I don’t know if people outside of Australia are seeing this but over the weekend Google have tipped their hat to Australian artist Arthur Boyd to acknowledge his 90th birthday.

My little corner of the world – the Shoalhaven, on the south coast of New South Wales – was a particular source of inspiration for Boyd. He’d often depict the Shoalhaven River in his works. He and his wife Yvonne gifted their property and collection to the Australian people (you can find out more about Bundanon here).

1. What do you do, what specific activities does it involve on a daily basis?

2. How did you get involved with this position and this industry?

3. What sort of training, education and experiences did you need?

4. What do you see in your working future?

After I created this painting I really wanted to put myself in it. After all, I figured, whose rage was this exactly? So I edited myself into the photograph of the painting. Let’s call it mixed media…

I muse over this connection between art and emotion. Art makes us feel, but it can also embody how we (as artists) feel. Sometimes this can represent a long standing emotional response, other times it can be just a stolen moment. The video aboves shows this painting being created in real time. Ordinarily I am not this fluid. Ordinarily I obsess over every little detail. But I was so caught up in how I was feeling that I acted very differently. It was oddly empowering.

This advice seems like a double edged sword – on one hand it seems quite encouraging to know you’ll improve over time, on the other hand it seems depressing that it will take such a long time. But it is true, I’m sure.

It’s the mark of a seasoned artist actually, at least as far as I can ascertain, to not be so hung up on judging their own output. In my experience I am always wary of being judged, I invariably preface posts with my artwork with words like ‘beginner’ or ‘amateur’ in part because I want to give context but also because I’m hoping random passers by will be gentle.

This is a fairly sketchy effort -in several meanings of the word – but I do like it. The way it looks off into the distance appeals to me.

I came to realise that I had a fear that I was actually quite invested in. As much as I hoped it wasn’t true I came to realise that a part of me wanted, perhaps needed, it to be true. Because so many of my life’s decisions had been informed by the expectation that it was true. If this fear wasn’t real – and I had the increasing feeling that it probably wasn’t – I had wasted so much time and energy and emotion for nothing. It was a sobering awakening. And an awakening I made over coffee…

I was sitting in a local cafe, reading Julia Cameron’s The Right To Write. She was writing about honesty and vulnerability, and talking about a book by Kenny Loggins and his wife Julia about their relationship. I couldn’t tell you what it was about that chapter that triggered me but the next thing I knew I was scribbling down a poem and there on the page was the answer to that baffling dilemma that had been bothering me for months.

I won’t share the poem at this point in time. I’ve been invited to submit some material for possible inclusion in a future compilation and I think I will include it in that submission. (In any event I will share it with you at some point in the future.) I guess I am just impressed by the clarity of it all, and how literally months and months of wrestling with things I didn’t quite understand somehow resolved themselves in a short poem.

Right now I’m just feeling frustrated and incompetent. I found myself referring to myself as an ‘amateur visual artist’ and then realised I was an amateur at pretty much everything I do. I’m not sure my skills have value. I’m not sure how much I can really develop them. I suspect the desire to express myself creatively might be another in a long series of pipedreams. [As an aside I can't hear the word 'pipedream' without imaging Super Mario Brothers.]

Life is hard at the moment, hard and confusing. While I am making an effort to paint and draw, I’m being constantly reminded by real world forces that it isn’t a priority. Infact I’m sure many see it as a pointless frivolity. It is hard to make the case for it, actually. Not even making a case for art so much as justifying the time, energy and other resources I devote to doing it. I think sometimes it would be easier to justify if I had some natural ability for it, that the merits of doing it would somehow be more obvious if I was a prodigy of some kind. But I’m not. I’m a beginning artist, a clumsy, hopeless, floundering wannabe.

Anyway it’s late and I’m tired and emotional. I’m hoping I can find a way to make things work and in the meanwhile I guess I just have to accept frustration as a part of life and as fodder for the creation of art. I feel like I haven’t been blogging enough lately and while I’d like to make assurances that this will change the truth is everything is so up in the air that it would be foolish to do so. (The wheels kind of fell off the ‘vlog everyday in July’ bandwagon too.)

