Tag Archives: Painting

Many Such Helpful Friends

02 Thursday Feb 2012

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Quilted Robot

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

I remember reading about how Australians began to embrace investment after they were made to keep superannuation funds. And then every Australian seemed to become a real estate junkie. Now if they are reading anything at all they are every day becoming well-trained specialists in recognizing that opportunity that will change their lives. Technology, education, age management, management… never ending self-improvements.

I think that facebook is training us on how to make our friends into assets. Useful, useable, tradeable commercial assets. We are learning to think about them differently, to understand the rules governing successful management of friend assets, to understand the financial potential in them. One of the rules of Asset Management of Friends is: never lose one.

It seems to me that the next thing to be “assetted” will be love. Sex, sexual relationships, marriage, partnership. We are so good at learning now, we will be excellent students. But I doubt the Asset Management of Lovers will say “never lose one”. It is clearly financially beneficial to have a marriage system that allows you to move up and up through relationships, gathering assets. So we will need to learn how to do that properly, and our marriage system will need adjustment to make it work for us, rather than against us.

If you’ve ever read one of those motivational (self help for the “activity” disability) books you’ll probably remember all the categories that you need to do a little in at a time. Things like planning, relating to people, negotiation, investment, time management. 

Now take the time to read through The Age, or The Sydney Morning Herald. They seem to have reformed themselves into daily motivational trainers for us. Is that what we are, now? People whose single desire is to improve, in clearly recognisable steps? Like the steps in a flower arrangement school, each with its own certificate (TAFE approved, RPL available).

It’s curious. At the moment there’s an article about air travel. Get over it and get on with it, they say. Another view might be: actually you’ve been SOLD travel as one of the ultimate rewards for your endeavours. And often it’s not fun at all! It’s actually a time where you get even more marketed and under-rewarded than normal! In fact, it could be argued that it is neither attractive NOR desirable! It’s just that it’s such a great little money-maker, and for you, a great way to learn how to stick to a goal.

One time I deliberately took a bad holiday – planned it from beginning to end and stuck with it. Why would I do that? I think it’s because I’m a particularly good learner.
Did you ever notice that you used to have interest in the dumbest, most unsharable things? And now there’s an online shop for it. Chewing match heads. Go do your research.

Weirdly, it all looks much the same until you take a look in another country. Ebay, for example. Who are all these scammers, you think. And then, once you’ve got the picture, you see it all over the place, right here in your own place. Stop telling me about those match heads, you think. I just used to like them, that’s all. And now those scammers won’t let it go.

Yesterday I went to a Vinnies and they had a skirt there for $25. It was a lovely skirt. Can you make this a little cheaper, I said, because I’m unemployed. No. We can’t. Someone came out from out the back and said: oh, we had to put that price on there, it was brand new. Yes I understand that it was brand new. I can see it is such good quality. But I am unemployed. Can you make this a little cheaper? No. We can’t. We get this high price so we can run our charity programs for the poor. Yes, I can understand that you get the money to run programs to provide charity for the poor. But I am poor. And I am asking you for help by going into your charity shop and buying the clothes that you have received for nothing. And I am now not even able to be your customer. Only your client. I am too poor for a Vinnies shop.

Newspapers read more like the kind of newsletters you can subscribe to. Which is important, because that’s what their business plan is, to make little tailor made newsletters for each and every one of us. So if you’ve noticed that, you’re with the program.

I write about Vinnies, it is snatched upon by the Facebook Fairies (oh look! a Product!) there is a “Vinnies Vogue” story in my personalized AGE within a few minutes. Sadly, they do not recognize that I am too poor to shop at Vinnies. Perhaps this is the aspirational lesson plan.

I am a little sad about newspapers, reading them was one of my great passions. It was nice when they came on sheets of paper. If you got up to go to the toilet, the same story would be on the page when you came back. It’s those trivial things that we become nostalgic for.

