Faces, Flowers and Photographs, pt. 1

First things first. The NDIS business is at a point where I have begun to hunt through my stashes of documents for anything that might fit their criteria. After  being crippled since 1980 they ask me for recent paperwork. Once you get the reports about PTSD, skeletal trauma from accidents and memory problems and serious illness you enter a state of maintenance for most things. That means people are not writing constant reports about problems that are well covered. That is a problem which I am really angry about. What planet do they come from that they are putting me through this as though there is some need for it. Bastards!.

dsc_0247-strelitziaAfter several months of avoiding any art with color I came back to making a work on Strelitzia. The act of painting had stopped partly because it is so difficult to paint in this awkward space and partly because the earlier works had been damaged when the shelves fell on them. It added another level to that loss that pervades everything and I couldn’t face it. To be honest, I was surprised that this one squeezed itself out of my moth-eaten mind.

It was intended as under-painting for an acrylic work. Some of the cheaper canvases from the discount stores are not too bad if you choose carefully although for the purposes of serious paintings needing archival storage most are rubbish. Riot art has canvass for people who are serious about their work. This one is cotton and seems strong though. The plant is chalk pastel and if I had thought about it I might have made the chalk pastel the finished work. It is a bit wobbly however and loses some impact there.

The gaping holes in my memory had quite an influence on this work. Firstly I forgot how the pastels work on acrylic used this way. The mediums underneath the chalk were discovered by experimenting with ways of using it to hold the pigment. I forgot that and while the methods discovered in those processes were used I forgot how effective the chalk was when used over them.

When the drawing took form and looked beautiful enough to be the main work it had to be fixed or it would simply fall off. I could not remember what, if anything, I had discovered about fixing chalk to a painted surface. There are commercial solutions. Hairspray is one suggested on Google but for some reason a very wet mix of binding medium and water through a spray bottle was what I went with. This was more likely a method that was forced on me by the difficulty I have finding money and transport to get things. I notice that Ebay deliveries have gone from taking about a week to being months or not at all.

I made the mix. Sprayed it and it wiped the pigment off the canvas leaving just the paint. There are reasons we have memories I guess.

It isnt a total loss. Even had the fixing been effective I would have used slashes of paint on the flower and leaves to make the effect more complex. I am avoiding it for now though. I want to use the lower plane of color provided by the chalk and cannot figure it out. That and I am just too ill to make myself do much

Good grief. I just found myself slumped over the desk staring at the screen. I think I was there for an hour. My joints froze up and I am going to leave this for a while and take a pill and sleep. I went out yesterday, took the camera and a new lens on the mobility scooter and managed to spend about ten minutes on my feet taking photographs. I hope this is making sense. I didn’t know how exhausted I was. I did know I was beyond doing anything that meant I wasn’t sitting. It took a huge act of will power to make breakfast and I haven’t found the energy to dress yet. Ill be back. I record these moments because with my memory time just passes into mist at either end. I wonder if that is bad? And I forgot what I was doing and published before I was halfway through. Glad I was editing as it went along. I also want to present a journal that has evidence of the amount of my day that is already spent on considering and coping with pain and illness. I know it gets a bit tedious. Hopefully the stories have enough detail to interest you anyway. I try to avoid coming in here just to reflect on a bad day. This is a good day.

I am back. But no. After a short sleep my body has slipped into that gentle place where it feels itself healing and wants more. The energy is used by the process and my waking mind is lethargic. I will sleep a little longer. Some people will envy me this and it does feel very nice at this point. After thirty years of having nothing that is not intruded on by the needs of a damaged body the long spaces of healing and being unwell are interminable and stretch quite simple tasks into frustrating marathons.

There is a creche of several magpie babies landed right at my back door and warbling away. None of us use the grassy areas behind the apartments and in the gardens along the fence are fruit bats and scrub turkeys. There are even rare frogs. The magpies feel safe enough to set their creche there during the day. The warbling is very lovely and it adds something I cannot define to lift my spirits.

This can go into a second page. There is no way I can do more today.

It has taken me two days to get back into here and to be honest the only reason I did that is because I was awake all night again and have given up trying to sleep.

Last night a friend’s partner left a very sad message on Facebook and then went off the grid. People thought he had suicided. The message was in the form of a video and when I saw it he looked so much my brother in the time he was scared for his life before his suicide that I cried like a baby. I guess all this death is breaking me. I dont even know the guy myself but I spent the night in a terrible vigil until one of my friend’s adult girls reassured me he was at his friend’s place and safe. dsc_0306thing

I went to the doctor trying to get information and reports together to give to National Disability Scheme so I don’t get removed from the support services I depend on. A worker took me over there. I needed to get some groceries on the way back but he was on a schedule and couldn’t spare me any time so I had to go out a second time and ride six kilometers on my mobility scooter including a walk around several stores in a big mall. After that I spent the entire afternoon in this chair too exhausted to do much more than make a few cups of coffee. heat a meal and stare into space. I don’t understand. I did everything I could to make sure the evidence of illness and injury was with my carers and they refuse to help with compiling anything. My doctor has just a few moments to help me and it seems that we need hours of research. Does no one know I am a desperately ill man with serious heart disease and that fights a broken body to do simple tasks? It is like I am carry the whole freaking world on my shoulders on my own. It hurts and I am scared now,

