Bitumen
73 creative works found
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done in bitumen mixed with oil paint. 140 cms (almost four feet) across. i painted this from life… the figure anyway. three hour pose. i am in such situations FAST. the detail took me another week. i picked the most difficult angle – the foreshortening is an OUTRIGHT BITCH. nailed it though. Yeah. / This is my favourite of my poems. Read it. Allusions and illusions / Sarcasm is its own reward. / With a feel for illusions and allusions there’s only one bone picker on the farm. / Give me a chance and I’ll tell you how to lose, / how to become whatever it happens you mostly revile when you’re alone / and trying quietude for an experiment. / Bones on the outside, like insects, sure. / There is no way out of this, this is stuck-dom, stuck-ville, / stuck-o-later time, / for Christ’s sake give me a plate full of ashes / and a smothered wreathe and why don’t you ask me one more time, I’ll find the right way to say it. / Ask me again. I’ll say the same thing in a different way and on the couch this time in the night, / singing softly and whispering into my hair. / I’ll show you my teeth and you can twist hairs on my arm so that you know that I know that you’re there. / Wishing for time to see, lips curled like paper on a fire, / man that’s not the world shaking – that’s just you. I love it when ads for colour fade. / Lifting up in quiet suspension and Christ did you see that guy’s fucking NECK? / Offer me a corner in the parlour with soft wrapping on the outside, / lights and stretched skin, translucent like / grass on a spring afternoon only skin, not grass. Offer me this and a few more and ask me again. / This time I’ll tell you a story with highlights in pink / and we’ll both fall backwards laughing into summer with our arms full of flowers clutched a little too tightly. Soft cheek carved into light smell of cigarettes and warm wine, / - tolerance and conviction clean into pure water, sure, in the morning? / Their love story, it’s famous, a princess at Christmas-time, / iron that’s pitted and scarred and cool and heavy in your hand. / Walking on the beach muttering vigorous, Clothos and Lachesis separated by cloth-backed, dark books. / Trying again and so hard this time laced and buckled and arcane, / accentuated and caressed. Willed into existence with a strangled grasp. / Can’t fake anymore got my vices clamped up inside into bluff and hardness. / Can’t give can’t touch what’s inside me / not with these hands pushing against the sides. / In a grotesquery of pinched bones and drawing / tightness beating against my ribs like I’ve swallowed / a murder of crows an assassin of ravens or a murderer an assassin a juggler. / Ask Me / One More. / Time. / These streets that are really just snakes and fires like that are lies. / These worlds that hurt and are pins in flesh, like before. / This compassion. This fever. / This moment and fall. It’s happy only-after, gripped and cramped sucked kissed and choking. / In the moonlight with a pulse and a flower clinging to her skin. / Sleep with me. / Push my head to your chest so I can hear your heart / Cry in your sleep. / Breathe into my open mouth / These are the words that will not make love stay.
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During our first time shopping at the Farmers Market held in the Wayville Show Grounds South Entrance car park every Sunday morning. / I took the camera along to see what I could shoot. / This was the first thing I got when I stepped out of the car. All The Materials Contained May Not Be Reproduced, Copied, Edited, Published, Transmitted Or Uploaded In Any Way Without My Permission. My Images Do Not Belong To The Public Domain. / (c) Stephen Mitchell : Using this image for any purpose and in any way, without prior permission, may lead to legal action.
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Budapest is a city with some amazing old buildings. This building caught my eye in an unusual place.
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All The Materials Contained May Not Be Reproduced, Copied, Edited, Published, Transmitted Or Uploaded In Any Way Without My Permission. My Images Do Not Belong To The Public Domain. / (c) Stephen Mitchell : Using this image for any purpose and in any way, without prior permission, may lead to legal action.
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All The Materials Contained May Not Be Reproduced, Copied, Edited, Published, Transmitted Or Uploaded In Any Way Without My Permission. My Images Do Not Belong To The Public Domain. / (c) Stephen Mitchell : Using this image for any purpose and in any way, without prior permission, may lead to legal action.
