The Guardsman

 

Recently I got all nostalgic about 80′s paint effects, largely as a result of working on the sets for The Guardsman, a play produced by Maitland Repertory Theatre. Described as a ‘light comedy about marriage’, The Guardsman was written by Ferenc Molnar and directed by Frank Oakes.

 

The green paint under the dado rails is acrylic mixed with generous amounts of Floetrol, cut with a bit of water, applied in a criss cross pattern, and then wiped off with a rag using vertical strokes. Very technical, folks. Basically you’re just applying transparent paint and then removing it again. The base coat is a matte, chalky mint green, also acrylic. 

 

Above the dado rail the undercoat is a pale, matte yellow. Nothing fancy, just low sheen housepaint. Over the top of this blotchy orange-brown paint was applied in patches. When this looked truly hideous, like heat rash, a thin coat of watered down white acrylic was mopped over the top with a cloth. This is the poor man’s equivalent of lime-wash (yes, I know we’ve come full circle here). 

 

The wooden trim (picture rails and dado) were undercoated with a pale ochre, then given a not particularly shiny glaze of burnt umber acrylic paint, also mixed with Floetrol. And the fireplace was bagged with matte grey acrylic paint (bagging is as simple as it sounds: you hit wet paint with a plastic bag) and then veins were drawn/painted with black and white acrylic paint. If you want to make convincing marble, I’m told that badger brushes and clingwrap are great tools, and some people use corks or feathers to draw the veins. A coat of low sheen varnish also helps. 

The birdrobe and 80s paint effects

An odd instance of life turning full circle, but lately I’ve been working as a set painter for an amateur theatre company. The last time I did this job I was about eighteen, so more than twenty years ago, and I find I’m enjoying it just as much this time around. I got into it in the first place thinking ‘well, I like painting on large canvases, so the theatre company is really just giving me free art materials’.

Unfortunately, like many young artists, my first professional gig as a set painter resulted in non payment and a fair bit of angst, so I decided to steer clear of theatre as a profession. I used to joke that ‘they’re actors, and so when they say that the cheque is in the post, you actually believe them…’

This time around, I’m working for Maitland Repetory Theatre, and like the rest of the cast and crew, it’s all voluntary. Maitland Rep works out of a lovely old church, next to the Maitland Regional Art Gallery, and has a dedicated following of young and old thespians.

I’ve been painting a set for The Guardsman, written by Ferenc Molnar and directed by Frank Oakes, which opens on the 10th April. So far I’ve been responsible for a not particularly convincing marble fireplace set, some blotchy old plaster on the walls, and faux wooden panelling below the dado rail. In case you’re interested in paint effects, Floetrol is my current weapon of choice, handy for all those 80s classics such as bagging, dragging, marbling, stone finishes, sponging and even the incurably naff rag rolling.

Now if you’re old enough to remember the 80s, you’ll remember a time when a feature wall would have looked just like some poor unfortunate had run out of paint. Back in the day, interior designers never used to paint any surface without torturing it with some implement afterwards. So paint was scratched, distressed, sanded, waxed, imprinted with a variety of objects, or bulked up with various fillers so it acted like plaster. Why people insisted on making their belongings look old, I’ll never know, but there it is. And for a brief time in the mid 90s, I worked for a London construction company, doing this kind of work.

I recently decided, largely on the basis of a casual conversation in a paint shop, that 80s paint effects were about to stage a comeback. I’d been considering buying Porter’s French Wash, a nice product that effectively acts as a scumble glaze. (Scumble glaze is sticky stuff you mix with paint so that it becomes more transparent, and you can see the brushstrokes after the paint dries; it’s as the pistachio is to shortbread when it comes to paint effects). I asked the guy behind the counter if he sold much of it, and he said ‘nah, not as much as the rest of their range’. So on the basis of this overwhelming evidence, I’ve thrown myself into a paint effects revival.

I figure that if I paint my house with these effects, by the time I get around to selling it, some years down the track, faux finishes will be a red hot trend. To this end, young Sophie has ended up with a pink blotchy bedroom (if it was a rash you’d definitely be off to the doctor) and I’m planning to attack the living room walls with a fetching shade of ochre.

Now if the ochre works, it will look like I am living in the pages of a giant foxed book, all creamy spotted and warm looking. Imagine a nice old pub ceiling, stained yellow brown with nicotine and water marks, and you’ve got the picture. However, there is always the risk that it will resemble some kind of giant animal burrow. Stay tuned….