And BOOM! A nostalgia section! Being sad is now flagged as a super-potential marketing opportunity. So my disappointment is of great interest. Perhaps having something interested in me will help that sadness anyway? My own personalized self-investment manager. I cannot lose. I am being supported by my personalized media, and my success is their profit. As a human success contributes to a healthy condition. So success is what I will have. See how helpful and loveable robots (a pretty name for technology) are?

Oddly, there have been some reversals in strategy. Arts Hub Australia used to refuse me their newsletter unless I subscribed. Now they send it to my email box, although we never agreed on such a relationship. They have come to learn that in the world of motivational newsletters, you have to be there to find a money-making opportunity. We will find that we have many such helpful friends now.

Lehan’s Bumper Edition – of Rainfall

17 Tuesday Jan 2012

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Qatar

Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Of course, these days we cannot talk about rainfall without speaking of Global Warming, so I will quickly get to the point. I know nothing of global warming, I understand very little, and yet I believe that Global Warming is real. I know myself to be one of the ignorant people who simply chooses her beliefs according to the reality that she wants for the world, and so I think that my opinion should be discredited and never allowed to sway others. I am one of those people who makes Global Warming such a deeply contentious issue.

I know that it rains a lot. I think part of the reason for that is that I spent several years working in an office with no windows onto the outside world. It is a great privelege for me to now have my own window. My window comes also with a frangipani tree, and those frangipani flowers drop to the grass when the rain falls. I can also hear the rain, but I cannot be entirely sure when it ends sometimes, as it can be too light to see or hear, and I cannot tell if it is raining more than it did in the past. I just know that that doesn’t mean that it isn’t. And that my adoption of that phrase among others is what marks me as a Doctor of Philosophy and not Science.

Of course, for me it rains much more than it used to because I was in a location in which it did not rain for half of the year, preferring to snow. I was told the snow was less in quantity than the past. But I was told that by people who were recounting tales of their childhood. I think that people are not very good at keeping time, and knowing time, at recounting time.

Lehan’s Bumper Edition – of Failure

26 Monday Dec 2011

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India

India

Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

The strange thing about failure is that you can work so hard to achieve it. I’ have painted and painted and painted, there has rarely been a time that I was not exhibiting my work, in a shop or a window. And yet I can honestly say that my career in painting has been remarkable in its lack of affect.

And then, I’ am doing it all wrong, and I know myself to be doing it all wrong. I do small paintings. I know that it is large paintings that capture people”””’s attention and I know that it is large paintings that you see in galleries and on the walls of homes. But I on’ly do small paintings. Partly I only do small paintings because I don’t know what I would do with a stack of big paintings, when they failed to sell just as my small paintings do. (Please forgive my lack of single apostrophes, this font doesn’t seem to have any) But, you know, you can’t make great big paintings without practice, and so it seems that at some point it is necessary to accumulate a stack of unsellable large paintings. That’s just the way things are.

I put my paintings in the window of the empty shop downtown and a number of people, after six months of silence, commented on them. That was good. They didn’t buy them, though. Since I have the impression that buying is the inevitable path one must take to critical success, I find that a little sad. I don’t really know what I need to do to make a change to this static situation.

I’ve put some on ebay, in my ebay store. This is because I have heard people say: you wouldn’t believe what people buy. I would like to believe what people buy, I would like them to buy my paintings. Nothing has happened yet, I suppose it may not ever happen.

Perhaps all this desire to have my paintings sell is simply good for one thing: keeping me painting. It fulfils some need for creative occupation, it satisfies my eye, it smells good, doesn’t cost so much money. So why not.

A thing that disturbs me is to look back at earlier paintings and see how much better done they are. Much more care for edging and lines and attention to (more) realistic renderings. Actually I can’t seem to be capable of going back to those paintings. Lines become faster and looser and rougher, a dog is barely a dog. Fascinating, disturbing and curious. I do love to look at my paintings, close up, at the paint textures and the pencil lines.

