Suspendering My Disbelief.

I've been reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader  (C.S. Lewis) for a few days .. well actually I have been reading it for the last few nights. 

Specifically, very late at night.

You know that time of night when, tucked away  in bed, you tend to fall asleep with a book suspended by one stiff arm above your face. Regardless of whether your eyes are open or closed, the book hangs like an executioner's axe, threatening to fall and dent your nose or, at the very least, give you a bloody set of lips, should you release your grip for a moment.

It all goes to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that it is a dangerous thing to be a reader of books.

I can only thank my lucky stars (read: Bank Manager) that I cannot afford an e-reader - because I fall asleep while reading so often that my nose, already bent like the beak of  the South Australian Yellow Breasted Nosy Noodletwit (genus: eripydies), would have been plastered all over my face by now.

Still, back to the subject at hand, what ever that was... 


..... ah yes, C.S. Lewis. 


The greatest thing about The Voyage of The Dawn Treader is its first paragraph. As a 'hook', as an entre, as a 'warmer-upperer', as a piquant sorbet, this paragraph is without equal. 

For example, the first line is: 

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

Unfortunately C.S. Lewis must have had an apocolypitic attack of epiliopithy after he wrote the first paragraph, because, without so much as a deeply bated breath, the book soon sinks into the depths of of authorial narrative intervention. (eg: Dear reader, you should not worry yourselves about Eustace, our erstwhile hero, because he is nought but a scoundrel who never changes his socks, even on Sundays.) 

Lewis's clumsy interventions are clumsy enough to make us certain that he (Lewis)  is clumsy keen for his  readers not to be hung up by their clumsy suspenders of disbelief.

And the fact that it is written for twelve-year-olds is no excuse for these lapses.

Mind  you, I am older than 12 and I am still reading it, suspenders or not.

So, the cover of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the genesis for this image. 

It's also a bow, not only to the cover of Shaun Tan's book The Arrival, but to the techniques of my wonderful artist friends Janne and Mita.

Oh, I almost forgot: this Illustration is for IF's prompt "Separated", a word that I have only recently learnt to misspell. Thank you for looking. 

One more thing. Do you need a good laugh? Check out Penspaper Studio. :). Elizabeth has a great sense of humour. 

Neighbours, China Dolls and Tennis Socks ........

We have had new neighbours for about three weeks. 

They have a dog. 

The dog doesn't bark in the normal doggy kind of way. Instead it 'yips'. 

For the first few days the dog 'yipped' all day and half way into the night. 

On the third night it woke me up at two oclock.

Then it woke me up at three.

When it woke me up at four I lay awake for an hour deciding what I would do.

By the time I climbed out of bed at half past six I had decided that if the neighbours didn't get rid of the dog I would either: 

1) sue them, or

2) kidnap the dog, gag it with some of my old tennis socks then dump it down a mine shaft.

Of course as a kind hearted intelligent man I didn't do any of these things - after all someone might see me, or worse, recognize my tennis socks when they finally found the body.

Instead red eyed and saggy cheeked, I went and politely knocked on the neighbour's door the next morning.

But that's another story - needless to say the dead rat in this  image is a metaphor for something deep in my psyche. 

Did you know that rats belong to the genus Rattus? And the black rat is known as Rattus Rattus? Who ever said that scientists don't have imagination, eh?

About this image? It's for IF's "Silent".  As you can see it works on three different levels. The top level, the middle level, and surprisingly enough, the bottom level. I think the justification for the paradigm, is found in the imposition of the persona of the rat, mirrored of course both symbolically and metaphorically by the metallic finish on the horn, which, in some ways, the horn itself is an iconic archetype of both the horn of plenty - representing harvest, lust, and loud noises - and the God of Thunder, Thor, who had an amazing lisp, and a way with his tools. I haven't even touched on the flower patterns which came with a book of Japanese patterns, on their own DVD which was marked, Copyright, nothing in this DVD can be reproduced, I mean I ask you? How can they sell you a DVD of patterns that you can't use....? I think that's why I gave them green nipples, which to be perfectly honest, was an accident, but I thought, gee if that sicko sadistic Surrealist guy can do amputee doll sexual innuendo, the least I can do is give my dolls green nipples.....

Okay, sorry about that.I just felt like raving as the kid next door has started playing with his electric car outside my window. The car goess zzzzzzzzzzzzsiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssssssssssssssssssiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip, ssssssssssssdfagggggg, gggggggwwwwwww wwwippppppp every five seconds. The kid goes YOOOOOOWAAAAZAA and kind of gurgles occasionally in excitement. He sounds a little like a baboon in the last throws of a tumultuous orgasmic terminal pancreatisis.

I hope his mother poisons him accidently before I have to use my tennis socks on him. I know which would be the worse fate.

Err, just kidding. Actually my neighbors are quiet, well mannered and a joy to speak with.

The genesis of this image.