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I began experimenting with adding different colours to bitumen recently. It has been pretty successful though normal oil paint takes a lot longer to dry and so ends up with Nell and Kirsty fur in it. / The Bitumen itself is the stuff that is used for fixing chimmney flues and apparently guttering. It is a lot cheaper than oil paint, and can be obtained in large ugly tins from hardware stores for a pittance. / To this piece I added Cadmium red and orange, to some of the otter recent pieces I also experimented with Yellows and violets. / Oh and I made up the dress completely which I am kind of happy with. / This piece is the sister to “Anna Begins” and they hang together,being cleverly and wisely bought by the same people. Well certainly it affects us all in velvet lines and nails dug into palms and heights drawing us to their creeping, gorgeous edges. That final appointment trembling inside our fragile masques. This is where you are. This is what you have left. / Courage as plagued and futile as fear, dignity an un-credible, absurd end point. / The words as pale and as oxymoronic as a just war or a healthy wound. Asking and questing, snatching at our clothes, comfort me comfort me share this with me, oh you must feel what I feel. Here, I’ll take your hand and push with painful strength to the muscle and bone and webs of red red flesh stringy and old. My words are nothing to the swollen mass in my chest. / Dipped and silvered with simple kindness and past love. If only to hear the morning in the pliable, ductile moments full of the scent of sex. When we lay giggling like children and sounding sane and just like humans, just like anyone, like anyone, like everyone else. / We shall never say time on our hands again. Brittle and small like the singularity of your throbbing appetites. After the fall. Yes. / Time on our hands is time IN our hands. Remember this, swept up in the kleptomaniac present. Hear it ticking behind you, within you rehearsed and constant in any heat you can find. / Imagine the shocking thrill of your parents’ eyes locking for the first time. Entwine your consciousness with the first moment that you saw, breathless and startled, the beauty in your reflection. / I want to share with you so much, so much; my heart is boiling full of knowledge, in a river where blood is born, an ivory string, a floating spinning ball in an ocean of involution, seventeen syllables holding the world clenched in vehemently, intensely ALIVE wonder. Both faces of Janus for me, for you, a dark and hungry god. A broken white abacus furiously calculating, but such wonders oh such wonders to share. And these old wounds, deep and real and crusted with scars as they are, it is these that have created us, burned us out from the husks that we were. Phoenix mother, hands like clouds.
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Dry central Tasmania.
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encaustic, mixed media 2006
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A comment of sorts? Abstracts and Artsy Architecture Landscapes and Nature Street Tasmania
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The delivery driveway at a local shopping centre. Others in this series:
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Boy walking on rocks Phillip Is. Victoria.
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Bitumen, 150×120cms. Sold There is a wee bit of a story to this piece… Well, I had won an award for “Clockwork Crow” in a country town about 6 hours from where I live. I like to turn up to such things both to be polite and of course for the greater glory of Paul. SO I had gathered my best friend Tim and a bottle of gin for martinis (for him) and set off. We got there ok, even on time, though we got confused between the pub and the hall where the exhibition was on and were forced to play pool while we worked out the error of our ways. Getting to the hall, I realised that they were reading my name as I walked in and sauntered up on stage and got my hand shook by the mayor of Wongan Hills; I got a hand made purple plaque and my cheque. Yay. Tim had retired to the car to play guitar by himself and drink martinis. The Wongan Hills folks were immensely friendly and far, far more friendly and hospitable than the city-based people I have met in similar circumstances. OK. Well there weren’t martinis. It was just gin. No olives or even a glass I don’t think. After failing to schmoose very well he and I went back to the pub for some more pool and to celebrate my victory. Now you see, I was wearing a suit, and Tim a muscle shirt. He is very big and does Kung Fu. When I say he does Kung Fu, he studied it for years and is kind of good at it in a very practical sense. Also he is somewhat known for his surliness and inability to cope well with people threatening his person and remaining passive. And it seems that stylish charcoal gray suits