I saw these screens, in the discount shop. Room screens that fold into three, made of canvas. So you can paint a painting onto them. They are fantastic. But where would I put them, for years and years, until it was time to toss them into the pile for the second hand shop?  Its very wasteful to fill unnecessary space.

Here. This one is called “India”, for no reason except the page I was turning at the time.

ARTISTS! Join Up!

17 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

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Rainy Day

Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

I read about a man, an arts administrator, who used to go to art colleges and tell the art students: join the police, join the army, join the public service, because you might change something there. He didn’t mean that art didn’t change things, though it so often fails to. He meant that an artist joining the ranks of the police, the ranks of the army or public sector might make a difference to that institution.

I’ve always thought that was very clever, since I read it wherever I read it. There is something about the way artists think that could be so useful in places like that. Artists think that their souls will be destroyed by going into them, but I think there is nothing like an unappreciated life’s work for soul destruction. The arts don’t have highly paid jobs. A good job in the arts is actually not the arts at all, it’s management, and one of those isn’t going to give you a particularly good wage.

I guess you might say what’s the difference, taking a job in the police force or taking a job as an arts manager. Certainly, if the arts management job allowed you to use your unorthodox thinking skills to make new ideas bloom, that would be good too. But arts management jobs are kind of conservative. I don’t know for sure but I think the police force might be a little more radical than that.

Artists do go into interesting jobs. Usually though they go into them as artists, with one eye on an exhibition. Or they go into them as side-jobs, to provide enough money for art production. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about taking hold of that talent you have for thinking about things in a different way; whether unsentimental, or without having to have a positive outcome, or looking into the guts of the thing, or thinking about whether the world really needs it. Taking hold of that kind of thinking, and giving yourself body and soul to a new way of using it.

I think that artists are a bit passive. That is, despite the tendency to flamboyancy or obsessiveness, despite the showmanship, artists are often a bit separate, a bit introspective, a bit outsider. Not really keen on being pushed around, and not keen on being singled out for odd behaviour. Perhaps that passivity is learned, as being different is a hard thing for a kid. Whatever it is, it manifests itself in odd ways, and one of those ways is in avoiding things that they will find difficult. Going into a job in the police force would be difficult. And that’s a good reason not to do it. But think. All the artists we’ve known who’ve had extraordinary talents to make things happen, to bring about change, to transform the way people think. Imagine what they could have managed had they set their minds to changing the police force. That’s why I agree with the man who first wrote about it, whose name I no longer remember from a book I no longer have.

Creative people, if you take a look around their living spaces, often have great practical ideas for ways to improve things. Once their told that they are impractical that idea seems to stay with them – still, a lot of creative people take on practical jobs to support themselves. And that’s great, but it’s not what I mean. I wish more artists would decide to take on an institution, an organisation, a corporation. Not to challenge it. But to make it better.

Maybe it just seems like a waste of time? To spend years of your life doing what ordinary people do, take an ordinary job. But really, no job with you in it would be ordinary. Not if you really cared about it. What’s happening now, with the arts, is that a lot of people spend their time making art objects, art installations, art events, as if that’s going to really make some huge transformation in people’s lives, and it doesn’t. There is so much of it around, so many people solving this output problem in just the same way, that people don’t really take a lot of notice.

Art doesn’t have a new kind of value that it didn’t have in the past. Maybe it has less value, because more people do it and more people own it. But it doesn’t have more value. And art isn’t seen as having a world-changing effect. There is no Nobel Prize for art, though there is for Literature, which could be a part of art.

Join up. Join the police force. I often wonder what this country would be like with a leader who was a trained artist. More than a woman, more than Labour or Liberal, that leader being an artist would make a fundamental difference. Not a flamboyant difference, because the system is in place and that system would rein in flamboyancy. It wouldn’t be Australia Council Funding for All, a Museum in every Shopping Centre. It wouldn’t be like that at all. But I have no idea what it would be, because as far as I know it hasn’t happened. Apparently Hitler was a “failed” artist. Does that account for his overwhelming popularity as a leader? Or for his excess.