(Incidentally, I promised EH photos of the birdrobe, currently on show at MRAG as part of the Year of the Bird exhibition, and here they are. I must apologise for the quality of the images: flash on means wrong colour, flash off means low exposure and blurry shot. Either way, documenting my work is clearly a task I need to delegate).

Year of the Bird: installation images

 

 

Today I went up to Maitland Regional Art Gallery to take some photographs of the Year of the Bird exhibition, curated by Caelli Jo Brooker and myself. All was going well except for two crucial factors: I’m very good at taking blurry action shots, and my little girl decided that the exhibition images would look better with her in all of them. After careful editing, I was left with a much smaller number of shots.

 

Marian Drew’s large scale photographs on the right hand wall, with Trevor Weekes’ mixed media drawings and paintings on the left. 

 

Tasmanian painter Helen Wright’s imagery (above). 

 

 

Marian Drew’s work was hung on a long wall, to the right as you entered the exhibition space; in the same gallery, on the end wall, Emma Van Leest’s intricate papercuts had a large yellow wall to themselves. 

 

The exhibition is quite large, so it takes up two adjacent galleries: with the two galleries combined, the floor space is a long rectangle with a partition dividing it in half. The partition has Trevor Weekes’ imagery on the right hand side, and Pamela See’s installation on the other, with exhibition signage on the short side facing the entrance. 

 

These are images from the gallery on the  left hand side. Pamela See’s blue acrylic installation is on the partition wall, with David Hampton’s prints on the long wall facing the entrance (next to David’s work you can just see some of Kate Foster and Merle Patchett’s collaborative series). 

 

 

Kate Foster and Merle Patchett’s collaborative series. 

 

 

Caelli Jo Brooker’s work on the yellow wall, and in a cabinet, on the short wall of the left hand side gallery. 

 

 

Vanessa Barbay’s work has a wall to itself, in the left hand gallery, on the long wall facing David Hampton’s prints. 

 

 

 

Another shot of Vanessa Barbay’s work, with Caelli Jo Brooker’s drawings in a case in the foreground. 

 

 

Pamela See’s installation on the partition wall. You can just see Helen Wright’s paintings on a long wall in the right hand side gallery. 

 

David Hampton’s prints and Caelli Jo Brooker’s mixed media work. 

 

 

My dear daughter pretending to be some kind of French super hero. 

 

Vanessa Barbay’s work on the left, and my wardrobe and painting on the right. 

 

 

Another shot of Helen Wright’s paintings. 

 

 

Close up images of Helen Wright’s work. 

 

 

Marian Drew and Trevor Weekes. 

 

 

Marian Drew. 

 

 

Final image of Helen Wright’s paintings on the left, and Trevor Weekes’ images on the right. 

The Captain

 

Regular readers of this blog (all six of you!) will know that I recently moved into an old house. How old remains a mystery, but the builder who checked the place out for me, before I brought it, reckons that it’s probably at least an hundred years old, possibly more. He was excited to discover mortise and tennon joints in the ceiling joists, “been in the trade fourty years and never seen that before!”, and I too admit that my heart fluttered at the thought. 

Shortly after moving in, possibly as the result of carrying heavy furniture on a 42 degree day, I thought I saw a ghost. Yes, one shouldn’t fess up to this sort of thing, it puts one squarely in the crazy basket, but it was the strangest visual illusion. I was lying in bed, gazing blankly past my grey bedroom door, through to the front door, and wondering why on earth the previous occupants had felt the need for four dead-locks, when something shifted. It seemed as if a black cloud hovered into the room, making the grey bedroom door look suddenly darker. Most odd. 

 

Anyway, for a few days I toyed with the thought that the place might be haunted, then spent a few more musing why anyone would put four deadlocks on a chipboard door frame. I tried to imagine some of the events that might have happened in my house over the years. Finally I decided that if the place was haunted, then I may as well learn to live with this as, after all, the ghost got here first. 

But why just resign yourself to something? Why not celebrate it? I’d been reading about the history of my new town and discovered that British survivors of the Napoleonic Wars were granted riverside land in an area known as Veterans Flats (nice land but it floods). So I decided that if my house was about fifty years older than previously thought, it could have once belonged to one of these sailors. 

 

A few more days passed, where I pretended to myself that I was communing with the ghost, and I eventually came up with the person who I think once lived here. I mean, this is completely fictitious, so please bear with me. His name is Captain Frederick Johanssen, he was a French seaman with a Swedish mother, and he settled here after the war, with his adopted daughter and Chinese housekeeper. 

