Boa Vista Road

This is Boa Vista Road in New Town, five minutes drive from the centre of town. 

I catch a bus up this way in my lunch hour sometimes and walk back into the city. The bushy hill is the Queens Domain. This road corkscrews up, over, down and around to the right to meet Park Street. A few metres beyond Park Street is the busy Brooker Highway. Then above that Cleary's Gates Road runs through the bush (lined with parked commuter cars). And even further up the hill is the jogging loop track.

I like doing these urban landscapes and like most artists I shuffle the cars out of the scene because they spoil it. 

I took these progress pics as I went. The red and blue one is the source for the animation below.

In the finished painting above, an old homestead snoozes in a quiet street with apparently untouched bush in the background - a total lie! I like an uncluttered landscape. But at the same time I really love the way the movement of a car across the surface of the earth can highlight the topography. 

I don't know where I am quite going with these experiments. This may just be too noisy with too much squiggle. My boss years ago said one project coming up "might suit your 'crappy style'" and I've always thought fondly of that. At least I have a style.

Cement mixer on an overpass, 1991

 When I lived in Melbourne in 1990-91 I went out to Sale on the train to visit my friends Phillip and Andrea. It was about a three-hour trip. I must have been in a particularly visually suggestive mood because I saw two things that have stuck with me.

One was Loy Yang power station. I had it etched on my brain afterwards. I cranked out a series of drawings and paintings and eventually had an exhibition in 1996 of variations on the theme of a simple scene: land, sky, monolith with lit windows, and four chimneys belching steam. (It wasn’t etched in my brain very accurately because Loy Yang does not have four chimneys).

I can safely say I've got that image out of my system now. The other thing I saw was a cement mixer approaching the train line on an overpass. Its barrel was revolving as it drove along. As my carriage went under the overpass, the cement mixer passed overhead. That’s it. But … it was beautiful. It was like ballet.

I don’t have any interest in making narrative film but I have a real itch to film and animate scenes like this. It has only just occurred to me that I can literally Blutak my phone to the car window and capture reasonably smooth and useable footage for projects like this.

In 1998 I had a second exhibition of drawings and two short film clips. I shot this footage with a borrowed video camera riding in a car with Mum (North West) and in the tray of Nick’s ute (North Hobart). It's painful to recall how ignorant I was and so how work-intensive my methods were.

I feel ready to throw myself into some new experiments in movement.

After Twitter

I spend a lot of time on Twitter; I post maybe 5 times a day on average. Just little observations in the main. I don't know how many followers I have, but I have good friends I met there and in most cases have never met in real life. The ones I have met; Josh and Sean and John and Craig and Dugald and Andy and Andy and Cheryl and Sue and Christine and Belinda and John and Dave and very briefly Ryan – all lovely people. All add value and meaning to my day.

It's a last day of Grade 12 vibe in there at the moment as everyone exchanges addresses, and we’re nervous and excited and sad. Elon Musk has purchased Twitter and rapidly driven it out into a paddock where it’s got four flats, smoke coming from the engine and the diff ripped out on a tree stump. Who saw that coming?! [Everyone].

The good thing if Twitter dies is I will maybe spend more time here expanding thoughts into larger forms and getting more practice actually communicating an idea in writing. The bad thing is communities will fracture, many people and groups and organisations and movements will lose their main or only voice.

Australia's soft plastics recycling industry has just gone public with the fact that they stopped recycling 6 to 9 months ago and have just stockpiled every bread bag I have given them since. This is dreadful news but it has also made me look at yesterday-me from before the news broke and say to him "oh you thought it was that easy eh? Buying everything in plastic is fine because the recycling fairies will turn it into park benches for old fellows to sit and play chess".

Similarly this rapid disintegration of something I had come to rely on too much for news, friendship, ideas and novelties has got me thinking "Oh you thought it was that easy eh? One website for touching farewells to beloved pets and news snark? And interacting with your favourite musos? And jokes?

A lot of us are going to have to work a lot harder to stay connected, stay informed, stay amused. But hard work is good, right? And Elon Musk, who in many ways is a world-historical idiot, is down $44 billion. Worse things happen.