Diary Of An Artist In A New World

Working And Drawing With Technology

Why would anyone volunteer for technosexuality? Or even want to be a technosexual? Why indeed? For me the answer is easy, but first I need to make a disclaimer: it is 9:20 in the morning. I haven't been to bed yet; I have spent the night drawing on the computer. The work was successful and I am feeling elated (as artwork that goes well always makes one feel) and I am having a couple of gins before bed (and as celebration)

There is a small reproduction of the drawing I have been doing. It is the sort of thing I like to do just now, marrying my classical skills with the computer. Not making a drawing in chalks and conté on paper, but doing it all with a Wacom tablet on the computer. It is something I started when the model was here on Tuesday night. I often draw like this just on paper, but this one sorted out some ideas I was wanting to translate to digital media, and printed - it looks great. It is something I want to do for my up coming exhibition. That exhibition will be the fruition of what I have been doing digitally. This small triumph this week is actually an important step along the way for me.

Another success with technology in the last few days lay in transfering this diary blog to a new domain. For ever more it will be known as www.diaryofanartist.com but it started life with a URL typical of a blog: www.kingscross.blogs.com/diary, a difficult to remember web address. To create its own domain was a ticklish matter which I had not attempted before, so while there are web experts out there who think nothing of playing with DNS records, for me this was a big deal. And fortunately I was able to figure it out without a hitch by doing sufficient research first and finding the answers I needed.

Technology has always interested me, but analog technology was always so frustrating in how little it gave back for vast investments in money and time. Now the digital world offers so much more. Yet for every successful step there is at least one other that frustrates. This week it took the form of some software for my phone. A dictionary - something one would assume is relatively straightforward. It would be if the software company's  decided to make things easy. For my Merriam-Webster dictionary the software company is one of those that doesn't understand the need to be clear and straight forward. So after some back and forward e-mails i still don't have a working copy on my phone. It will get straightened out eventually, but they unnecessarily make one jump through hoops to get there.

Many people cannot understand the success of the iPod - they think it is just marketing. What they do n ot understand is that when Apple came along MP3 players had lots of features but none of them worked very well. The iPod just works. So all those who complain that it does not have enough features don't realise the importance of things working well. The same thing is likely to happen with the iPhone. Lots of phones have lots of features, like my one, but lets face it, the software is often flaky. Lots of features, but they don't all work well. All Apple has to do is have a product that does what it does well and they will have a hit.

Technology when it works well is a delight. It can also value add to productivity. It has transformed me as an artist and opened the world to me. It has laid a new creative universe at my feet. I love it, but hate the unnecessary frustrations. Lets face it, so much of the stuff that is frustrating is just company's that don't know how to make things work right, or are so greedy they couldn't care about the users experience so long as they make money.

Conclusion: technology is wonderful, what i can do with it is wonderful, but the people who sell it - are mostly not so wonderful. Lets hope we can all survive them.

Sunset In Sydney

The sky lit up tonight with bright gold and salmony pinks. It was extraordinarily beautiful. Some people spend a lifetime searching for meaning and purpose in life. I cannot imagine any purpose or meaning greater than simply being able to open my eyes and drink this beauty in. And, as an artist, the icing on the cake is to be able to make and manipulate images like this, and share what I see.

Thoughts In The Cold And Rain

Today when I awoke this first thing I could hear was heavy rain pouring down on the roof. I is really cold at the moment and I had thick blankets on. I love being warm in bed when it's cold, and the rain is all around.

The heat of the shower is then doubly enjoyable. The warm water calms the body and frees the mind to think in a very free way. I get a lot of my creative thoughts happening in those times in bed when waking, and then in the shower. It is as if the creativity is locked up in the sleeping state and the dregs are squeezed from the dreamland by the sensuality in that last interface with the unconscious before the cerebral cortex is fully engaged.

Rain of course was taking me back to North Queensland, to the high mountains between Millaa Millaa and Ravenshoe. There the rainforest is thick and more primordial than the tropical coastal rainforest which is full of palms and heat. In the high mountains above 1,000 metres the air is cold and ferns grow huge in the misty drizzly rain. So often the moisture is technically not actual rain, because it is simply the interiors of clouds that envelop the mountains. It rains more than  one day out of three when averaged through the year, but during the wet season it can set in for weeks at a time. I remember one time when it rained non stop for 12 weeks.

