Night

I'm halfway through a week of annual leave. Sewing is the order of the day, mainly because it's so easy for me to not think while I do it. Because this break was organised only about a week ago and because two of my team are also on leave, I'm having to show up for meetings every day (I'm writing in 2020 and of course "show up" therefore means Zoom), and resenting those interruptions slightly but only slightly. I didn't make a parade of this by any means but in all the meetings so far I've gone on with my projects. I've sat with things in my lap and handsewed hems etc. The culture of having camera and mic on is so strong in my workplace that it's commented on at length if someone turns theirs off. When the covid-positive colleague showed up to a meeting last week they turned on their camera and sick as a dog they looked too. I'm thinking about cutting out a shirt during the OHS committee meeting tomorrow.

We're two weeks into this state of disaster period of severe and destructive restrictions, with at least three times as long again still to go, then if we are very lucky we may be in a position to return to some of the socially and economically necessary activities, although never in the same easy way as before. The severity and destructiveness of what's happening is unavoidable - the situation we were in and indeed are very much in still meant it was the only possible course of action. It's crushing though. Much as I continue mostly to do okay at regulating my days - few wobbles, some tears, but always with perspective - in the back of my mind sits a blurry mental image that's a sort of symbol of what's happening to the city. It's blurry but it's something along the lines of a tearing, convulsive catastrophic medical intervention - a bit Ballardian, but with that intense private nightmarishness of the Ballardian experience bursted out and settling across the city like a miasma cupped and pressing down on us by a vast unseen dome, pressing out the air and leaving crushed wreckage standing where buildings full of people used to be. Maybe more Goya than Ballard. Oh, spoilt for choices! I say this to myself so often that it must be a general truism by now: modernism finally makes sense. When we come out of this, shattered, atrophied, blinking, we'll have to re-learn everything. There's a reckoning and a reassessment coming for me, I know. But for now, to think only of the present is all that is possible.

Two weeks into this deep grind, maybe six weeks into the downward slide after we thought we'd seen it off. It's hard to keep track of time. One of Lenny's classroom teachers has the virus - Len hasn't been near the school since June, so I'm not worried on that account, but it's horrible just the same. My last day working day before covid was 18 March, five months ago. 

I've finished seven pencil drawings since late April. They should maybe not be on the wall, as pencil is not very light resistant, but to do anything else with them would be to open unwelcome and unanswerable internal questions about what happens next, so there they stay. I do look at them. 

This one is different to the others. I generally prefer to use oilier pencils as they can be worked over and into each other like glazes, but when I picked up the pencils again I only had about 50 Derwents and maybe 15 really good Faber-Castell artist pencils, its not enough colours, and I considered forking out for the full set of about 120 Derwent studio pencils, I even went to the local art supplies shop mentally ready to do it, but they don't carry them as stock. I got distracted and bought a handful of Prismacolor pencils, which come in beautiful subtle colours, but as I soon found out, just don't mix with oily pencils. So I thought Well I'll see what these are like if I just go with what they can do instead of fighting their natural qualities. This drawing is also the only one I started and finished in a single sitting. 

In the spirit of a typically dysfunctional VCA studio crit I look at this drawing and at the photograph I worked from, and in front of everyone I aggressively ask myself Why have you made a picture that is the same as that other picture? Is it to show us how well you can copy things? We didn't let you in here so you could copy things.  

Yeah, I prefer the photo. I enjoyed making the drawing but I couldn't do in it what I'm always trying to do, namely take out the light but replace it with colour instead of darkness. I'm not sure whether to worry or care about this or not. Like really, I don't know. With writing, cooking, sewing, education - any kind of generative work - the spirit I admire most in others and try to emulate, is the spirit of setting out and trying hard to achieve an outcome that's been thought about and envisioned, but then accepting and working with what actually happens in the making.

I've got over a hundred photos like this one, taken on the nearby oval in the hours before 8pm curfew. Setting aside the getting to know the pencils bit, which is important but not everything by any means, what I was looking for in this drawing is the same thing I've often looked for walking alone in the artificial twilight of floodlit city parks and streets. Melbourne invites this sort of attention, I'd venture to say, throwing this out there as a spontaneous idea but one I'd enjoy exploring more and maybe defending, I'm not wedded to it, it would all depend on how that conversation developed. Now that walking out from one's home, alone and mute, as night falls is all that there is, the other things one silently pursues across one's life recede or slide away and it's just this. Can you find something in a drawing if you can't even say what it is? I think so, maybe. The important and hard thing is to not persuade yourself that you won't find what you're looking for.