I have been busily inventing stories about the Captain’s daughter (pulled out of the Pacific Ocean, with no signs of shipwreck nearby, or any other survivors, just this little girl swimming alone in the sea, miles from land); his housekeeper (actually his lover and a trusted friend, but propriety and his nature forbade any public acknowledgement); and his Swedish mother (so beautiful that it scarred him for life). 

Captain Johanssen has become something of an obsession, but being a practical person, I’ve decided that this is a useful partnership. I’m currently working out a renovation plan for the house, and having excruciating taste in home furnishings, and an even worse sense of interior design, have solved this by asking one simple question: ‘would the Captain like it?’ If the answer is ‘non’, then the idea is discarded. 

The Captain, it appears, is prone to military straight rows of clipped box hedges; neat white paintwork; black window boxes with red geraniums; chestnut brown Chesterfield chairs with many buttons; polished brass and flooring that, it has to be said, looks a hell of a lot like a ship’s deck. I’m currently pondering how much rope, canvas and nautical paraphenalia one can pack into a house before it starts looking like a Maritime Museum gift shop. 

I’m also thinking that eventually I would like to write the history of the Captain’s life. 

A passion for peacocks

I thought I’d blog about my latest obsession: the peacock. While I’ve had periods of infatuation with various artists, writers, animals, men, drinks, sports and foods, this is my first time with the peacock. It began innocently enough, when my friend KRS began making these wonderfully strange sculptures of peacocks. Interested in female identity, and themes of vanity and beauty, her birds were often tied up in leather straps or wearing blindfolds. They were really mawish. 

 

The next peacock sighting was a report by my cousin Julien from a music residency in Italy. He was holed up in a villa, a beautiful place with formal gardens, recording with a range of international and local musos. I was keen to visit, but with a young child, the timing just wasn’t appropriate. But I’ll always remember him writing me an email about the white peacock in the villa gardens. 

For me, this white peacock, has assumed the proportions of the mythic white whale. It was  the classic case of the hoilday abroad coming at the wrong stage in one’s life. 

 

Anyway, I had Year of the Bird coming up, an exhibition curated by Caelli Jo Brooker and myself for Maitland Regional Art Gallery, and I was struggling to think of something to make for the show. Then it dawned on me: it was time to re-ignite peacock-philia! Caelli and her family delivered an old oak paneled wardrobe and I set about painting it in the carport. 

 

Ironically, birds have taken to crapping on the wardrobe, but I’ve decided that this is their way of expressing admiration. I’ve had a great time getting OTT with peacocks. On the wardrobe, which has some nice Art Nouveau panels (the shapes seem to suggest what subject matter they’d like to have on them) I’ve painted all things peacock.

 

There are peacock wings, peacock feathers, peacocks sitting on castles, Art Noveau/vaguely Japanese inspired peacocks, peacocks displaying, courting peacocks, (curried shrimp…), and various designs that are supposed to remind you of… the peacock. It’s never going to win any good taste awards, I’m quite certain of that. 

 

As the damned thing needs to be delivered to the gallery on Monday, I really need to finish it by Saturday to give it time to dry. The next step is to paint the decorative side panels, then I’m going to pick out some more highlights with white paint, toned down with a bit of burnt umber. 

 

From a purely parsimonious perspective, I’ve got to admit to loving the underpainting in burnt umber technique, because the pigment is the cheapest of the range. Also, the thin paint applications mean that so far I’m only about three quarters of the way through a small tube, which is pretty good as I tend to be a bit of a paint hog. 

 

Ah, the romance of the open studio! Plein air painting at its most budget. 

The next step will be to apply some thin washes of colour, hopefully once the flecks of white highlighting have dried, otherwise it’s going to be a horrible mess. Finally, the wardrobe will get a coat of sealer (if I have time) and some brown furniture polish. The theory is that the polish will tone down some of the colours, and make the green trim, which is a rather yucky spearmint chewing gum colour, look a bit more nuanced.

 

Thanks to Holley Ryan, who very kindly painted our faces with peacock designs, during a recent visit to EVM. 

 

Jack Kerouac it ain’t

 

Pick up any book about writing, and it will give endless reams of advice about how to create the best conditions for writing productively. These include joining writers groups, making it a daily job, blogging, finding a mentor, working alone, setting up a designated area and/or time for writing, and working to a word count goal or deadline. Implicit in all this advice is that somehow writers are special creatures, who require some kind of rarified atmosphere to create, even if this is just a humble desk and filing cabinet. 

