice when you have not formed the sounds that you hear. When they have not passed your lips.
Pieces of my sight shift though I do not move and I do not look elsewhere. Fear binds me motionless, uncertainty and hesitance forcing me into a stillness and… where is this wetness from?
It glistens and whirs and whispers and clicks in my ears – and – I smell a scent from a summer that existed 25 years ago or sometime or some TIME I don’t know some feral scattering of days – a child unformed wildling heart wild in head brimming and scalded with latency.
I smell dry grass and clean cotton. And…
I taste green-yellow stalks feel stiff material against soft young limbs still warm from a long faded sun.
Small feet hot and sure on uncut grass.
Perhaps the faint sureties of my vision offer me a suspension or a solution or – yes this! This this this! Force my teeth against each other the wet inside of my cheek between, all the strength I can find and in a
BURST
Pain.
Real.

Real?
I fail without simple answers, stuttering ambiguities sincere and desperate. A gasp of longing slips from my tongue flicking outwards from my undecided lips like a creaking leather whip.

Stop it. Stop it stop it. The fear is colossal, impossible.
Stop.
Deep breath, try. Shudder once more. My own tears hot on my cheek. Sip something cool, open a fucking window? Put the kettle on again forget that it exists? To not believe that it does? I stand. I twist my strong, deft hands against each other.
The skin that creeps across me ripples in its own trickery as hallucination forces me to move, forces me into the bathroom and my hands into cold water.
Shock and cold and it tastes so sweet and I could drink such water as this, forever cool. False insectile legs pricking my skin even as I scrub it, prickling through my hair.
I pour clear cold water in a winding trail down my back and hold my head under the tap for as long as I can bear.
Oh, to find a baptism such as this – at the hands of one so replete with belief that what they may have been disintegrates before the throb of divine insistence. Baptised by a drowning.
For this act, to find faith in warm human hands… In some symbol ancient and quivering with the force of certainty. With fucking CERTAINTY (Devil’s dictionary – FAITH: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Ambrose Bierce.)
Beneath the crying cup.
Dust strewn under hard, calloused hands.

Angels? And dust? We must be both! Concentrate!

As the cool water runs over the yielding welcome of my eyelids.
My NEED lurches me into the fierce trembling courage of honesty; forcing placing my quivering vital self. The last and least peace that I can find. Paint oh, write, you must you are running out of time!
Zealot of nothingness, disciple of CHANCE. Rhapsodist in ephemeral accident so pure its coldness burns.
I hear the hiss of the plumbing, the booming blood surging in my ears. I breathe some rushing strand of the water and cough hard. Enough.
I bang my head, hard, on the tap, even as it vibrates to my sight in the tricking slight of hand of hallucination.
Only me. Shiver and shake. Force out each claw into a supple human finger, nails painted deep sapphire blue. They are scratched from my guitar, stained with my paint and sore from the incessant scrape of life at their raw nerves searing just under the skin.
Squint and glare at my reflection. Snarls have always just looked completely silly on my face. I must smile. Smile smile. The shape of the bone, the skull, under the gums.
The sink is covered in paint. Faucets young but obsolescent. Plastic decay matching my own.
Flick my hair back just so and water sprays lightly. It seems to fall in jerky staccato accelerations and infinitesimal pauses. Some of the drops on my open palm. They roll and rattle into each other like flawless crystal marbles before dissolving into water once more.
This. Endless. Endless. Impossibility… this mammoth UNNAMED and Unnameable emotion. That my senses distort when I must see to work to breathe to work see to paint to live.
It is so heavy. I want it and hate it and crave a name for its crippling mass upon my heart.
For now…
Trick it with beauty. Paint. Be brave. Courage my friends, my siblings, my lovers.
Angels and dust.

Concentrate!

“Where I am I don’t know, I can’t know. In the silence, you won’t know, you’ll never know; I must go on, I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
Beckett.