 Recently I went to our national gallery and saw an old book of photographs of dolls by Hans Belmer. Very surreal. A quick search on google gives me a lot of pseudo erotic bondage type photos so beware. This  is one of the photos in the book I saw. I didn't realise it was meant to be erotic till I saw it in the context of his other work. I just thought it was weird.... in fact maybe I shouldn't have bought it up.... but I think his work evokes an emotive response and so is worth examining for this aspect alone.

Thank you for those people who wished me well with my books. That means very much to me thank you. There was a small mention of one of my artists' books in the paper on Saturday - which is also very exciting! 

Meanwhile prayers for Jack Foster's wife who has been very ill recently. You can wish him well at Jacktoons if you like.

Jack's a good bloke and a very funny guy and I'm sure he'd appreciate your prayers more than you imagine.

The Absence of Pain

The first time I thought how pleasant it might be to extremum vitae spiritum edere was in 1994.

I was sitting at a set of traffic lights at the corner of Turton and Maitland Roads in the city of Newcastle. The lights were red, it was 10 past nine in the morning, I was heading off for work and I had on a starched white shirt, black pants, and a yellow ochre tie that my wife had made me.

The time of year was late winter, the morning sun was in the northern sky and beamed through the windscreen. The sun made me a little drowsy as I watched the traffic buzzing past.

The suggestion of the pleasantness of death, of non-being, crept up on me like a soft shadow. It started with a smell - the smell of fresh loamy dirt infused with the comforting aromas of rotting leaves.  

Mesmerised

This is a character from the first illustrated novel I did. And never sent away. That's alright. It was all practice. 

So I resurrected him for this one and placed him near this river. He is mesmerised by his own reflection..... like The Dog and its Shadow - one of Aesop's Fables. Except this boy has no bone in his mouth - luckily. Boy, that was a hard pose to do. He had to hold it for about three hours.....;)

PS one of the scenes from the book - sort of fits in with the Mesmerised theme. Please click the images for big :D

The Secret of The Dancing Ducks



Psst... want to know a secret?

In my library there's a small blue book which I keep on the shelf reserved for books on novel wrtiting. The book is called 'How To Write A Damn Good novel". It's written by James N. Frey and is a fine book, so much so that I've read it at least seventeen times. On page 67 of Frey's book - a particularly dog eared and well worn page - is a sentence that I find intriguing.

That sentence states that, if at the beginning of a novel (or short story), a shotgun is hanging over the mantle of the hero's house, then, by the end of the novel, that shotgun ought to have been fired.

In other words, we as writers have a silent contract with our readers. That unspoken contract states, that, if you stick with me to the end, then I, in turn, promise to deliver the goods.

That's where "The Secret of the Dancing Ducks" title comes in. The title of the post is my promise to you that, if you read this post, then eventually you too will know The Secret of the Dancing Ducks.

But before I get to the Dancing Ducks and their arcanum, I'd like to touch (talk, converse, gossip, chitchat, shoot the breeze, jaw, chinwag, natter) on some important elements about secrets in general. That's if you let me.

Firstly, have you ever noticed that, as soon as someone mentions that they have secret, then everybody wants to know what that secret is? 

Humans appear to have am inbuilt want-to-know-mechanism that makes us stick our metaphorical noses into places that our feet don't (or won't) fit. To spy on our neighbours we stick our noses between the gaps in paling fences, to see what's going on down the street we poke our noses through windows, and in to see into adjacent rooms our noses sniff out keyholes and the cracks at the edges of half opened doors- all in the name of furthering our knowledge. That's partly why we have done so well as a species. Our inquisitiveness has helped us spread around the earth. Our noses have sprayed our DNA in every dark corner, our curiousity has marked our territories like dogs - and our propensity for being busy bodies has turned the Earth into our own backyard.

(Speaking of dogs, did you know that they have two hundred million nasal olfactory receptors? - sorry, not that I care - I just had a burning desire to tell you that).

Of course, many secrets are meaningless to anyone but the secret's keeper.

But not always. 

If, for example, you watch enough television, read enough books, or see enough movies then you will know that plots are often driven by secrets. In movies and in real life, secrets can sometimes provoke a life or death situation, can sometimes cause a marriage or divorce, and sometimes give us massive headaches.

Oddly enough secrets are like objects. They have old owners - and they can have new owners. It's a given that a secret has less value if its present owner is inclined to blurt it out across the universe. If everyone knows a secret then it becomes an 'unsecret' - so to speak.  The corollary being that, to be really really really valuable, a secret must be known by only the annoited few. And in the case of the best secrets, those annointed few must have coaxed it from its original owner. 

And hence to these illustrations. For they too have their secret - and trust me, these illustrations and their secrets are ultimately related to The Secret of The Dancing Ducks.

 According to the tennets of 'secretness' outlined above, the very fact  that I have announced that these images have a 'secret' should theoretically be enough to stir your interest. And according to the shotgun contract I made with you at the beginning of this post, that secret should be worthwhile learning. And lastly, according to the second tennent of secretness, I must not tell you that secret straight away.