act as a red flag to a similarly surly bull for drunken local country folks. The evening had not progressed very far when we noticed that some of the local lasses were taking an interest in us and soon a group of young country girls had struck up a lively conversation with us where we failed to have anything in common. The local lads seemed perturbed by this and began being more raucous and surly themselves in a different manner. Someone threw beer nuts at me and there was some jeering. Then someone threw ice. I had worked out by this stage that these people may well qualify as YOKELS, that there were LOTS OF THEM and that we were in THEIR HOME TOWN. I began agitating for our departure. Tim, however, had different ideas and in a slightly unsteady manner was counting our potential foes and then nodding confidently and rolling his shoulders. “Ok dude. You got the two skinny ones on the left? I got the rest.” “Gah! How about we buy them a round of drinks and tell them how nice their mullets are? Or we leave, dude, my paint covered chariot of uncertain mechanical reliability awaits!” I replied, tugging ineffectually at his notably solid upper arm (for which I had to reach up… I should point out that Tim is NOT a violent guy. Just – well – aware of how capable he is and not given to being pushed around.) Eventually I got him to leave but it wasn’t easy. We escaped without violence and I still had my cheque. We had also had to abandon any hope with the local girls… sigh. “To our ashes glory comes too late.” (Martial.) On the long drive home in my trusty 1984 Pulsar (NOT TRUSTY AT ALL! the damned thing cost me almost all the money I made this year!), we got well and truly lost and got to my house around 5am. I didn’t sleep, not really sure what I did apart from that it would have involved working. Right; now we come to this piece. I was painting for a charity show, which I had done before, but this was a little different. I turned up, only a little late – Jane had volunteered to pose for me on the evening. She was great for stuff like this. There was a chair and also an easel on stage in a gigantic hall. A spotlight shone on the easel, and 200 or more formally set tables lined the room, filling with people dressed in black tie. There were at least LOTS of people attending. I had my canvas and my paint and a model on a BIG empty stage and I had not slept the night before. The MC announced that I would be painting for the room’s pleasure and that the piece would be auctioned for the charity at ten o’clock. It was just past 7.30 at the time. So I had less than 2 and a half hours to start and finish a piece in front of 500 people who were all at least rich looking and I was exhausted. Here is where a little bit of bipolar mania can be a handy thing. I was a bit high and frantic (see the bipolar and Paul page) and I painted well. I finished the piece with minutes to spare. There was actually a bit of a bidding war (well ‘war’ may be a little strong) and they sold the piece for $1500 unframed for their charity. Although someone did steal my briefcase on the night. Grr. And they never gave me a thank you note or courtesy thank you phone call. Not that I am bitter about it but it is a bit galling. I mean I didn’t get any of the money, you’d think they would thank me. But noooooo. The piece above is the one I did on the night. Note that it is pretty big.
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These witch’s hats caught my eye on my ride home from work.
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Rainy day in proper London. / 35 mm argentique, uncropped.
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Bitumen on board. Yes… bitumen, like on the road. bout a meter across. / Still got the original. Wierd. / I started this piece about 5 years ago and had it hanging in a fancy gallery in Queensland for a little while. I thought they had kept it as they generally did their very best in their expensive sensible shoes and craven sexless souls to fuck me over. This was my first experience of galleries, and I met it with a baffled sadness. I met everything with a baffled sadness at the time because I was once again a drowning man, despair filling me full and making me cry. The gallery also made me feel like a fool. Humiliation… ah well. / So I didn’t try and get it back. I found it a little while ago at my sister’s house; she had picked it up from the gallery somehow with her mysterious efficiency. I thought “hey that’s pretty cool I wonder what great artist has left a painting just lying around in my sister’s house? Oh it’s ME!” / I worked on it off and on for a couple of weeks and this is the result. I don’t actually remember who posed for me, my memory being as odd as it is. It has that aching sense that I am always always always aiming; struggling for like a hungry monkey… grappling with a greased up hairless human BANANA SUFFRAGE and EMANCAPATION SUPPORTER holding a melting banana double split.
