Fly Fly Away Pamela

So much for serious academic writing. All I want to do is draw. And draw and draw and draw.

(this is not such a great photo. I need lessons)



Apart from weirdly and compulsively drawing, I have been working a bit on my children's book, The Many Houses of April Aloyisious Rousseau. And it is so much more difficult than I ever imagined it would be. It is a story about a girl who lives in a circus caravan and her great aim in life is to live in a house. It was inspired by the August Sander photo above, 'Young Girl in a Circus Caravan'. I found the image on the wonderful Moma site. Where I also found the wonderful work of Kiki Smith (this link came from another blog but unfortunately I can not remember which one).
I am finding it very difficult to write a brief and imaginative children's book, perhaps because my great impulse in life is to tell long and elaborate stories. And I do really want it to be a picture book rather than a long narrative story.

So this is a brief extract from the beginning. I will show you a story board tomorrow...

The Many Houses of April Aloyisious Rousseau

Firstly, you should know that I live in caravan. My name is April, April Aloyisious (pronounced Alo-ish-us, like delicious) Rousseau, no relation to Jean-Jaques, French Philosopher extraordinaire. I’m named after my Papa, Aloyisious Rousseau, World Renowned Trapeze artist who died tragically when I was but a “wee babe-in-arms”. My Aunt Adelaide’s words, she likes to say “weeeee” in a Scottish accent and chuckle like she is telling a bad joke. That’s my Aunt A for you though- she’s nuts. I call her Walnut. She calls herself “Conjurer”.

My Aunt A (Walnut) and I share a caravan. It’s a circus caravan. It’s not a house, but it does have a built-in bathroom.

Many shades of green

These parrots are extra noisy and a little bit crazy...


I heard on the radio today that companies in Australia are using green as an advertising tool (though this is hardly a revelation) and many products that are advertised as green are not. Then when I examined my washing powder more closely I discovered that though it says grey-water safe there is a tiny little asterix beside it, and in fine print at the bottom of the box it says only grey-water from the rinse cycle is safe to put on your garden. Perhaps this is standard but I was really annoyed, especially since I have been dumping buckets of it on my herbs. They seem fine but I hate to think what I have been doing to the soil and to us...

Magma is Awesome, Man!

The Angry Couple. This is a drawing from a Brassai photograph.

M's birthday card. If you want to find out more about Magma - scary!

Well, maybe manifestos are not for me, though I really wish they were (it took an inordinate amount of time and anxiety to reach this decision). I am most definitely a list writer though, and a dreamer and a planner but none of these are necessarily conducive to manifesto writing. Instead, to begin with I have a list of what I think this blog should be.

1. A blog is about process.
2. A blog is a record, a journal.
3. Notes and Queries
4. Inspiration is endless
5. Mistakes are really important.

I finished my honours a few months ago and I have spent the last couple of months starting projects and feeling quite overwhelmed by all the various possibilities. I guess before I embark on any kind of post grad work I feel that I need to be producing quality work outside of an institution. At the moment this could be anything from arts writing to fiction to drawing and illustration. This is not good. It freaks me out.
So, over the next few months I have three projects that I want to complete, one is a children's book with the working title, The Many Houses of April Rousseau. The other two are re-writes of my honours thesis: one as a popular essay for a competition that closes in August, the other as an academic journal article. So over the next few months I will share the process of completing these three projects. I think that the most important thing for me is to try and attain a kind of coherence in the work that I produce. This blog will therefore be about the process that I go through to complete the projects, but it will also be a bit more of a project in itself. I also hope to update it a lot more frequently.
In the next few days I will outline the projects in more detail.

The Lady and the Eyelash

A recent ink drawing.
I am still going with the manifesto.
In the meantime, some titles:
How to Grow a Beard
The Lady and The Eyelash
The Many Moustaches of Monsieur M.
Another Day Another Donkey
Alice, Henry and the Avocado Plant
The Green Fairy

Flickering

originally uploaded by +fatman+.

When I first started looking properly at Flickr I found +fatman+. His photos of Japan are beautiful, especially his set +magnificent prosaic of Japan. Strangely, he disappeared not long after I discovered him. He left 1040 photos. And now beneath his last photo (the photo I have posted above) there are several comments asking where he is and what has happened. They grow progressively more desperate. I guess anything might have happened. He might be sick of Flickr, he might be busy, he might have had an accident, or a baby, or he might be dead.

This makes me think about what it is that I am actually doing on the internet. My passing, flickering interactions with people. Because I seem to spend more and more time here looking at blogs, at flickr, at art (I love this - the link is from Irina Troitskaya), at other people's houses. And given that I am new to blogging and the blog is not really a format that I feel entirely comfortable with I thought it best to write a bit of a manifesto. Because I love a manifesto. But first I have to think of one, so I will be back in a bit...

In the mean time we might all contemplate the Google zeitgeist (link courtesy of M)
and think about how great it is that one of the things people search for most on the internet is how to kiss...

I should have been a meterologist

Ohhh the weather.
The heat. The hotness.
How can you not be preoccupied with the weather when it is this hot and you anticipate the cool change this much? While always generally interested in the weather (who isn't really), lately it feels all-consuming. I know when it is blowing southerly, and when it blows westerly. When it blows easterly (which is rare in Melbourne) it rattles my bedroom window, and when it blows northerly it is really really really hot! I might add that at this moment I can feel a shift, a change and there is now a cool breeze blowing from the south west.



The above image is taken from a beautiful zine called Far Far Away, a collection of drawings by Marnie Slater published in India in 2006. They are drawings of fruit and vegetables from the vegetable-wallah on the corner of Khar Pali and 14th in Mumbai. They are beautiful watercolours and they make me think of India and how much I would like to go back there.

This old derelict house was in/on (?) the old part of the lake in Srinigar, Kashmir. The houses that loomed from the lake were extraordinary, though usually abandoned by their wealthy owners. I guess because of the war.

A mosque in the Himalaya where the air was thin and most definitely chilly.

Finally, The Sartorialist- who most people know and love is also in Delhi, taking photos of the sartorially splendid New Delhians...

Utrecht and the Wandervogel

Given my love of zines and artist's books I was so happy when Matt arrived back from Japan with these 3 small, simple and beautiful artist's books. I think while I love the art in each I am also quite taken with their simplicity. The above images are from Taisuke Koyama's book, Dark Matter. More of Koyama's photography can be found here.
Two of the books were by the artist, HIMAA. The images below are taken from his book, Unfold.



And the following images are taken from HIMAA's book Wandervogel.



When I typed Wandervogel into google, I realised what HIMAA was referring to. I had heard of the hippies who lived in Germany in the forests in the 1920s and 30s but hadn't realised that they were called the Wandervogel. I think it is intriguing that while the Nazi's were becoming increasingly powerful in Germany there was also a hippy movement very similar to that which emerged throughout the world in the 1960s.


As usual, I am fascinated by the way that all these things seem to come together.
The images taken from Unfold (particularly the coloured pins) remind me in some way of Elizabeth Dunker's design. This is her blog and you can find more of her work here at Lula. It is also worth mentioning the beautiful Pappersvlk book by Albert Sjöstam featured on the Lula website.
The books above were all published by Utrecht.
And finally this is a fantastic Japanese blog about books: bookendless