23 Tuesday Mar 2021
After Ecce Homo Corona, by Eureka
I think of Christ
Jesus of Nazareth
Shepherd to a flock
convinced of their righteousness
but so often wrong
Dissident, revolutionary
not one to turn any away
yet so many now use his name
to push down the desperate
Christ as an excuse
My cup runneth over
giving to another
will not deplete me
instead build our mana
Just love thy neighbour
even the weird ones
14 Saturday Dec 2019
Posted in Art, My Journey, Writing
≈ Comments Off on End of year schedule madness
Tags
Art, Christmas, ekphrasis, end of year, Ian potter, Inspiration, Muse, National Gallery of Victoria, Poetry, Writing
We’ve entered the realm of Christmas parties and end-of-year celebrations. I had my work party last Wednesday – good chicken, disappointing dessert, my poetry group end-of-year do today and my writing group Christmas party tomorrow!
As we’ve done in the past, the poetry group visited the Ian Potter Centre at the National Gallery of Victoria to view the works in the hope of inspiring something poetic.
I spent some time sitting in front of these three works by Petrina Hicks: Fertile (2010), Into the abyss (2011), and Melo malo (2019).
Then I stood looking at this work, Force (1950-54), by Roger Kemp.
Finally I sat with this impressive sculpture, Hippolyta and the Amazons defeating Theseus (1933), by Jean Broome-Norton.
I wrote the bones of three ekphastic poems today. It’s more poetry than I’ve written in a long time, since I’ve been mainly working on prose. I hope to post some of the poems here on this blog once I get them polished up.
All the artists at the Ian Potter Centre are Australian, and all the works I viewed were in the free collection part of the gallery.
I can highly recommend hanging out in galleries with notebooks and writing whatever comes to mind. Take yourself on a date, or go with friends. You never know what might come of it.
21 Friday Dec 2018
Tags
after ‘The American Dream’, by Brett Whiteley
Detail from ‘The American Dream’, by Brett Whiteley
The brain is a machine
susceptible to corruption
working away on incomplete
data sets
The bird builds a nest
fills it with eggs, potential life
feeds the young on instinct
and hope
Green and yellow earth
flow down to meet the sea
intuition and reason fight
for primacy
The blue ocean continues
insensitive to the logic, the imagination
of the painter who tries
to capture it
The red light of alarm, a dream
we wake from sweating
trying to make sense of the message
sent from the void
The coming storm, the enticing nude
the death of intellect as we
exchange emotion for distraction
and stop thinking.
15 Saturday Dec 2018
Posted in Art, My Journey, Writing
Tags
Brett Whiteley, ekphrasis, end of year, George Baldessin, Inspiration, National Gallery of Victoria, New Years Resolutions, novel, Poetry, summer, Writing
Today I attended the end of year gathering with my poetry group. We get together in an inspiring place, today it was the National Gallery of Victoria at Federation Square, and we write, if we’re inspired, or sit and ponder, if we’re not inspired. Then we have lunch.
I went through the George Baldessin and Brett Whiteley exhibition. I’ve always like Whiteley’s work; it speaks to be somehow. I didn’t care for Baldessin. I didn’t actively dislike his work, but I didn’t like it either. Except for these pears.
George Baldessin sculpture in the foreground, Brett Whiteley painting in the background.
I wrote an ekphrastic poem, while looking at Whiteley’s ‘The American Dream’ mural. I’ll post it next week after I’ve had a chance to revise it.
For now I’m just going to leave you with this teaser: I’m planning to self publish my second novel in February. The exact date is still TBC as I have a lot of work to do to get it ready, but I’ll have a cover to show you in the next few weeks and then I’ll be able to announce the release date.
It’s a relatively short novel, around 50k words. I’m feeling good about it, which is a bit of a weird feeling for me; most of the time I don’t think very highly of my work.
I’ve also started thinking about my New Year’s goals. Each year I’ve written myself a to-do list and I sometimes get stuff done, and sometimes don’t. I’ll be posting a new list and a wrap up of last year in January. I feel like I’ve come quite a long way recently and I’m sure I have a lot of room to grow and develop too. I’m looking forward to it.
13 Wednesday Apr 2016
For day 13 of NaPoWriMo I responded to a drawing done of me last night at the student union at the University of Melbourne.