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Despite some stillness; quietude, yes, in this piece…. i painted it whilst manic as a rachorse goanna on crack and speed and hm viagra in a terrible hurry running on reallllllly hot desert sand. i should write more about the fun parts of mania. ah… THAT sex drive man… add no fear at all to that and… well there are many stories. heh. / i walked into the schubert gallery on the gold coast where there were lots of famous artist originals on the walls like arthur boyd and sydney nolan and pro hart. apart from them were also lots with talent too. i had only ever sold one painting in a gallery before then. I had never been in an exhibition let alone a solo one. i just walked in with it. I managed not to end up in bed with anyone there that day, which is probably a good thing really. moving right along… the subject turned out to be a sarah (i have for some reason been out with 11 girls with the name sarah. one of them was nice.) this one turned nasty but still we had a lot of fun. In case you think i am being a sexual tell tale and blowing my own horn (which i can do – used to be a gymnast you know – bipolar also has a major depresion component with the opposite effect, and the last one left me impotent for almost six months. this isn’t mentioning that psychiatric medication’s most common side effect is sexual dysfunction. / so i think it’s only fair that i get to have periods where i have to masturbate three times at an absolute minumum to go outside the house without hm / pitching a persistent tent. and also i think it is only fair that the high euphoric bits of mania feel fantastic and i have no inhibitions and tend to believe in myself perhaps even a little tooo much. no fear so i am just fine with approaching anyone! it makes for a nice relief from all the fucking torture parts of having chronic bipolar. the torture part has been the definining feature for the last twelve months, in a manifestly physiological sense. I have actually begun to stop getting worse and now i have, i timidily tempt fate by stating that i have IMPROVED (tempting fate not really something that bothers me… not giving a fuck as i don’t believe in anthropocentric nor pre-ordered delusions to make ourselves feel more all special and the focus of everything in a cosmic sense.) anyway. hope everyone likes the painting.
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Oils on canvas. Bought by a lover of mine before we became lovers as we fell. Twice Against her lips Time for us and time for me and whirr and click once more. / Found my pen again, chewed lid, pragmatism in black and softness, / time now for my clockwork to wind down and slow but twitching twitchy. / A pair of chewed lips, quiet and wet. I have a handful of / lizard skin and a pocket spare, dry now despite the humidity / and humility and lacing (stitched?) with cowardice. Whirr and click and spin, / time for stubble and sandy eyes and wet legs, maybe coffee and maybe company, this last unheard. / Loneliness and boiling energy not even my quizzical state, not really. CDs are all unfitted now, I have to find a new expression to face (reaching into barrows, casements disappear dark and rich. Sharp movements and smooth skin furrowed into velvet. Shiny and vigorous, fitted out with cries and appropriate lustre.) / Sweet tonight, hot on their healing and fevered up and round with smiles that seem to find the right muscles to poke, and even like me, they might. / Boom and twist this time though whirring and clicking and sinking in teeth and she says that she likes my scars though not where they sprung and wrenched from (that part mine nearly clasped and nearly held close and rocked like a sleeping child a puppy an adulteress. Fenced though peeping and flashing onto the page now and that other now, then.) / I can’t remember a time when panic didn’t finger my sight and there wasn’t a hole where cold things and rat bites spoke, and tired was all I was among other things. / (Nine o’clock tick tock tick tock, how long is it how long have I got?) / But looming out at me like a loon or an argument with myself is this. / And I do need her to sing to me, I do need her to come down into the street. And though she didn’t trace my scars with her fingers, she kissed them as if they weren’t purple with violence and sucked up into themselves like the memories that hold them, and I think that I believe her and not me. / She sounds like she means it more. / Click and whirr, boom and spin, with gentleness and quilts and eyes with honeysuckle edges. Cadence with her head cocked to one side in limping rhythms and skin that / smells like cinnamon only better, / better than that.