Well, I’m happy to announce that I have discovered the best place to write, and it is, drum roll please, a cruise ship. As someone once quipped, cruise ships are full of the “recently wed, overfed and nearly dead”. And no-one would ever accuse them of offering high brow entertainment or attracting the world’s most cultivated travellers.

But cruise ships offer some great perks for writers and I’ve come to regard them as floating writers-in-residence programs. Once you have brought your ticket, and staggered on board, weighed down with suitcases full of seasonally inappropriate clothing, a cruise ship is a writer’s retreat. They provide food without washing; daily housekeeping and a total absence of household duties; the internet is too expensive to use, and there is no mobile phone reception, which cuts out all the usual digital distractions; and for writers with children, there is a free kids’ club which the little ones actually enjoy. Plus there is something about being in the confined space of a ship, and the sight of the ocean, which seems to focus the mind. You can’t actually go anywhere, so there is no running away from your writing project, so you may as well write. 

A dear friend and I recently went on a cruise to New Zealand, and I took my laptop and an incomplete manuscript. I set myself a target of bashing out 1000 words every day, it was a 13 night cruise, and came home having written about 16,000. I’m thinking that next time I have a deadline looming, I’m going to hit the high seas. 

The Town of X

Sometime ago I went on a rather fraught family holiday with my ex-husband and our four year old daughter. We loaded up his campervan and explored the NSW East Coast, stopping at various national parks, beaches and camping sites. On the way home we spent the night at Crowdy Bay, a rather lovely bay with a stumpy lighthouse looking over the ocean.

Anyway, by this point in the holiday I’d finally managed to relax and started enjoying things like the number of seconds between waves, the sound of seagulls hovering overhead, and the way clouds look during a thunderstorm. And perhaps I was starting to get bored too, because when we pulled into Crowdy Bay, a pretty, innocuous place, I started imagining all kinds of strange nautical scenarios. These included a deluded notion that at midnight, all the ghosts of drowned seaman would walk across the water of the bay, and that the local fishermen practiced pagan beliefs and would occasionally throw human sacrifices into the sea. 

Months later and I was looking for inspiration for the Newcastle Short Story competition, and decided to turn these musings into a story. In the end it wasn’t a very good story, and didn’t get anywhere in the competition. But I re-read it recently and decided that I quite liked the central premise, that pagan beliefs could continue unabated in remote coastal villages, and wrote it again with a Tasmanian setting. 

Crossing the Bass Strait seemed to make the narrative much stronger and somehow more believable. Although originally titled ‘Crowdy Bay Night’, I decided to keep the location vague and sinister by re-naming the story ‘The Town of X’. I guess I got a kick out of the notion that people would try and guess which southern Tasmanian village it was supposed to be.

I’ve just sent it off to another competition, so I’ll blog if it gets anywhere and maintain stoney silence if not. Rather optimistically, I’m hoping to kick off a new form of Australian writing that I’ve tagged ‘coastal horror’. It just seems that coastal style, which has become so ubiquitous in interior design, advertising imagery and even clothing, is ripe for gothic re-interpretation. There are only so many scrubbed pieces of white timber, wicker chairs and navy jumpers a girl can take…

In other writing news, a large publisher has shown very, very, very (to the power of ten) vague interest in my 1001 nights manuscript (I’ve blogged about it here and here). Of course, being your typical creative, I’ve already mentally cast the movie, spent the royalty cheque and designed the dust jacket. Stay tuned…

 

 

Books, birds and babes…

The year has started well, with something of a pile up of creative projects, which is nothing to whine about, but does present some ‘what the hell should I do first?’ scheduling issues. I got interested in time management and efficiency a while ago, and wasted countless happy hours reading about spreadsheets, productivity cycles and cognitive patterns. It was a great hobby while it lasted, but I can’t actually say I walked away from the phase with anything concrete other than ‘always do the fun thing first’, which is actually diametrically opposed to lots of this kind of advice. 

Next week I start a commission to write the 25 year history of Hunter Valley Grammar School. I’ve never written a local history before, so I’m looking forward to some happy hours in the library, and hanging out with archivists. I’m thinking I really should start wearing my hair in a bun…

I’ve also got to finish the perennial PhD, as my scholarship is running out at the end of next month, and what was a delightful hobby has suddenly become an urgent matter. It turns out that the University really likes their PhD candidates to finish more or less on time, and has suddenly pulled out a dazzling array of sticks and carrots. One of the best carrots, by the way, was some great workshops run by Thinkwell. (It was actually Thinkwell that got me interested in time management, and also wondering why procrastination ever acquired such a bad name). 