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I am Paul and I paint and write, draw and play and sing.
People even pay me. Mostly for the painting and drawing part

My work is about passion.
Never believe that you do not know what it is that you see when you look at artwork.
Emerson said “Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string.” If it moves you. If you can feel it, if you see yourself in its shadows or a memory or a hope, a colour, a place a feeling – if you empathize… if it makes your breath catch in your throat. That's the only thing that really matters.
That – THAT exquisite moment is such a gift to me. It is the greatest hope that I carry with me in my hopeful little heart of hopefulness.
It is a great honour to be in any way a part of such feelings with my work.

PAUL'S ART CAREER:

I was invited to exhibit at the Soho Gallery In Soho Village New York, but my health did not allow me to take advantage of that opportunity. I have a certificate of art and design and a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, majoring in painting, for which I maintained a distinction average.
In 2000 I exhibited at the Como Library, which led to an exhibit at the Como Gallery. I also sold work during that year through a variety of commercial galleries including the Schubert Gallery on the Gold Coast.
I had my next solo exhibition at Gallery 274 in Northbridge in 2001, followed immediately by another solo exhibition at the Babylon Hotel. That year Cannington had three consecutive on-site art competitions coinciding with markets, painting timed in situ. I won all three awards, including one sponsored by the then premier, Geoff Gallup. I won the Katanning art award and the Wongan Hills Art Award.
In 2003 I had a highly publicised solo exhibition at the Hawthorn Gallery, which the Premier of Western Australia opened. The Premier and I had planned a portrait sitting, but he retired due to personal reasons and I missed that opportunity. . I won the Mosman Park Art Award that year.
In 2004 I held another solo exhibition at the Australian Institute of Management, and that Institution also purchased a four meter tetraptych which still hangs in their foyer.
In 2005, I held a solo exhibition at Little Creatures Brewery in Fremantle and another at the Mosman Park Town Hall.
In 2006, I held an exhibition at a central Florist in Floreat and was fortunate enough to have a sellout show.
In 2007 I exhibited at the Matisse Restaurant at City Beach.
I won the international art award - the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) that same year.
In 2008 I held a solo show at the Moores Building in Fremantle.
I became ill with CNS pain and spent 8 years bedbound, during which time I wrote a 5000 page novel “All That We Have Given” – one chapter of which subsequently won a place in the Atlantis international writing Award, along with another short story.
I was invited to exhibit at the Soho Gallery In Soho Village New York, but my health did not allow me to take advantage of that opportunity.
I won the Armadale Writing Award in 2018. I wrote a another novel for LGBTQ+ tweens but have not pursued publishing due to my health.
My health has slowly been improving in the last eight years, but I am not interested in exhibiting presently.
I have sold work to to collectors in many states of Australia, the United States, Europe, Asia (including Japan), and I exhibited on the South Bank in London in 2023 despite being too ill to attend the exhibition.
I am severely disabled. I was born with a left temporal lobe sub-arachnoid cyst and have no function in more than one fifth of my brain. This has resulted childhood epilepsy, prosopagnosia (face blindness) rather extreme ADHD, mild dyspraxia, the above mentioned CNS pain and bipolar one disorder. The bipolar required annual hospitalisations until 2014, and I have undergone ECT (shock treatment) over many years. It has impacted my memory. I don’t have any recollection of winning more awards, but my family assures me that I have won more. Unfortunately most would have been awarded before such things were published online. I am unsure of the total and lost the physical plaques for the awards during the haze of my illness, which has lasted for eighteen years. However, I am functional a few days a week and often attend life drawing – I have sold dozens of fast life drawings to the models themselves, which is, I gather, quite unusual. My bipolar is now far more manageable and I no longer requite ECT.
Presently I am engaged in illustrating a graphic novel that I have written.
It concerns the darkest of subjects, but because I’m an Aussie, the dialogue is hilarious because THAT’S HOW WE DEAL WITH ADVERSITY. It’s a tradition I’m proud to carry on.
I am half way through the illustration of the graphic novel. I am painting or drawing each panel to the best of my ability and it is some of my most powerful work.
My ambition is to create one of the most beautiful books in the world.
Sometimes I paint in public, and every now and then people will cry when they see my work.
I hold that to be the greatest honour an artist can receive.