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Bitumen and Oils on canvas 90×60cm / I gave this to my girlfriend. Sinn is her name. She is an angel. I wrote on it a distortion of a biblical quote, scratched into the paint the sharp chewed end of a paintbrush - / “Take this as a seal upon thy heart, / as a seal upon thy arm / for love is strong as death.” This is the new part about why, that I wrote today: Somehow… / In the last few weeks… / A New medication. And in the bizarre atypicalities of my neurochemistry, I have begun to rise from this hell. As I have from others. As I will fall and fight free to make and make and love and love… as I will forever fall and fight, till I fight no more. / For the first time in 12 long months – In slow moments of a year composed of weeping with terror at each excruciating sliver of time… this year that has etched and aged its crawling minutes on my face ageless always until this; past its due. / New meds. / And. They are working. I will heal. / I have a different kind… a new understanding of hope; / This, unlike its sisters in their cruel pollution of horror and knowledge… / Hope and terror are diametrically antipodean twins. They die without each other. Antithetic. And symbiotic. And now, well… My hope is as clear as the carbon lattice perfection of a diamond edge. that was the NICE PART that is NEW / VERY VERY VERY NEW this is the REST. It is less nice and was written barely two weeks ago. I completely understand if none read this much. I can paint again! I am offering free hugs and ironic weird comments from an odd angle for EVERYONE too! CHRONIC PAIN AND PAUL… Chronic Pain and me. Why I ain’t been painting all that much (actually I have, just badly. No. Really.) I don’t know if the pain will end. In truth it terrifies me. I am not one easily frightened. / It has already cost me a year. Even when everything else, all the madness for so many years, were not enough to start aging my face. This has. It is too strong, too much. Without painkillers, there is nothing else. No thought. It clouds my mind so completely that I had blamed myself for its very existence and more than that, for the core of its aetiology. / It is not my fault. / There is a scene in the film ‘Good will hunting,’ where the genius Robin Williams and the younger genius Matt Damon are in Mr William’s office. He says “It’s not your fault.” / Over and over. Will Hunting looks annoyed, then enraged, disbelieving. Eventually he collapses into tears and into the wise and knowing arms of Robin William’s character. His psychologist, believe it or not. Matt Damon and Robin Williams nailed that scene, and also in the same manner drove a steel spike into the heart of self-blame. / Will Hunting knew in his mind that there could be no blame laid at his feet for being beaten as a child. But he could never, even with all his own genius, convince his heart that this was true. / I blamed my SELF. I deluded myself that I deserved the brutal extremity of this pain. So, much like Mr Damon’s character, I lied to myself and subsequently suffered, and fucked up my life. Humbly. In this matter, I admit it. I am a fucking hypocrite. I understand self-loathing, spent so much of my life wasted in its claws and I find it difficult to take in others. I have spent endless hours with broken men and women trying to show them how wrong they are in the passion of their hatred for themselves. I have burned a year of my existence doing precisely that, in agony. I dated a kind woman, and she had some powerful painkillers that she had left from back surgery. I was at this point able to admit to myself that 1/ I was in FUCKING PAIN MOST OF THE TIME. and b/ it was not my fault at all. It allowed me the time to see without doubt that the pain I was and am experiencing has nothing to do with anything that I have done. In the mean time the pain has worsened. In the last few weeks this has increased by multiples. / What I believe is happening is not truly a belief, but only a – suspicion? A guess, mildly educated. / The madness has been contained. The damage to my thalamus has, to anthropomorphise a neutral biological process, found another outlet for its grief and rage. Instead of changing my moods and causing me hallucinations… it is causing me illusory pain. It IS an illusion only in the sense that my skin is not in reality alight and burning. But don’t you see, you must see, please look hard enough… it is much worse this way is worse this means more because I CAN’T I can NEVER put the fucking FIRE OUT! / The worst of this situation is that the pain is more disabling than the madness was. It will not kill me, though sometimes I wish for this and would see it as a tender caress of mercy. It won’t, and the madness would have. So I am alive. / But I cannot work. If I am in physical pain I cannot… it is