The PhD started off in Fine Arts, and for a variety of reasons recently jumped across into the English and Writing program, specifically the Creative Writing strand. This means I’ve got to write a novel length work of fiction, then turn around and analyse it in another longish document. I always imagine that this is a bit like an 18th century surgeon operating on himself at sea: you get to see how your guts work in a stressful environment. I’ve got to admit to being perfectly happy with the creative side of the project, no issues there, but the actual analysis and contextualisation of what I’ve written causes some psychic discomfort. 

The good news is that the creative bit, a novel that was provisionally titled Scheherazade’s Sister, and is now more likely to be called Catharine: a reverse fairy tale, is nearly finished. Of course when I say nearly finished, I’m lying: this is just in case my supervisor reads this. I have nearly completed the first draft, but for me this is the hard bit, where all the structure, action and themes are worked out. The subsequent drafts are more in the nature of having fun fiddling with language and seeing how things can be improved. 

Catharine is a character who haunted me so strongly that I had a phase of imagining her walking around the house in a pair of clunky high heels. She insisted on having her name written in a particular way. It was all rather Six Characters in Search of an Author for a while. It wasn’t until I started writing her down that her (entirely imaginary) restless presence started to fade. But I’ll write more about this in the future. 

Meanwhile, far away in another part of town, Caelli and I are continuing to pull the various strands of the Year of the Bird exhibition together, including finishing our own work. The exhibition is due to open, to the funky sounds of Kahibah Funky Brass band, at Maitland Regional Art Gallery at 3pm on Saturday 23rd February. I’m hoping that we get lots of people at the opening and that everyone wears bird masks and dances. 

 

 

Year of the Bird

This painting, moonlight on your beak, is one of the ones I’m working on for the upcoming Year of the Bird exhibition at Maitland Regional Art Gallery. The plan is to produce two paintings and one painted wardrobe. I was outside this afternoon, trying to scrub the last of the old shellac based varnish off the wardrobe, before the rain started. Thanks to the guy in Eckersleys, my local art store, who suggested that methylated spirits and wire wool would do the trick.

And here’s a portrait picture, taken in front of moonlight by Caelli Jo Brooker today.

 

I’d been whining about how I needed a headshot for a magazine article and Caelli very kindly took this one. I like a number of things about the photo, mainly that it appears that I have a bird perching on my head, but also because of the flow of the composition: it leads your eye round in a nice swoopy circle and then along the path into the painted woods.

 

Gunyah Artists’ Residency

In a well intentioned attempt to catch up on blogging about art related stuff, I thought I’d write about a couple of recent pieces of good news. The first is that the sculptor Karen Robinson Smith and myself will be spending some time this year at the Gunyah Artists’ Residency in beautiful Port Stephens. Now I like Port Stephens, I really do, but two things put me off actually entering this lovely expanse of water. The first is the very clear memory of sailing up the Australian East Coast, delivering a catamaran to its new home in Brisbane, and seeing a large shark heading for the Port entrance. And the second is a dimly remembered factoid, something about it being a particularly popular breeding ground for Grey Nurse sharks.

Other memories of Port Stephens include ramming a steel hull yacht into a sandbar on the way out. The yacht was a beauty, and she’d recently had a full refit in a Lemon Tree Passage boatyard: she was gleaming, no rust stains to be seen, just perfect brightwork and new paint shining in the sun. We spent about an hour getting her lovely hull unwedged from the sandbar. In my defence, yes I was steering, but the boat owner was giving directions.

I also recall a funny conversation with the ex-husband after he’d accidentally dropped an anchor onto the sea floor whilst mooring. I’d dived for lost stuff once before, I once rescued an outboard from a metre of slime on the bottom of Dora Creek (all that could be seen was the ghostly profile of an Evenrude logo) and he gently suggested that I may be able to pick up the anchor. I just remember suddenly recalling the Grey Nurse statistic and immediately yelling ‘no!’

 

A final memory of Port Stephens is eating some incredibly good fish and chips from a local store.

The other recent piece of good news is that Sirena, my Hans Christian Andersen inspired short story, was selected for publication in the 2012 40 degrees South Short Story Anthology. This was nice, always exciting to see your name in print, and I liked some of the other stories in the collection. 40 South is currently running another writing competition, The Tasmanian Short Story Competition; the good news is that you don’t have to be an island resident to enter, the bad news is that it closes next week.