Jackson Pollock saved my life.

It is an all too uncommon to feel the genuine, visceral effect of a work of art. A recent return to Canberra gave me an opportunity to look back on a time where a painting struck me with such obvious and enduring force, as to jolt me out of a rapidly darkening personal malaise.

From the first experience, time spent in front of Blue Poles, became moments of both escape and drew attention to a rapidly darkening spark life.

It should surprise none to know that I am no art critic, nor even a student of its history or technique. And even were I to be able to claim such a background, I would not seek to focus upon the technical merit of Pollocks work, nor what it represents in the development of abstract expressionism. For while the effect of the painting itself has lead me to try to understand these things, it was not technical merit nor Pollocks status, that made this work so impressive and important to me at the time.
Indeed it is possible that, at the time of my first impressions, when time in front of it assumed a meditative, almost revelatory quality, I am not sure that I could consciously articulate what it was that drew my gaze and my mind into the mesmeric tangle of drips and splatters.
It is only later, in the clear minded moments of reflection, years in the future, that I can look back at myself then, and at the painting itself, and wonder not just at its genius, but at the powerfull connection it was able to make with a fragile, lost mind like my own had been.

...

Pollock is once, famously, to have responded that he 'was nature', when asked if he painted from nature. In Looking back into my discovery of Blue Poles, and how it affected me, I have some understanding of what he was asserting. At the least, I have some impression that a sense of 'nature' and its energy, complexity and vitality, is what I felt in it. 

      For those not familiar with it, I feel woefully unqualified to give a sufficient impression through description. An enormous canvass. It seems a cut-out snapshot from something greater, even infinite. An intense overlaid structure of knotted drops, spatters, spandrels and webs of coloured paint. A seething surface of aesthetic vitality, energy and movement captured and expressed with a precise, fluid use of colour and texture that draws the eye from across the room, and drags it deeper into the perpetually receding tangle. 

    If the canvass is as a cut-out from an infinite whole, then the painting itself becomes a snapped instant in time and space. As though one stood at the edge of the universe, looking back through its infinite stretch of space and time, into the moments of origin. In those strands and interwoven tangles of paint, one gets a momentary glimpse of the interconnected universe. The unimaginable super-massive scale of galaxies, infinitely receding back through oneself, into the sub-atomic and beyond.
At once, one could be cast out in the middle of a galaxy of exploding and reforming stars, or amidst the infinitesimal spatter of bossons in a super-colider. And in that beautiful duality, is comfort.
Perhaps it is in that seeming depiction of the perfect moment of infinity, the energy, vitality and connectivity of life, that I found my place. Grounded in the scale of the universe and my part in it.
In the way that one gazes at the stars, or looks down at our little blue planet, and feels the squirming swamp of the trivial evaporate, perhaps it was the glimpse of an energised, connected infinity that so resonated with me, and gave me comfort. 

In the years since its creation Blue Poles has been analysed for its fractal qualities and there has been speculation and conjecture as to how relevant or important this is. Pollock himself is both lauded as one of the Titans of modern art, and denigrated as a symbol of the over-estimation of modern artists driven by a market looking for fodder. For myself, as I sat in front of it again some 9 years later, I considered Pollocks claim to be nature, and even the fundamental project of abstract expressionism and the pursuit of the subconscious, and came to no conclusion, but one. 

The painting still has a magnetic sense of the infinite. 

Years later, after countless hours spent in front of it, I still find in it an anchoring harmony as it draws my gaze deeper and deeper into that seeming infinite.
 

Silence.

Long days.
Work, but with too much time to ponder...
And after, too little to reflect.
I look back at this blog now, and already it seems as though it happened to someone else...
Or not at all.
Google says I cant post any more photos on here.
Apparently Ive exceeded the limit. I cant help think, in current mood, that perhaps thats appropriate.
Ive little enough to say, and have barely picked up a camera since returning to Sydney.
A few weeks in the odd limbo of existence, without any real feeling of it.
Wanting, waiting for whatever is next.

sumptuous.

Great expectations.
Unrequited love.
Revenge.
Betrayal.
Remorse.
Nostaligia.
Thursday night at the wharf.

Reset.

A week of weird at home.
Time to unpack the baggage.
Bottom of the valley, darkest moments before the dawn.
No booze.
Get out in the sun. Run.
The cosmic kick in the ass to restart the process.
Jobs. Houses. Do something with those photos...
I'll get back to you on that.

Harbourside birthdays...

Seaside, spring post-storm

all things end.

Back to say goodbye.

