Diary Of An Artist In A New World

I Love How The Rain Turns The City Into Visual Art

 

 The walk from the studio down William Street to the city CBD is one I love at any time, but I especially love it in the rain. Tonight the rain was teeming down. There was no wind, and the rain was the sort of warmish rain that is the best. The rain was streaming past the streetlights. That is a special delight seeing the rainwater turned into a stream of cascading jewels as if it is a sparkling carnival necklace draped around the lights. 

As I walked past the Cathedral the bells were peeling and that itself gained a surreal quality as deep chimes of the big bells danced it time with the rhythmic plittering and plattering of rain in the street. Even the cars join into the chorus as the normal car sounds are modified by the swishes and sloshes of the wheels in the river of water on the road surface.

 

 

 

Ultimately, however, the greatest joy is the colors and the lights reflected from the sidewalks and street surfaces that turn the normal street view into a work of impressionistic art. Everything looks so different. The night rain increases the contrasts so there are more darks and grays so that the colors of tail lights and traffic lights increase in intensity and then are doubled as reflections mirror an up world with a matching down world.

I hear people complain about the rain and I wonder why. Can they not see the mysterious poetry that envelops the skyscrapers in the rain, the change that overtakes them as their tops disappear into the low cloud and they become like trunks of trees in a gray forest holding the sky up. Do they not see the softening of the world that occurs like some giant Pissarro had taken his paint brush to the city.

I think it is beautiful and I love rain so much I wish it rained like this often enough to satisfy the poet in my heart. Where I grew up in North Queensland in the rainforest near Ravenshoe it rained on average 120 days a year. That is one day in three and I never tired of the misty beauty that would come into the mountains and valleys and all the inevitable results like all the waterfalls, and the emerald green color of the grass and the way everything always had a luxuriant feeling of growth. Rain in the city has a different feel to in the rainforest and is much more about light and colors. It is a creator of a different kind of magic, and I love it just as much or more. 

It Takes A Long Time To Get Back To Normal

I don't think anyone is the same after something like the loss of their father. When he died I was stunned. It felt like I had been hit over the head with a piece of 4x2 timber. That shock takes a long time to subside and probably never goes away completely. I still think of Don as the man with all the advice. His stories are alive in me and I find myself retelling things he said and did as if he was still around. Is it wrong or strange to mention him as if he is still here and use the present tense? It is not as if I cannot let him go, it is more that the emotion in the first couple of years is still raw and the wound still healing and I like to protect his memory as something hugely valuable that will always loom large in my heart. He didn't want to die, and I didn't want to loose him but dreadful as this part of life is, it is unavoidable as is the time necessary to recover.

Getting back to my diary I realize how long it has been since I was last making posts. It is not that nothing important has happened - on the contrary, it has been a momentous year with events that have been life changing. In particular Elizabeth coming into my life and to a lesser extent creating a large painting for a new Music Center in Poland. I would have liked for my father to see both but that wasn't to be. With such emotional events there is plenty to talk about but sometimes the feeling for a certain privacy prevails and consequently my diary has languished, and feelings have been shared only within my close circle.

I can understand why just with typing these few words. Emotion is welling up inside me and I am experiencing that horrible feeling in the stomach and I feel the weight on my shoulder. I think those who find it easiest to just cry their feelings out might reach a point sooner where they no longer need to cry. Maybe not. I do know that being a man is a double edged sword at a time like this. We do find in ourselves the strength to be a rock and carry on through the sea of emotions, but in our strength we sometimes cannot just cry into the wind like we really should do.

It is also easier for those who believe in after life's in a literal sense. Sure I believe in a metaphorical living on of his spirit. Every time I think of him for example he is alive in me but that is very different to some invisible metaphysical being with thoughts and feelings that lives in some spiritual realm and continues on as if it was Don living in a community of similar ethereal beings or metaphysical souls that are conscious and can live forever or return to earth in another form. People who really believe those sort of things feel less loss and maybe even a kind of celebration that their loved one is in a better place and they too have less fear of their own death. Unfortunately a true skeptic requires quantifiable and verifiable evidence when figuring out the workings of the universe around us and in light of the lack of evidence of the existence of a metaphysical world or we have to face the bleak prospect that death is a very final thing. My father didn't believe there is any life after passing from this one and I cannot disagree with him. Unfortunately that finality is hard to deal with sometimes.

Apart from the loss of life, death also takes with it the sharing of future things. My father would have thought the Polish painting that I would be doing the following year was just another waste of time as he saw all art in those terms, but Elizabeth he would have loved and welcomed as a long lost daughter. I think both of them would have found it difficult not to like each other. When death takes someone in the family it takes so many opportunities too.

So now life has changed and it is time to do normal things like make posts in my diary and other web sites. So much of my web world had become neglected during the last year or two and this last month I have been updating existing sites, creating new Facebook and Twitter pages, and created a brand new web site for the sketch club. Practical considerations meant that the need for survival dictated more practical sites got the attention first, but now my diary is open for my musings again. It is another milestone in the process of getting back to normal and writing these very emotional words an important part of the healing process. Another part is admitting that I miss him a great deal.