I need to compile the reports I have found. I need to scan the part of the report the doctor wrote out. The reports from previous doctors I have managed to find need to be scanned so I have to move furniture about so I can get at the scanner. That data needs to be run through optical character-recognition software, redacted and checked for text mistakes and then the whole package has to be converted to a PDF file and emailed to the NDIS. The alternative is simply to change the last part to printing the PDF out and then another six kilometers on the mobility scooter to the Bateau Bay Village where the post office is to mail it. I cannot face it at the moment. I am  falling apart just typing this.

I also have to prepare a letter to a person at the new amalgamated council asking for access via a boom gate to the nearby asset protection zone so I can get onto the little path up there and get photographs safely with that mobility scooter as a control point/ I need to sleep very urgently but I am so bummed out by all the dying and the almost dying and the threat of the NDIS chucking everyone who has not the right paperwork out of their care packages and the pain and the isolation. I think I am breaking and I am very very scared. My heart is gonna kill me if I dont get a better level of emotional and physical comfort than this. I have serious angina. Eventually there will just be another pain and I will go down like a head shot bullock. Nobody expects me to live long and yet I seem to have to live on a treadmill for the bureaucrats and I am sick of editing this bloody story. The more tired and stressed I get the worse my memory gets and the harder it gets to avoid mistakes. The spelling of the word bureaucrat wasnt even close to looking like that when I first did it. I cannot tell if I am close to babbling incoherently although I am sure I have needed the constant edits done in this section.

Image of a cross hung on a tree by children on the Dog Skat Ridge

Image of a cross hung on a tree by children on the Dog Skat Ridge

Researched a Tamron SP AF 60mm f/2 Dill Macro 1:1 Lens for the camera in the hope it would assist me to get ore bug photos. I managed to spend ten minutes on my feet up on the Dog Skat Ridge two days back. I managed to get thirty close-up photographs of spiders and bugs and hover bees with only one that seems to have worked. It is that starry thing above right. I dont know what it is although I am sure I did capture an image like it before my memory is shakey. It looks very nice and if it wasnt the only one that worked I would be delighted. Portraits worked out a little soft but nice and the cross to the left above was about 50 or 60mm and worked very well. It is many times larger than the bugs on the waste ground up there

The fact is that I can barely stand and one arm barely works so taking a photo on the move on broken ground involves me hovering unsteadily. I hold the camera in one hand and struggle to keep it steady while the other less useful hand hook branches out of the way or just waves. The little Pixma bridging camera had a close-up lens attached and that gave it a better depth of field and faster auto focus by a considerable amount. I could have expected most of the images I attempted to have been useful even if if they were not great. I am not sure the new Fujis were as good on the super macro as the older ones though. The potential is there. I did research which lens to get for several months and everyone did suggest this one needed a tripod to do bugs and also that the auto focus would hunt. It certainly did that. I tried manual focus for the fist time. If I can free my left hand and get easy camera positions I would feel confident with manual focus but it means more study and I hurt. I dont want to end up dying in front of a television while all the things I love pass by outside but the effort to stay connected and do it is getting huge. I should say that this is the most camera I have ever owned and it is a thing of beauty that I love to hear working and use. A beautiful thjing even if it costs me a lot of pain to get there and use it. It is a lot heavier than the Fujifilm one which makes it really a struggle to keep steady as well.

Cupboard, bed light box

Cupboard, bed light box

Father and Daughter. ( At the bottom of the page.) Mick and Gemma (Jemma?) Pigma pens on Artistico and Fabriano 200gsm paper at 30 x 40cm in size.  This image took over a month to set up and draw. It tested me. I would work until it was too difficult to sit and too painful to hold the pen then I would cover it with a towel because it could not free it of the pain it was causing me and did not want to look on it until I felt better. It is too soon yet. All that pain colludes to make me hate the work so I have simply shelved it in the storage book and forgotten it. The pain in my hands from that did not help hold the camera at all. It is passing. The memory will pass and I will be able to look at it maybe. I am still unhappy that I have no way to get all this work to show although I have been talking to galleries I am far from having the money to get anything framed or delivered to them so it still sucks that. I dont know if I can take on any more. I am totally wrecked and the things I do are just tiny clumps of effort in a huge passing parade of time that races through my fingers while I fight all the handicaps.

Finally. I am trying to build a photo booth for the photographs needed to make high quality ciglee prints. I cannot possibly afford to get the studios to photograph them. I have to do it here with this gear. I have a very crystal lens. The thing is to get the light on the image and get the camera stable at the right distance etc etc etc,

For the moment I have obtained some lights to put on this old bed base made into a cupboard. (Above right)  I am getting confused. I thought I had a handle on it but it just sits there with wiring and lights and globes and switches laying about. Too much for me right now. See image above right.

dsc_0252-father-and-daughter

Father and Daughter (faces)

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