NOVEMBER

It seems that the wet season is about to return as the humidity is now climbing slowly.  Things begin to get moist once the water vapour in the air reaches above 82.11% and other bits become very sloppy especially the grey matter inside my cranium. I often imagine my brain as a natural quagmire of stimulus, memories, views, experiences and hopes and if one dives deeper there will be a zone full of shape-less, incomprehensible and unnamable stuff bobbing about in the dank goo colliding into each other.  Miraculously my brain seems to have worked fairly well given its  obvious limitations.
​I currently drip sweat onto a new series of mixed media works. I must remember to list human sweat as one of the mediums I use often here in the tropics. Drip, drip, drop, drop, drip, drip…. I try to concentrate on combining all forms of liquid colour as well as shapes, lines and conceptual lumps into little works of art. Art truely is a ridiculous from of behaviour but it really does work sometimes. It wanders off into silliness at times but with the potential of genius if one is lucky so it keeps me investigating the breadth of its utilisation.

It is my experience that in climates close to the equator things once easy to comprehend or navigate become vague, sticky and maze-like. It is difficult for me to play chess in the tropics, to perform complicated mathematical equations and occasionally to talk proper like yahknow… ppphh…eewww pingooo…
I actually find mathematical activity impossible anywhere anytime. Of course chess and mathematics do happen under intense sun and coconut palm trees but when I find puddles of sweat below me that grow to the size of small lakes I can almost see my neurones diving into the deep end and drowning in my own personal salty body of water. 
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When did I start making art I wonder? At what age? I recently found a drawing scribbled by myself in a tiny notebook. It was from 1963 or 1964 which puts me at 3 or 4 years of age. This pencil squiggle looks half house-like and half walking person. Was I confused even back then about stability and mobility? Stationary things should not move normally. Perhaps it was a depiction of a caravan or a house on stilts but I don’t think there were any homes constructed that way in Nunawading where I grew up.  Did I see a caravan in the street cruise by? Did a large person the size of a house come to visit? Who knows? Here is the image which I shall call -
​MOBILE-HOME. 1963/4.  (90 mm x 65 mm. HB pencil on paper.)

Mobility has been made very difficult or impossible and even illegal in a huge number of places across the planet. Many friends are limited in terms of travel these days. Some unable to visit the next suburb and others contemplating international travel have had to shelve such plans. Passenger planes flapping through the air have dropped by half and half of all those planes have been grounded. Some major airports have zero passengers these days and I just read that passenger traffic across the world is down by 95% ! Quite astounding figures. My passport will not be used for awhile is my guess. Borders have become more hard core and problematic for the average traveller these days. Borders were bound to get more strict in the coming years as the population climbs up to 9 billion, inequality climbs upwards to horrid levels and resources dwindle to horrid levels the other way.  Higher fences shall appear on many frontiers and bureaucratic paperwork to enable legal border crossings will become just as high as those fences. Borders will get so much more boring, bamboozling and militarised. Globalisation makes no sense with borders but I am just a romantic artist that has a little hope in the totally mad experiment called humanity. All those belonging to the Humanity club have always and still do today waiver between crazy and logical. What an adventure for us all on this speck of dust spinning about a slightly larger speck of sparkling dust. 
Speaking of the sun. Its 41 C in the studio now so it is time to watch a waterfall cascade down my chest and onto some new works on paper.    A series titled -  BORDERING ON LANDSCAPE.