The federal election is over. The sun shone across autumn blue sky as our new Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese and our new foreign Minister, the honourable Penny Wong flew to Tokyo to talk about the Pacific region, climate change and our relations towards the world. Reform of government is underway by a Labor government, to be fully sworn in a day or two with assistance from a progressive cross bench. Winter has now hit and the hard work starts to sort the mess left by Scott and his gang. We watch the new opposition arrange the deckchairs, sift through their miserable mean tropes, and elect Mr Dutton who was called “Boofhead” after his continual trashing of parliamentary procedures during question time. The Lucky country strides on. The household is now Scott free and the country regained …for now.
I made a Solomon’s choice with a drawing after several attempts to salvage it. It is one of those drawings not tossed out or painted over. It is one of those drawings that calls out, ” Keep me …I can still work”, that ends up on the bottom shelves kept for studio orphans.
I planned to rework the background, clean up some sloppy lifework, add some interest to the foreground and draw feral cats along the horizon line. I soon realised I was still left with a contorted, large, dancing cat, caught somewhere between cutesy and brute graphik, even after adding the feral cats. It all felt like a lot of effort. So, the Solomon’s choice. Dancing cat back in the Orphan drawer and the remaining bits back on the studio bench.
So starts a new chase to capture the 1975 memory of the colonies of feral cats hiding in the scrub by the Sandover Highway. Other drawings, languishing in the orphan stack, may find their way into the work because they add to the visual story, offering clues of the drawing’s underlying intent of capturing memory and meaning.
Time will tell if the choice was right.What is done , is done and my indecision resolved. And I still have to clean up the background, sort the edges and make the foreground live. But then the original drawing was 3 decades old, and the new one, or is it now two, are only a day old, one part, in pieces, is on the bench and the other placed in the bottom drawer waiting its fate…I see a big cat but also a lot of texture and pattern. Snip, snip, snip?
