Weblight Studio

Pencil doodle, the Olympian

Both days of the weekend have been much the same. Any attempt to get into the mental art-space ends up with the urge to sleep. It took a few hours this morning to find the energy to drift over to the supermarket and grab some groceries. It was a slow, lethargic, effort. My mind seems like a big bag of feathers rather than a tuned device for thinking. It is not a bad thing. The last few months have been savage on the emotions and exhausting generally. There has not been a chance to rest without disturbance. The air seems cleaner and I feel very relaxed. It can’t last long I suppose but for now the idea of resting rather than worrying is attractive so I will go with that.

Illustration, Copic pens on bleed proof paper 45x28cm

Like the stipple based drawings elsewhere throughout the blog the image to the left is an illustration of the type normally provided by graphic artist’s for use in magazines before computers took over image making. Both of my main lecturers at the Bachelor of Fine Art would agree that these works were not art. They would have been wrong. You only have to look at the work of Lichtenstein or Warhol to see where the divide is bridged. The various doodles throughout the blog are also Art. The blog is Art! I am an artist and this is one part of the output of my creative efforts and twenty years of study and research. It is Art and Art with a capitol ‘A’ and has the potential to bear all of the pretension and bullshit that surrounds the elitist endeavours. Those elitist identifiers and expectations are put there by others. Slogging along in the stink of my own feet and farts in a fog of depression and pain I can safely say that pretensions are small things here.

The image to the left was done during the Graphic Arts Certificate Course at Hunter Institute under the amazing teaching of one Lorrae Obrien. She was a very fine teacher and I would have happily studied with her and the other instructors in that course for years. They had a lot to give and I could see the niche where it could be put to work.

My own attempts to put an exhibition of various works using ink on paper has stalled and probably sunk for now. The frames have gone from approximately fifty dollars  to almost seventy in just a few months. The framers do not seem to be able to follow instructions regarding the sizes and white space I want around the drawings. I think I have had nine? done and the white space and sizes range all over the place. To get to the full exhibition there would be several types of ink drawing including the dozen stippled drawings I have in hand now plus almost twenty other ink architectural images. I would have to be able to be able to trust the framers to understand my instructions the first time as I am often ill and having to battle to get things done is beyond me. I cannot see how to overcome those problems while I am limited as I am.

The trouble with the estate agents has cost all my saved cash after the few frames I have had done. When I am forced out of this apartment the work I have done regarding buildings in Budgewoi will be unsaleable unless I can get a place in Budgewoi and there is nothing but hovels in my price range if there is anything.That money may be considered lost as is the goodwill and the advantage of being established and locally known.

Bird of Paradise Flower

There is an 80 x 130 cm canvas on a stretcher sitting about at the moment. Actually there is one in the garage half-built as well but I favour the first. The one in the house is a used canvas with deep paint and medium. It is well-worked deep acrylic  with complex surface colours and textures. It was an attempt to create a ground surface reminiscent of a forest floor with all the leaves and tiny grasses but it failed. I may work some small Bird of Paradise Flower drawings in pastels or water colour pencils and see if I can get an image that will translate to a palette knife work on that canvas. A lot of people think the Monstera image done some months back was a failure but I find the complex under-surface and the coarse palette knife work to be beautiful.

You cannot see the surface structure here but that is the painting I am describing 1.3m x .8

caricature of Andre Brodyk (known as Faux Pas)

The picture is a caricature of one of the lecturers in the first year of the Bachelor of Fine Arts course at Ourimbah Campus of Newcastle University. Because it was the first year of the course and the first course of its type Andre had been involved in he was as touchy as a hat full of bull-ants. When he stood in front of the class and said, “Just consider me one of the gang.” everyone was placed in the unenviable position of having a person who could not take criticism asking for it.

We had an appointment to brief our legal team today.

There was a phone call a while ago telling me that the Police had not yet delivered their brief. As soon as I hung up I looked up the address for the legal office and called them back. Before the first Tribunal hearing the gang at Ray White called Mum and told her the hearing was on another date at another time than it actually was. It is an old ploy used by shonky lawyers to get through cases without much effort. The person they have rung never has a record of the call and the court or tribunal does not listen to accusations without evidence so the case is over before it begins because that person is still on their way to a later date that will never occur. Mum was upset that she had been flagged as a weak link and treated so disrespectfully. Anyway, this time I double checked and the office verified the situation.

Everybody seems reasonably pleased with the changes to schedule. I needed to polish the footage. I am still not comfortable with handling the software. The care providers can catch up on paperwork and someone is off to do some fishing. Apparently the Bream are running off the beaches. I am jealous. My body hurts too much to be marching it up and down beaches looking for washes and gullies behind the surf. Actually first order of the day is to sleep another few hours with some loud music so I cannot be disturbed. I am TIRED and still have those niggling chest pains.