In fact I must make you wait.

But how do I keep my secret from you as long as possible?

So far I have used misdirection (you pretend to look in the other direction while I slip the rabbit from the hat), delaying tactics, blind paths, subplots, thrown metaphorical hand grenades across your path, said "Hey look at that naked person" while pointing you back the way you came - all in the name of making you wait. 

And in this way I can make the secret seem more valuable.

Or can I?

To be honest, at this moment, I have an overriding and burning urge to reveal to you my confidential, covert, cryptic, discreet, disguised, dissembled, dissimulated, furtive, hush-hush, incognito piece of information that makes these illustrations special.

But before I do....

Did you ever read Foucault's Pendulum?

It's by Umberto Eco - that chap who wrote "Name of the Rose".

The essential themes of Foucault's Pendulum involve The Knights Templar,The Rosicrucians, The Gnostics, The Freemasons,The Bavarian Illuminati,The Elders of Zion,The Assassins of Alamut,The Cabalists,The Bogomils,The Cathars and , lastly but not leastly, The Jesuits.

In the beginning of his book Eco promises the answers to the secrets of all these things. Yet in the end we are given nothing but a demonstration of Eco's amazing ability to make us think he is intelligent.  Consequently Foucault's Pendulum was the last book of Eco's that I will ever read. 

A strong statement I know.......

These images?
They were made for Illustration Friday's 'Burning.'

Their original genesis was/were the Witches of Salem.

And that, believe me didn't work. (See album cover at the bottom)

Their second genesis was 'Nero fiddling while Rome burned'.

But Nero fiddling didn't seem quite right.

And after checking my facts it seemed that Nero did nothing of the sort.

And so I put the two together....

Feel free to click for big.
Thanks again for looking.
The final image is just below.

King Canute

One of  my favourite painters has, for a few years, been Edward Hopper. If you are familiar with his work you know that Hopper, for all his greatness, rarely paints a good human figure. They are too pale, or too bent, or too angular or too.... just not right.

But for  all his faults he has succeeded in describing the essential isolation of humans from each other. A typical Hopperesque painting might have two or three figures in an enclosed environment, each facing away from each other, as if the others did not exist.

In his paintings the protagonists are so close - and yet so far.

Though Hopper places his people in American  environments of the 20's and 30's, logic tells us that this inability to bridge this isolation has been part of human nature since we started as a species.

So thank you Hopper for the inspiration.

And of course that leads us directly to our subject - King Canute. (Well it doesn't really, but I will pretend it does.)

If you are like me, you probably don't know that King Canute, also known  as Cnut, won the English throne in 1016, just 50 years before the Norman 'invasion.' Again so close, and yet so far.

With all the things I know about the Normans (funny helmets, arrow in Harold's eye, Hastings, Bayeaux tapestry, the Droit de signeur) I know nought about King Canute - except that, try as he might, he couldn't stop the encroaching tide.

That isn't to say I don't think about Canute quite often.

In fact I do - most often when I am having my morning run along the beach and my shoes are wet from a sudden surging wave that has caught me unawares.  To be honest, usually I've been daydreaming about making up some scary monster that I can scare kids with in my next 'illustration" - rather than taking in 'the moment'. 

So serves me right.

And to be more honest, at six o'clock this morning, this illustration started as an illustration about a bent and gnarled tree. At about half past six, the tree became an island. At a quarter to seven the island became inhabited with Canute, who refusing to leave the seaside, has been caught by the encroaching tide.

Originally Canute was staring out to sea, on his lonesome. But then I realised he needed more.

He needed enigma.  So at ten minutes to eight, just when I should have been ironing my shirt for work,  I introduced the figure on the right - and suddenly had more than a story. I had drama, plot points, metaphor and balance - not just the balance of composition, but the balance between age and youth, gluttony and moderation, stoicism and distress.

And another figure to clothe.

Oh well.

The final image is below  this text. The dark clouds are above the youthful figure, the light is on the King's old and swollen face.

I wonder what it means?

And I wonder which one is me?

Thank-you for looking. Again. Clicking for big in this case give accidental almost "photo-realism". Something I strive against.

Oh well :)

Illustration Friday: "Adrift"

Marty and Christine Geraldson saw Tim  wade out into Lime Creek at about 10.30 pm. The thirteen year old boy was fully dressed except for his shoes. Clutched in his hands were three strange dolls; one dressed as Santa, another as a medieval squire, the last as a well dressed explorer - Stanley Livingstone in turned out later. 

"Oh.... and he had something else ... a small wooden boat," Christine told the girl from the big city newspaper the next day. " Tim waded out into the creek till the water was waist height. We watched him put the toys in the boat and then he just stood there, staring into the darkness, not even shivering, but humming this strange song, like a dirge...  My husband Marty wanted to call the sheriff, but I .... I don't know why but I stopped him. There was always something odd about Tim, something adrift, as we say up at the hospital. But I never thought this would happen...."