MAY

Mr Cheeky the frill necked lizard lives in our garden and it is a delight to see him scampering about doing all sorts of lizard business. At night fruit bats squabble and during the day cockatoos screech above us while I patienty wait for paw paw (papaya) fruit to grow larger.  Finally the un-humid dry season has arrived in Broome. That means superb weather for the next five months.  Yippee! is the correct response right here especially after six months of BIG heat and BIG humidity. The town is very quiet now due to travel restrictions nationally and internationally so no tourists in a tourist town. This will be a very complicated year for many.​

I continue my normal business of making art even if all my exhibitions are cancelled, galleries are closed, art lovers busy with complicated lives, social events shut down and strict social distancing behaviour now all make physical proximity to tactile art not possible. Artists are rather adaptable and most are very familiar with an income graph that looks like a roller-coaster or often sadly a dead flat-lined  horizon line but we all keep at it for a thousand assorted reasons. Most of those reasons for making art are very positive so in the studio I be. Being positive… most of the time.
INSECT SKYSCRAPERS, 4000 YEAR OLD TREES AND A MINI BAR … is an online exhibition presenting new mixed media works, works on paper and a few pearl shells from my tropical studio in semi lockdown. Please visit this link for a peek.                                                                         

vimeo.com/414615464

2020 has so far gone in a manner that has been a little unexpected but the possibility of a pandemic sweeping the planet was actually always on the cards and certainly those in the medical world were very much expecting such an event. Covid19 has caused total havoc and death for some and for all it has caused pain or fear or stress. Some nations have fared and/or prepared better than others and I must say that the concept of nations in itself has not really helped this battle against the virus. In a world that operates on so many trans-national ways utilising massive and interconnected global networks and connections it seems simply old fashioned to wave any emotive national flags that represent a chunk of land recently and artificially constructed due to wars, royal marriages, colonisation events, drunk cartographers, business deals or religious fables. Humanity plods along and our success at certain things is indeed astronomical but these gains are balanced out sadly by a whole mess of horrid and insane dumb-fuckery. 

All of us are making it up as we go forward and it is all work in progress.  I can only hope for progress but when I observe some individuals who proudly display greed, stupidity and zero empathy then I am not too concerned if a large asteroid one day erases all our species from existence. “So it goes” as Kurt Vonnegut said. Back to the drawing board Universe and perhaps evolve a better life form. A friendly life-form with good survival skills that is not scared of others, one with extra portions of empathy, intelligence and ample humour which is of course a favourite and highly under-rated human trait. 
I can imagine two aliens closely observing Earth while sitting at a bar many light years from here drinking some flouro-red toxic liquid while laughing and screaming to each other silly crude interstellar xenophobic jokes –

“knock knock? who there? 9 billion humans… !”                                                                    
“what’s the difference between a human and a …”                                                                
“how many humans does it take to change a light bulb ?…”                                                  
“why did the human cross the road ?...”                                                                                  
“two humans walk into a bar…”
Cheers to all !