[...] your voice is so unique.

I wondered momentarily if that was a compliment or an insult. But in any eventuality it struck me as true, that in a very real sense – whether by accident or design – nobody sings exactly the same way I do.

You Mean The Whole To Me (Demo) by johnlacey

Vocal Stuff by johnlacey

Born To Lose You (Distorted Organ Version) by johnlacey

I went for a walk earlier and Rickie Lee Jones’ Matters came on my iPod.

Doesn’t matter if you’re fat
Wear a helmet or wear a hat
If you’re sorry or if you’re sure
Who you are is who you were
Who you were
Who you were… matters
It matters

There is much talk about about making ‘great’ art and, actually, making ‘great’ art is tough for a number of reasons – not least the anxiety a need to be ‘great’ can often produce. There’s often talk about finding an agent, getting published, signing a deal, finding an audience. These things are all perfectly wonderful in their own right. But what I would like you to do today is really understand that you are unique, that nobody else in the world would’ve created that thing you created in exactly the same way you did. And I think that makes it special and gives it a value we don’t often appreciate.

You know what – cafes have character too. I know this because my favourite local cafe died recently. Actually there’s a cafe there in that same building, but it has new management and it’s become a completely different place. In a very real sense it is no longer the cafe I fell in love with. The sensuous jazz that once filled the building has been replaced with top 40 radio with loud obnoxious songs with jibberish lyrics and clunky screaming ads. (Once you’ve enjoyed your mocha with Sarah Vaughan having to sip it to the sounds of Lady Gaga is no picnic.) The seats and plates and cups have been matched and colour coordinated, red and white everywhere you look, they remind me of the way toadstools are depicted in children’s picture books. The plates used to be white, simple, they used to be a foil for the delicious food that rested on top of them. There are shiny new appliances, and the new owners and staff are genuinely lovely, but I mourn for what I’ve lost.

It’s funny how we tend to be aware of character mostly when it changes. I think of The Last Airbender movie. Admittedly I’ve only seen the trailer, but as I watch it I’m struck by how faithfully they’ve recreated specific action sequences from the animation on which the live action movie is based. But I also notice that the characterisation seems to be a little underwhelming. Saving the world might be the goal for their great adventure, but it’s the characters we become endeared with and that’s mostly because of their quirks. Aang, for all his superpowers, is still a basically a kid and in the animation he has a youthful enthusiasm that we as viewers enjoy, not to mention his sincere but often awkwardly expressed feelings for Katara. His talents as an ‘airbender’ show us what he can do, but how interacts with his friends and enemies show us who he is. This to me is what character is all about.

I think too of a kid’s show my niece enjoyed when she was younger, In The Night Garden. The show is aimed at quite young children, and the characters don’t really speak – at least they don’t use any words adults might recognise. Certain sequences are repeated in every single episode and an unseen narrator introduces the characters and situations. Yet, oddly, you are left with a strange sense of who exactly these characters are – what makes them unique, what they value (a security blanket in the case of Iggle Piggle for example), and how they interact with each other. Creating characters isn’t always easy and to do it without the use of dialogue is particularly impressive.

Cliches are bad, right? Well I want to suggest that personal cliches are useful in establishing character continuity. I want to go further and say your own personal cliches as a writer are the corner posts of what we might call ‘your voice.’ The particular way you like to combine your words, that thing you do with the semicolon. We get to know these characters – and perhaps more importantly – we come to expect specific things about them. Ocassionally they’ll do something to surprise us, perhaps as the plot develops, but mostly they’ll reinforce our understandings about them. The best example I can think of when it comes to personal cliches is The Simpsons. Can you imagine Mr. Burns without thinking about him say, “Release the hounds!”? Can you imagine Homer visiting the Kwik-E-Mart without hearing Apu exclaim, “Thank you! Come again!”?

Can you think of some characters – be they fictional, living, inanimate – that have left an impression on you? Leave me a comment.

I don’t know how cathartic this was in the moment. Certainly I admit in the video that it didn’t make me feel much better at the time. And yet in a moment my art practice went from careful and considered to wild and spontaneous.