The Blue & Yellow Post

I paint. I paint with oils, acrylics and watercolour. I guess my favourite medium are oils - because they are so seductive. Depending on the medium you use, you can get all sorts of transparent and rich colours.

Right now I’m wrestling with 2 paintings. Both are based on photos I took on a recent trip. The wrestle is with the process and I guess the outcome.

My problem is that I don’t want the work to be a replica of something I saw, yet I do want it to replicate what I saw - if that makes sense. The images that are pre-occupying me are steps that lead into the water. In both, the water seems so mysterious: one is slightly more bouyant or playful and the other receding with the tide - revealing the rich variegated stone patterns beneath.

I work with the forms yet all the time resisting them. I want to shape and push the forms, to stretch them so they don’t resemble the starting point, and then reconfigure them to make sense of the whole picture. This means continually massaging how they relate to each other on the canvas. I enjoy the colours, the balance, the solidity and fragility of some elements - and have immense fun with the texture of the paint itself. Yet I wrestle with the fact that it should look more like life, more like the original picture, more like reality.

People who see my work - describe it as impressionistic.  Is that because I can’t reproduce forms realistically? The reason they say this is because each painting has a feeling of transience and movement.  I also think they are impressionistic because I use the knife more often than I do the brush.

Another pecadillo, if you like is a lack of planning. I prefer the painting to emerge as I go along. I like to be suprised at what the painting process delivers - almost magically. It may not resemble the starting point much at all, but it comes to a point when the work is finished and I’m happy to let it go as an impression of the starting point.

Nearly every time I look at my work I feel good about it and about myself. Which is a world away from what I was like when I was a teenager or young adult. In fact, I would recommend painting for all depressives and those working on the renovated self. It’s a great way to fall in love with life and with your participation in it.

I knew a woman once, whom I thought was quite a gifted painter. I couldn’t understand why she judged her work so harshly, refusing to pick up the brush for many years after a “bad” experience (ie a painting she didn’t like). I’m not saying don’t strive for perfection, but really - the world is full of critics enough, why would we add another one to the equation?

Yes, I love the process and I do like the workat each iteration. I like its boldness, the “painterly” (as a teacher once described it) style, which I think just means the fact that I’m not afraid of using a variety of and large amount of paint.  In fact I relish in it. Bloke used to find the “mark of bubba” everywhere around our house. A smear of paint on the light switch, on the fridge, on the phone and of course on every wall along my path.

He would be frightened of the work. Not because of the mess, but rather frightened for me I think. He’d notice when the perspective was wrong, or the composition didn’t resemble reality. He thought I’d be disappointed at the end. Of course he was projecting, and when I asked him why he didn’t paint, given that he was an excellent draftsman, he told me that he was too scared. He would spend so much time planning what to paint, that he would become too intimidated to begin - in case it didn’t work out.

I guess I get scared too. Scared that it will end up looking like crap. But I push on through that, it happens about a third of the way through the painting’s life cycle. And I remind myself that crap is all relative. One person’s crap is in fact another person’s delight. Last week I dreamt someone commented on my painting to the effect that “It looks like shit”. “Exactly what part of it and what sort of shit?” I asked in the dream. At the time, I put it down to a heavy night on the turps (booze that is)  because the painting resembled a truncated intenstine, and I did feel like shit the morning after.

So I’m writing this while my two (yet to be finished) paintings dry. I’m writing it to remind myself that the process is incredibly rewarding - with fresh discoveries all the time. And I’m writing it to remind myself that the process itself is a way of wrestling with my own way of seeing the world - ”In real life” or in my head. The view in my head is like “real life” but is mixed up with all the excitement of other inflluences.

Farewelling my sister on this morning’s flight to Hong Kong, and then onto Budapest; cleaning the house and washing the linen in preparation for interstate friends; getting ready for dinner with a close friend and her guests tonight, and remembering how sublime the Merchant Ivory production of “Howard’s End” was last night.

Yes, all of that has an effect on whether I see the water as emerald or mauve, and whether I paint the stones with a dab or a dash and just how much paint - that I’ve just plied on  do I now scrape off - in order to give a sense of well trodden steps.

Magical.

A long time ago someone took this photo. It was the week after the death of our mother. They say a picture is worth a thousand words.

Just as a picture records seminal moments like these, those same moments highlight the essence of who we are.

I believe those moments of death, birth and marriage highlight a hunger for certainty and meaning.  We make meaning of things with the head and the heart, and for want of a better word, with the spirit.

How much of our spiritual skills are handed down and how much do we acquire? Can we acquire any after a certain age? And do seminal moments up the ante at all?

My own seminal moments include:

• The death of my mother when I was four years old
• The death of my father when I was 30 years old
• My marriage when I was 37
• The death of my husband when I was 48 years old
• The death of my stepmother when I was 48 years old

The primary death of my mother was the defining one.  As one of four siblings we each had a different way of responding to that event. These responses set in motion an entire approach to the way we live our lives.  And this approach is well explained by a particular spiritual system.

The Enneagram has gone the farthest to explaining what these responses were. All of the family is into the Enneagram. So much so, that we’ll describe the behaviour of a family member as a typical 6 or that’s a 3 for you!

