New Story


It's been a while since my last post - moving locations is stressful at the best of times, but separation from the familiar makes the experience a little more intense. It took ten years for me to create the life that I had in Albury, and then change came, and it was time to move back to Brisbane, and start all over again, in a different way, with a different life, with unfamiliar spaces and faces - a lot changes in 20 years, and despite having lived here before, much is now very strange to me. From a small rural town to a big capital city is no small leap in culture either - and there have been instances where I have had to break "new" habits to reestablish old ones. In essence, it's like changing countries again.

But enough about life. Let's talk about art.













In the time that I have been on the move, there have been a lot of changes and developments in the work - still figurative, but leaning towards a more elemental, almost abstract approach. And while graphite has still been the main media of choice, I have been looking to return to painting, and start exploring more of this new world in colour. Colour adds another dimension to any work - sometimes a drawing doesn't feel complete as it is, and that's usually when I make the composition a painting instead - simply because the story requires a different medium. Art is currently reflecting life - in change, in development, learning new things, exploring old territory at the same time - and a sense that the modern world is now catching up with me emotionally and artistically. While I am quite fond of pop art and modernism, I have always considered myself a classicist - in recent days, I've discovered myself leaning towards a more contemporary sensibility, and a blend of the figurative into the multi-dimensional dreamscape of the abstract. There is still form, still recognisable elements of the surreal, but the story is changing - again, a reflection of how my own story is changing.

I'm the big 42 this year - yep, it's my Douglas Adam's year, the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything, and to be brutally honest, I'm doing a lot of introspection, looking back over my history, doing that thing where I work out what the next bit is going to be all about. Life so far has mirrored very few of the values that I was raised to believe in, which is pretty much about the same for us all, that we learn things for a life that we don't actually live - and I've had to make a lot of adjustments for the reality that I am living in. In the short term, the aim is the same - art life, music, culture, create, create, create, and find a value in devoting myself solely to the work - but the big picture is now nothing like anything I imagined before. I'm having to make some serious mental and emotional space to find out what is going to take its place. I have no answers for that yet, nor much of a meaning that equates to 42, but I'm in a personal universe where age has become completely irrelevant - it determines nothing of what is to come, and only life really has any kind of real response to what is possible. Living in the abstract is as much of a condition of artistry as painting it.

Changes are coming. Like little trains on a very big track - and there's a lot of time and space that has to change. There's a lot of work to be done to rearrange websites, and heaps of images to edit, and films and music to make - it's all in the works, and it will all slowly show up in the world that is zeddess. In the meantime, here is some light music, and let us all remember God's last message to mankind;
We apologise for any inconvenience.

Loose Ends video on YouTube