Sky

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.  

The Perennial Gosling ...

The Death of the Lewd, Knotty-Spotted, Pinch-Pated Cripple!

Warning: this post is politically incorrect.

Illustration Friday: Chicken - The Death of Gerald Arthur Rottenheimer

Well it's been so long.

Sorry....

I made a new year's resolution you know. 

Apparently carrots make you turn orange. Did you know that?

So I have given them up.

But before you laugh, I have to point out that it's a well known fact that the carotene in carrots makes human skin turn orange.

Of course you have to eat a certain amount of carrots per day.

But I think that even the remotest possibility of having a vegetable make you the laughing stock of the other commuters waiting at your bustop just isn't worth the risk.

You probably might say that people who have a financial need to catch the bus (as opposed to having a private chauffeur) don't matter. But I can tell you that they do. Sometimes it's even a life or death situation.

In my neck of the woods, examples abound a plenty.

Consider, for example, that 'just' last year, just up the road at my 'local', we had a ninety three year old bent backed bus commuter named Gerald Arthur Rottenheimer throw himself under a shopping trolley at the supermarket - all because he had been seen the previous day waiting for a bus in the rain without wearing - yes you guessed it - the correct 'bus mounting boots'.

Now you might never have heard of "bus mounting boots". But that doesn't mean that they are of no importance.

Before you start to giggle in disbelief I would like you to pause for a moment - perhaps just even close your eyes for half a minute and think about poor Gerald Arthur Rottenheimer.

You see Gerald really didn't deserve to go that way.

Even though Gerald didn't smell the best, he always made sure that his slicked down silver grey hair was parted neatly in the middle. And this head hair was immaculate in the way that it matched the thatch of hairs that sprouted from both his ears, and his nasal cavities.

As for clothes he was quite the connosieur (why do I always pick words I can't spell?). Quite often he was to be seen wearing shirts that were only stained at the front - and I only caught him waiting at the bust stop once without his trousers.

But he'd had a good excuse that day... He told me in a whisper that Mrs Crabbit from number five had made a visit to his apartment in the morning and the only way that he could escape from her amorous clutches was to lock himself in the bathroom and clamber out the window (three floors up mind you) shimmy down the drain pipe and dash to the bustop in the hope of sucour - all without his trousers.

So now you have the picture - a ninety year old, bent backed, silver vaselined haired, trouserless man, with a thatch of lush nasal and ear hair, a man who, though he washed monthly, still  didn't smell too good, in a fit of hellish embaressed manic despair, throwing himself under the runaaway shopping trolley of a thrice unwed mother, the shopping trolley itself filled to the brim with used babies' nappies and no  name 500 gram brand cans of spaghetti.

It's not a pleasant way to go, is it?

That's why I gave up carrots.

Because of Gerald.

See you soon, maybe tommorow :)

Oh if you click the images, it gets bigger.

Thank you for looking.

Oh there are some star thingies and a poll. I didn't put them on, they came with the template. I have to figure out how to delete them. Must be in the html code? And sorry my banner is off centre. All the best blogs have off centred banners ;)

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 :)

"The Odyssey Of Captain Limphook."

Well, you know, when things are crappy in our lives, I like to remember the story of Captain "Big Bad" Limphook, who, for eighteen years during the late 1700's, was the Seven Seas most deadly pirate.

Badder than Bluebeard, more rascally then Rottenbreath Mackenzie, and a bigger fibber than "Tall Tales" Long John Silver, Captain "Big Bad" Limphook died from an unfortunate accident in 1797 while shaving in rough seas somewhere south of Tasmania.

He was so famous for being really, really bad that, on the day of his death Lord Byron Macintosh OBE, wrote an ode to him. It was, I believe, called "The Ode To Captain Big Bad Limphook."

Unfortunately it had a few ribald lines, and as there are children present, I cannot present it in it's entirety. In fact, I can only give you the title (which, as you see, I already have.)

I do have, however, some pictures of Captain Limphook himself - with his best mate, Brian the cabin boy. (Brian was a champion boxer from an early age - luckily.)

Thankyou for looking, and be careful of getting sand in your ears if you click for big.

(Thanks for the suggestion on the closeups Justin Segal  Check out Justin's work. He rocks,)