Carly from Artist's World Toukley showing their excellent framing

I suspect I should not be doing a post right now. I have done a bit much today and there is something that feels like a fist under my ribs.

The morning started with a little protest up the street at Budgewoi. I took whatever I had to make a booth and let as many people as possible know what was happening. I didn’t realise it was Salvation Army Week and they thought my little protest booth was quite funny as it was made up of bits and bobs from about the house and delivered to the site by mobility scooter.

Artist’s World had finally finished the framing of the drawings and they look great on the wall at the shop. I was hoping to get a whole exhibition of this style of work framed up but the prices have gone up by about fifty percent since I started getting them framed and there seems to be a problem making them the size I want. I had more than a dozen new works plus some much larger works.  Perhaps I can find a sponsor. With my health on a fast decline perhaps my Mum can find a sponsor. I am almost out of time.

I have them stored in sleeves and they can stay that way for a while.

ink doodle, sable brush

Ray White Budgewoi had an application before the Consumer Trader and Tenancy Tribunal to have me evicted immediately back in March and again in April if I remember correctly. They dropped that application during a hearing back at the end of April. They have suggested the application was dropped as a kindness to me. There is no more laughable suggestion. When the application was made it was made under their suggestion that I was a threat and danger. The Tribunal seems to have recognised that although I am big I am too ill and handicapped to be the danger the Ray White guys suggested I was. The Tribunal adjourned the hearing to see what happened in the interim. No violence occurred and no threat of violence was made. At the last moment, and certain of defeat, Wendy Mcleod of Ray White dropped the action.

I have an application to see the termination of my residence and the order to move by the 30th May as a retaliation to my stand for my rights on chemical exposure and the photography of my personal goods. There is plenty of evidence and I have the story in posts further back.

During the last Tribunal hearing Ray White were given the idea that their termination would probably be seen as retaliatory when the case came back to a hearing in June. They were also informed that if they made another termination order some time in the future of that day it would be difficult for me to link it to the retaliatory behaviour and they could evict me in peace. On returning to their office they dropped the termination I was fighting and generated another termination demanding I leave by August 1st. They then made an order demanding I give them access to the house for a “regular Inspection” although it was not regular. In the regular inspection they check both apartments at the same time and they didn’t. The inspections are normally held six months apart and this one was months early. They also generated a thing called a Notice of Breach claiming that I was running a business from the property without permission. All this was simple and plain harassment!

With my health declining to the point of spending time in emergency wards in hospital and many visits to specialists coming up I have asked for an extension of the time to provide evidence to the participants of the hearings. Evidence due on the 14th of this month but a deadline which I could not possible meet especially with the changing status of the Ray White stance. Ray White sent me a letter claiming they had dropped the eviction as well as the Notice of Breach and suggesting they had done it out of concern for my health. They did not inform the Tribunal that they had dropped the eviction notice thus leaving open the door to go back to the Tribunal and claim a win if I believed their letter and did no more on that case.

Today I can sit on my butt. The video footage is done and the files are all printed and saved. We backed up the computer and all the server based files last night. I feel really sick so I might sleep for the morning. Oh yeah, my t-shirt arrived. Yay.

More mail and email and phone calls came with appointments for more tests. Everyone is seeing me fairly quickly although I wish it was while all that soft-tissue damage was still causing me grief.

Battle Spider with saddle

A support worker took me all the way over to Kanwal Radiology and Nuclear Medicine Centre for some ultra-sound scans on my neck. I forgot the bloody referral didn’t I! The staff and the technician were really great about about helping us. We drove all the way back home but the technician had lunch early so there would still be a slot when I arrived with the paperwork. I think that is nice!

The morning was spent on the phone to the Tribunal. The next big thing is to go and get legal advice from the legal support centre (I think that is the name) I called in a favour and had some investigations done but none of that is back yet.

Some of the memory cards for the mini-cams have finally turned up. The instructions were translated from the Chinese by aliens I think. I will work it out without instructions. I am not a hundred percent certain these little things are much good yet. Time will tell.

Letters of support are flooding in. I cannot tell all my friends how much I appreciate your support. With all the illness and stuff this has been grim at times.

I have to get up the bank and get some money moving about to different places and get some people paid but I am so tired. The whole face tingling thing is happening again and I am becoming prone to bouts of confusion far more often! My new t-shirts arrived. I wrote about them some entries back. Zazzle did a great job on the prints and I like the American ‘Hanes’ brand.

Pampered myself with some Pickled Onion style Mersey Valley cheese. My mouth waters just writing about it.