The Enneagram is based in a Sufi practice and is a dynamic program to define the spiritual self in relation to others and the world. The system went through a number of iterations to become what it is today.

The system is good for our family for a number of reasons: it is dynamic and inter-related. In other words, we are who we are, in relation to ourselves, to others and to the world. And the best part is that each type is in the process of change and growth. It perfects itself in movement towards or away from other types. 

There are nine types. And each type is defined by a reaction to an impulse (in our case this was pain and fear). No type is any better than another. There are ways to find out what your type is, but I always believe that when you find out your type, you are invariably embarrassed and or humbled by the insight.

We four sit together. We have a 5, two 6s and a 7. Each one of us reacted to the pain of losing our mother in a slightly different - though connected - way. One retreated to the head (5) to find an intellectual explanation; two joined a bigger system (6) to offset the anxiety and belong somewhere and the last one chose the path of sensation to feel alive and to avoid pain (7).

I wanted to write a book with my sisters. Gab was to write the path of epicurean delight – food and pleasure; Cate was to write a dissertation on sense-making and intellectual control and I was to write the third path on myth making and imagination. In the middle of the story, a fairy tale would link and explain the three types. We got so far but no farther.  As it matters more to me, I will pick it up again one day.

The dynamic process of the Enneagram means that as a 6 I have the potential to move towards a number 9. I am not changing types but, if I continue to grow, I can develop a new set of spiritual skills, represented by the number 9.

When I am at my best as a 6, I am self-affirming, trusting of self and others, independent yet symbiotically interdependent and cooperative as an equal. A belief in self leads to true courage, positive thinking, leadership, and rich self-expression.

Number 9, at their best are self-possessed, feel autonomous and fulfilled: have great equanimity and contentment because they are present to themselves. They are intensely alive and fully connected to self and others.

One of my nieces is a 9 so I can learn from her what it feels like to live like a 9. Another one of my nieces is like me, a 6. So if I can live well and fully, I might assist her in understanding herself a bit better.

We are attracted to other types and can understand them. I have a penchant for 5s (given that my twin sister and husband were both 5s). I certainly understand them and I lean on them to make sense of the world inside my head. I also ‘get’ 7s and lean on them when I nudge the bottle or cook up a feast to comfort myself.

So way back when I was 4 years old and the worst thing in the world that could happen did happen; I assumed the mantle of the fearful loyalist. To face whatever it was I had to face, front-on; counter-phobic and confrontational. Confined by and in this awful situation, I was wrapped in a straight-jacket of anxiety. My twin sister, also 4 years old followed another path – one of the eremitic Investigator; equally valid, but different to mine.

Neither of us could tell where the paths would lead. But they were set in motion by this momentous event, and they would diverge many times in the years that followed.

A picture does indeed tells of a thousand worlds still to be lived.  

“Heaven begins with our favourite memory” my girlfriend Rosey once told me.

For me it was bumping out out a show, often at 3 a.m, doubtless tired and pissed, but so happy - in the smells, the dust,  the wonder and the satisfaction.

When I was starting school, my stage, cast and lead character was Mighty Mouse  a cartoon character from the sixties (who years later was disbarred from Comic Valhalla due to a perceived opium addiction!) Mighty Mouse was everything to me, my scene, my rising star, my metaphor and script for surviving the school yard. He was my Raison d’être.

He may have been small, but he was power-packed. “Here I come to save the day, that means that Mighty Mouse is on the way.”At that time in my life I was hanging out for a miracle and a saviour. And in the process, that wonderful alchemistical theatrical process, I rescued my self.

Notwithstanding the blatant fantasy fixation, the game provided me a rich vein of coping strategies. It  gave me the ‘pretend until it feels better’ mentality and the  ’practice until you get it right’ strategy. Both of which I’ve maintained to this day.  All through high school and through my working life I’ve cast the play, the characters, the scenery and style. So as to make my world interesting enough for me to be a part of.  If I found things boring I changed it. If the the colour was drab I’d enliven it. Sort of Steven Covey meets Colour by numbers.

• “Adventures in Paradise” became 2 years teaching in PNG.
• “The Little Princess” became 2 years in Government House
• “The Sound of Music” turned into the Australian Opera
• “Hawaii Five-O” translated into 5 fabulous years working in Television and
• “Disneyland”  morphed into the Public Service with its rich seam of fantasy.

But here’s something for nothing - the technique is exhausting. So I’m bumping out the show. No not suicide - just changing roles. A mid-life trauma has forced me to reconvene my cast of creative thousands into a new show altogether. But how?

In a recent documentary on the making of the Australian Hedda Gabler, the fabulous Cate Blanchett commented on the exchange between actor and audience. She ruminated that each production is forged in the exchange between actor and audience and each interpretation therefore is ”right”.

I’m not sure about this new theatre I’m engaging in. Not sure about the cast, or the role, or the plot. But I’ve settled at least on the audience. They’ll be explorative, faith-filled, imaginative, forgiving and kind (as much UNLIKE Hillsong as possible). This is theatre of the soul, not the masses.

And of the show itself? It won’t be outside the self,  it will be within. I’m happy to bump it in anytime.