Other times it is unbelievably heavy. An inch falling in half an hour is common. I remember the time when two feet of rain fell in two days. It over-topped Koombooloomba Dam. For a while it was an unofficial world record for the amount of rain to fall in two days. It was the second highest fall anywhere for a 24 hour period. Then a place in India claimed the record for themselves, and it was an official record to boot. Only in places like Millaa Millaa and Ravenshoe do people think it matters that another place has more rain.

For years the officially wettest place in Australia was Tully. At about 5 metres of rain a year it is an impressive statistic. But Tully was only a short distance as the crow flies down the mountain from us. While Tully probably did get more actual inches of rain than us, they had far fewer days of rain and we thought that important.

I remember conversations in the Ravenshoe Food Store. Amazed visitors being spun tall yarns about what it is like when it REALLY rains. The story's though tall, were actually not too far from the truth.

Some people go mad in rain like that. They see the mold growing over the walls and consuming anything made of paper. Human skin becomes perpetually soft and wrinkly. It is as if the rain permeates the body until it seeps into those dark places in the mind and like the grass it starts to grow uncontrollably until it is thick and hard to walk through.

I love that rain. I am like the rainforest trees. I reach up to the sky and love the womb like essence of the clouds that are so close you can touch them. It can be very nurturing.

It can also be incredibly dangerous for young men. In rain like that there is little to do except drink and drive around to friends houses. I remember a time when I was in a car, the roads, being largely dirt were slippery, and the mountains make straight stretches rare - it is corners all the way. The Millstream was in full flood. It got too dangerous for me and I stayed behind at one house. Not long afterwards we heard that my companions had failed to take the turn onto the Millstream bridge. They had hit a tree which was very fortunate since that was all that stopped the car going into the Millstream. They both went through the windscreen but not entirely out of the car so that instead of drowning they merely were cut up by the glass. I could have been in that car. I might not have been so lucky.

It was in that rainforest, in that rain that I grew into young adulthood. That is an experience that few forget and I am no exception. But of all the memories, I think the rain is the most powerful. Certainly it was the most consistent thing that tied so much else together and led to so many other memories. There are still times when the heady smell of the growing grass on the day the rain stops comes to me. It is a sweet smell, a smell that speaks of things alive and vibrant. And when the sun comes out it is full of the promise of a new day.

I may be a city boy, but as they say, you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy. And days when I wake up to rain like today, are days when I feel my roots very strongly.

Music And Rainforest In William Street

When travelling from place to place I variously use my iPod or mobile phone. On the iPod I listen mostly to podcasts and audiobooks. When I only have the phone with me I will watch TV news, or play a game if on a train. Walking, I will listen to fm radio or my recorded music.

Tonight walking up William Street I was listening to a mix that had favorites from the 60's to recent. As I walked The Hollies singing "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" came on. Every time I hear that piece of music it instantly transports me back to a certain bit of road in North Queensland many years ago. I was hitch hiking, going to the Zen Colony down Sluice Creek Road. The cars were few that day and I had been walking for a few miles. The air was warm and clear, the grass an emerald green, the rainforest rich and dark. The smell of things growing was thick like honey in my nose. It was a long straight strip of bitumen grey and warm that showed the tired cracks of thousands of wheels since it had been laid back in the War. It was a long storyboard stretched out before the dirt road that lay ahead. To my left was a farm that my father used to own. By then he was a thousand miles away, but I could feel my family presence still in things like the fence I once helped fix, the paddock where I dug the ground. A gate that I could then, and still do, remember driving the tractor through, and the old black dog who was on the other side. There were the places I escaped to for a quiet time of thinking, and looking deep into the sky. The places where my imagination could turn a country loneliness into a fantasy land of my choosing. This was land that was in my soul, and a little of my soul was in the land.

I always return to that piece of road when I hear that song. It's not that I could physically hear it at the time, but it was playing in my head. The problem with having near perfect recall for  such moments is that it fills the head with so much stuff. It can be hard to get to sleep unless I totally exhaust myself, because there are so many experiences that flood my mind constantly. That day back then was no exception. I only heard that song once before that beautiful day yet I could play it in my head with perfect fidelity, and so as I walked I  played the song on my internal MP3 player, and liked it so much I played it a second time. By playing it twice I burned it into the brain so much that I often rewalk that mile or two of road from that idyllic morning so long ago.

This evening, as the cars of William Street whizzed past me they became cows in the field, the cold of winter drizzle became tropical warmth and the buildings became dark green rainforested mountains, and along that country mile as I walked, The Hollies started to sing... again.