I wish that more artists would think: I want to contribute, and this is not the best way to do so. Because I think it isn’t. Being an artist, being creative is not something that puts you on the path toward great leadership and great mentorship. It’s just not. I think we must be doing something wrong, I really do. And although I find immense value in having been an artist throughout my life, I also regret, a little, the things that the role of artist have influenced me not to do. I thought I would be able to do more. And I am hoping that someone one day does. So that more artists join the police force.

Heavens Legs

14 Wednesday Sep 2011

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Heavens Legs

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Heavens Legs are sleeping in the sunshine under a dark rock warm and humid. We all wish we could be there, we all want to be hibernating. If you venture out the kookaburra will get you, and no amount of tickling that fine beak will make him let you go. Squish, and squish, until those sturdy legs are no longer moving in fine sequence. Imagine the feeling of Heavens Legs across your bare stomach as you sit on the floor looking out into the dark night, and that’s how it feels in the kookaburra’s mouth right now. Heavens legs ruffles the feathers on Kookaburra’s cheeks. Snap! goes Kookaburra, and legs fly over the yard.

W+anchor & Skuttlebutt

06 Tuesday Sep 2011

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay, Politics in the Pig's Arms

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W+anchor & Skuttlebutt

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

It surprises me sometimes, how emotionally sticky Australians are. But then it surprises me how deeply tolerant we are. Still we haven’t thrown W+anchor and Skuttlebutt overboard and they’ve been deeply irritating of late. W+anchor! Stop goading your sister! ENOUGH of Nauru. One more n-word from you and you’ll be put in goal.

There’s a particular wisdom that all parents should know. Never get caught out making a threat that you don’t intend to follow through. Never say NO if you’re not completely sure of what you would do if it didn’t work. Never do that, not even once. Now Skuttlebutt’s gone and done it. It’s hard to know what terrible consequence this is going to have, but we do know one thing, now that the high court has said NO, and Skuttlebutt has only become disappointed, very disappointed with you….to say in return, we know that things are going to be very different along our coastlines. My guess is, backpacking’s got tenure.

It would probably surprise a lot of Australians to learn that there are countries, even quite close to our own, where wanting to go to Australia is not considered illegal. Where finding a boat and catching a boat to Australia is not unlike the experiences of many Australians of catching a bus loaded with dead fish and live chickens through the mountains. It’s a bit risky, it’s uncomfortable, but then again it’s something to tell your family about.

Sometimes local transportation is just like that. But it’s cheaper.

If I were looking for a start-up business right now, I’d be off to one of those countries right now. I would find a nice building and open a chinese restaurant. Near the water. With a little guesthouse out the back. W+anchor and Skuttlebutt. At your service.

T.A.P.

29 Monday Aug 2011

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Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

My mouse is dying, it falls off at the edges. The track is weak, my fingers can move the curse but not make it change anything. I need a new mouse. I order one on the friday and it rings the doorbell on Monday, Mourning. In between I TAP TAP TAP with my thumb, and by the Sunday C5 and 6 are crackling against my pillow. Racing down my arm and back up, I feel like a broken collarbone. The new mouse has a little button on it, up and down so smoothly. If C5 and 6 can speak to my thumb, it seems, my thumb can reply.

Ecology, Tenderly

09 Tuesday Aug 2011

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Ecology, tenderly

Painting and Story by Winifred Ramsay

I saw two rainbow lorikeets in the tree at the top of the yard. This tree had hard brown pods, and one had opened. They were both standing on the branch next to the pod. One of them would reach into the pod and pull out the seed. It was a flat round seed encased in a piece of translucent paper-like material.  The lorikeet would give the seed to the other lorikeet, who would nibble at it and then let it go, and it would float down like a large snowflake through the yard. Then it would take one for itself, then it would give another one to its mate. They did that until the pod was empty. What a lovely partnership, I thought. Ecology, tenderly.