Pre-flight checks

Rain lashing windows,
And inside packing.
The accompaniment of the strange feeling of limbo between leaving
and whatever comes next.
Its just a flight, one island to another.
But in those moments of empty time, there is space to be lost under the waves of memories of people places, experiences that have passed... caught between them and the expectations of home, and wondering just what home is. 
Not naive enough to expect a grand homecoming, and perhaps a little too jaded by experience to be excited.
Its never what it was before, and how could it be when you are not?
And so the expectation of the familiarly unfamiliar.
New relationships, homes, jobs, lives... all in the shadow of what you remember from before.
I left with expectations. Hopes. Possibilities.
But experiences were rich, and vivid in their difference from all that I thought as I left.
Home is where the heart is...
Going home. ?

18 again...

Age is an illusion.
No matter how many times the Earth has orbited the sun during your life, you can be undone by the same feelings of helplessness.
You can always feel every moment in front of you obscured in enigmatic maze
... every moment behind an unfathomable mystery.
Detail notwithstanding, ive had a week, a month... perhaps more... to feel like im back at the begining of things.
18 again, and non the wiser.
Degrees, jobs of all colour and years of travel... meaningless.
Still frightened.
Still ignorant.
Still immature.
Still straining for something to change.
Still asking stupid questions of life, and still having fuck-all in answer. 
Still wondering when you can wake up and not feel like a clueless adolescent.
It seems the only changes are a fading of hope and an inevitable rising fatalism

Overly romantic,  perhaps diminishing... but, still, in my sentiment, im still hoping for the wind to change

“The lapse of ages changes all things - time - language - the earth - the bounds of the sea - the stars of the sky, and everything 'about, around, and underneath' man, except man himself, who has always been and always will be, an unlucky rascal. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment. All the discoveries which have yet been made have multiplied little but existence.” Byron.

The Guns of Brixton... markets.

You know youre in London when...
Everything has a warning sign.
The night-time tube takes on an amusing dimension when one realises just how riddiculous an obsession with safety and information England has developed. You can open the doors of the Paris metro before it stops, the closing Tube doors give a decent impression of the pre-launch warning of an Arianne 5 heading into high orbit...
In fact, Im sure being a french rocket, it has less warning notices than the doors of a London Tube.
The most pointlessly amusing notice would have to be the sticker announcing that the window should be opened for ventilation... as though anyone capable of reading the notice would ever be in a position to need the information it was announcing.

Happiness Forgets.
It gets help from a good dry gin martini.
An east london basement bar. Dark. Stripped brick walls, candlelight and a great top shelf.
A cousin and an old friend from another life.
Another goodbye moment.
Buses across town in the drizzling dark.

The bus to Brixton.
The village markets.
1 pound tacos and a beer wandering the bustling lanes of food.
round one of market Tapas, Carribean cod-fish balls and a burger.
Light and sound and Motion

Shades of Grey

Ive been rather silent the last few weeks.
I put it down to colour and movement.
Even at my best I struggle to put in words, the vivid moments of the everyday. Perhaps it is as Oscar Wilde quipped, that the bad poet '...lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”
I cant help feeling that is somewhat overdramatising my own situation, but it does afford me the consolation of believing that theres a little poetry in my life as lived.
.. Even if the expression of it remains a frustrating mystery.
Anyway, be all of that as it may, the last few weeks have been rich with change and difference, the new, the old revisited, happiness, sadness, melancholy, memory and maudlin... and no small amount of alcohol (considering that last one, it is probably best for the sanity of any that may read this blog that I have refrained from writing much. You are all no doubt painfully aware that alcohol does little to improve whatever I have written under its influence.... be it only an ill-advised text message, or 20)

So, at the end of all of that, a month of erratic movement has passed since the Vendange,
a month that has seen 10 trains and 2 buses across 7 countries.
A month of old friendships revisited, and new ones cemented.
A month of language melange.
A month reminiscing about the past and ruminating upon possible futures.
80's music in Switzerland, 50's in Antwerp, Bavarian in Berlin... and Morphine in Rotterdam.
The UBahn, the Metro, the Tube. Taxis, buses, bikes and wobbled walks home at all hours.
Wine, whiskey, Beer and ill advised martinis in the early morning.
... a month ended standing in the bar of the Eurostar, humming across the sunny autumn countryside, as the wave of realisation and memory begins to catch up.
Quiet tears into my gin, under the weight of all that has passed.
The realisation of the travellers dilemma.
Once you have tasted life elsewhere, felt the difference and richness. Once you have lived a vivid other, you lose the ability to be content anywhere.
Home is home, with all the warmth, love and security of the familiar and family.
But so much of your life, your memories, and your friends reside elsewhere and to live at home is to miss them and the life they are part of.
One can try to chase them, bouncing forever between in the vain hope of finding a place where the feeling is less. But, as I stood in that bar I realised that the price one pays for living vivid, is to live with an enduring sadness and separation afterwards.
One can live many lives, but only be content with them one at a time.
 ...
The autumn colour of London is grey.
From the moment you see it in the distance, buried under a misty dome of clouds, it is near universal.
Grey stone streets and pavements.
Grey concrete flats.
Grey tiled rooves.
Grey river.
... grey skin as summer fades.