impossible for me to paint. For the last year I have forced myself to whilst I have been in pain. I have produced more slowly than ever for manifold reasons, the chief of which being that I can’t see. Somehow I produce ugly lines and uglier colours. I have spent almost all of this time painting over the beauty that I had created whilst without pain… In those few hours that I cradle to my heart and hold so sweet (one form of True bliss is the cessation of pain.) In a state of some kind of grace I can barely imagine right now. / Therefore. Yes. Draw the conclusion like pus from a wound. But draw it I must: that I cannot even draw. / The dreams that I had that were not dreams at all but logical conclusions… of fame and fame and fame and fame. They have proven to be, for now, false indeed. It is breaking me. Breaking me. / For right now, once again, I am an invalid. I have… little. For all that I have fought. It is… hard to hold on. I have a good woman who looks after me. This means more than I can describe. I have her, and that is a wondrous thing. A miracle that I should meet someone unselfish after allowing into my life so many who have taken from me and taken and taken. / I do not know how to effect change. I have little time to plan wherein my thoughts are not torn from me by brutal physiological assault; by agony. I am giving up my space here in the city and moving to share with my father once more. / The pain, unedited by the dilution of prescription medication, is colossal. It is taking my life from me. It steals my breath from me. I wake and – it is there. Stunning, so fucking violent and I can’t breathe, I cannot. I have fled from hope in rational terror as from a betrayer, traitor, monster. / Sometimes, many times. Yes. There is no breath to scream. The last weeks… / Somehow… / In the last few weeks… / A New medication. And somehow in the bizarre atypicalities of my neurochemistry, I have begun to rise from this hell. As I have from others. As I will fall and fight free to make and make and love and love… as I will forever fall and fight, till I fight no more. / For the first time in 12 long months – In slow moments of a year composed of weeping with terror at each excruciating sliver of time… this year that has etched and aged its crawling minutes on my face ageless always until this; past its due. / New meds. / And. They are working. I will heal. / I have a different kind… a new understanding of hope; / This, unlike its sisters in their cruel pollution of horror and knowledge… / Hope and terror are diametrically antipodean twins. They die without each other. Antithetic. And symbiotic. And now, well… My hope is as clear as the carbon lattice perfection of a diamond edge.
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A corolla winding its way down the Lake Mountain Road back towards Marysville in Victoria’s Yarra Ranges. Taken with my Canon 40D… finally! Processed in Adobe Photoshop CS and Lightroom 2. Sales 1 Matted Print Featured in the Transport group on the 15th of April 2009 On Saturday the 7th of February my family lost our home away from home at Marysville, as well as our two Rhodesian Ridgebacks and our Abyssinian cat. My condolences go to anyone who also lost family, friends or property on this terrible weekend, and I know deep down that Marysville will be back and better than ever, in the near future… Click here for my other photos of cars! Click here for my other images of the Yarra Ranges
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Found on the side of the road near my mother-in-law’s place. The wife and I had gone out for a ‘macro photography’ walk around Kingscote (Kangaroo Island … and this was spotted on the bitumen less than 50metres down the road! All artwork is copyright© to Stephen Mitchell All Rights Reserved. / You may not use, replicate, manipulate, redistribute, or modify my photography, writing, and artwork without my express consent.
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HOT AUSSIE ROADS © Vicki Ferrari / (best viewed large) / Western Queensland Road, nearly outback except that it is some tar on it!! / Desolate spaces out there, but fantastic place to be!! Vicki Purchase Card / Purchase Mounted Print / Tech / Nikon D70 / Photoshop
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Wantirna, (outer-east) Victoria.
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Nevertire Rd © Vicki Ferrari This is the Nevertire Road, from Tottenham – dead straight! Then you can head to the Nevertire Pubs for a drink or two (or more!)..... Nevertire Map Hope you enjoy the ride here! Stay awake and watch for roos!! Vicki Purchase Framed Print / Purchase Card / Purchase Laminated Print / Purchase Poster / Tech / Scan of Original Print / Photoshop (uploaded 9th September 2009)
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