Pauldrobertson
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pauldrobertson
Australia
130 creative works found
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This is a major work. It is not only large but quite dramatic and of course, bright. The surface is deeply textured – I used plaster, sand, dirt, grass and bitumen within the acrylic, though the figures themselves are in oils. 180 cms across. It works, for me, anyway, like this. We are each of us trapped within our subjective experience of the world. Each of us will have a unique reaction to a circumstance, to an experience. It is the great beauty and also the great tragedy of being human… The separation of the figures is meant to represent our own separation. The sticks in the ground are there becuase I thought they would look cool but mostly as a metaphor for each individual’s reaction to the spectacle in front of them. As for that – the sunset or storm – it is dire and dangerous but beautiful. Like life, huh? Someone will ask me a question and I feel like beginning my sentence by explaining that they might not be able to hear me because of the pane of glass between us; the separation of experience and memory and the inadequacy of the tools that we have for communicating with each other. / I don’t get it, I never have. Most people only exist for me as a collection of unexplained actions that happened to occur within my field of vision. And yet I am DESPERATE to communicate. It seems like my every action is driven by the need to explain, the need to bridge the loneliness and by so doing stifle the despair. Is that in itself an offensive thing? What is it about me that I need to change? / It exists everywhere in equal proportions, like a great stinking miasma, a universal audience of apathy and miscommunication spreading out across the planet. There is a world – consciousness, or at least world hegemony, and that is that we are universally alone.Existing through books is not enough. I guess I’ve always known that. C.S. Lewis said that we read to know that we’re not alone. But it doesn’t really work like that; we read and find that we think or feel along similar lines to another person, yes, and so we are relieved. But this is a person that we will probably never meet, and certainly if we did we would be unlikely to be able to communicate with them at all, let alone on the level that they had communicated with us. It’s one way. I think that that’s why I am always giving my books to other people, – it touched me, can it touch you too? Are we alike? In this, if in nothing else? / I have this thing where I feel like my every action is unconditionally controlled. Not in the sense that I have absolute control, more that I MUST maintain it. It feels like my hands will fly up of their own accord, scattering everything in their flight, or that my legs will kick out by themselves in the middle of a conversation with someone. Or sometimes like I must rigidly control the muscles in my face so as not to let them slip into what it feels like they naturally desire to do. If I let my masque slip, there will be a twitching grimace that will assert itself in a spasm that will gain control of my face, and once this process starts, by the simple slackening of my tight control I will unleash something that I am unable to regain. Something horrible will get free of me and I will be forever a gibbering mass of uncontrollable sibilance and jerking palsy. My limbs feel as though they are over-full of blood, my body transfers a feature of each sense to me in Technicolor extremes. I feel that I must move quickly, else I will be trapped in my body by hysterical convulsions. People seem to me to be moving in slow motion and talking in riddles, though that in itself is nothing new. / No, not anything new at all. So. I have my cigarettes with the oil paint (it always seems to be something with cadmium in it that gets all over them, dunno why.) I have my dark, violent music, and lots of books to read. I have my health… / I’m thinking of bringing out my own aftershave, maybe eau de turp’s, or cologne de cadmium, For men, when having a pencil in you’re hand isn’t enough…
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I won’t sell this piece, and it is the only one. I have had offers before, but I am glad I didn’t accept them still. It’s painted on plasterboard I stole from a building site as at the time I couldn’t afford canvas, or even board. / The figure is me – I had long hair at the time… / It is the last piece I did before I quit drinking – TEN YEARS AGO TODAY – the 20th of december… The title is from my favourite Tori Amos song, from her first album.
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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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Disarray… I try to refer to it every time I can ORDO AB CHAO (order out of chaos). hell better the other way round. / I did this piece while I was working at the Babylon Hotel. When I say working, I mean painting. I had a deal where I would paint in public at the pub and get free coffee and exhibition space in return. Pretty sweet really. I got to be friends with a lot of the waitresses there, so when I was placing the figure in the foreground I based it on one of them – she was wearing a Cardigan and had a bag with her. She was running late and flustered. / / / / I like the idea of the figures in my landscapes being deeply self-involved despite the dramatic and unusual things happening around them and this is a good example. She is looking at her watch in the midst of a desert in the face of an incoming maelstrom. To her the fact that she is late for work or whatever else it implies is far more important than where she is or what is happening. Also there is that I am kind of obsessed with time (the whole Einsteinian relativity thing and spooky quantum theory throws our understanding of the world into disarray) so I try to refer to it every time I can. This is probably my favourite of all my landscapes – just for the colour. I sold it in 2003 through the perth Royal show exhibition. /
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Pastels on Paper 120×90 cms / Sold the original. Watch hands on an ancient clock, slow but still moving. Clicking in the dark when there’s no one home. Echoing in a hall with light spilling in through the frosted glass. Like when the game is over and it’s time to hold and time to kill, the very very last drop of milk splashes onto the page and the very very dark blue moves in the corner. Walking with me to the end of the isle pewter cups full of thick liquid that catches in the back of your throat and makes you sputter like a fire or a kerosene heater or a lamp or an old sick car with students in it too dumb / to know / not to try. / No time to write or think or curl my fingers around, a dove’s leg curse or a jewel. Pierced, oh sure, like that a pinprick in an open sky, a babbling tower. Water from the sky from the ocean from the heart, clipped, triggered and muzzled, strapped to the enormity of it. Colour-blind and balanced, capsized and immersed, a bridge that’s a seething landscape. / Titan for a Tuesday, dry as a bone wrist or a Doll’s house in the desert. / It smells like strength and vicissitude with only what you want and a cold turned spoke. / Staggering and with a head full full of light, only small acts of kindness, what else is there to find for us silent at the edge of the day? / So then it’s only you and me in a saturated blue, long kisses hard into each other / sweat and confirmation, an engine of conviction, a weapon of devolution. / A slow turning and immense mill with a lidless sacrifice and an angry wasp, pulled from one strung heart sharp over ribs. There’s only breath and life / and no promises from either, go guarantor for me that I’ll be alone, / prove me right with skin that colour, hand that soft, a zealot with a placard walking in the rain. / Drama and faith are such poor excuses. / Only hints and grace, something gone, out into the soft and never ending night with a half heard cry. / I’m sad for you, baby. / I know. I know. / I saw the tremors and the shadows in the kitchen. Like leaves and seeds bent around a chain link fence on a quiet day. It’s only me, just me, that’s all. / I can come and visit and hold your head up for you while you try and sing, like before with both hands that you pushed to my throat. / Wait for me, oh wait for me baby. / I know my arms are empty and ugly and I have hard edges and sway and rock and twitch twitch twitch and I’m sorry for all these things and for the old woman made up for no-one and for the beautiful girl so autistic she couldn’t see and for the tiny mad child that I was / and for the tiny mad child that you were, dirty hands and sweet, / sweet, / bruised skin. / Twelve o’clock on a Friday night, / Run my hand down the side of my face. Crack each finger individually. Give up, give in. Whisper and kiss the side of my mouth. Someplace or something warm. It’s okay. / It is.
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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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Named for a Tori Amos song thatmakes me cry pretty much every time. yeh, i know… i am SUCH a pussy heh. / I was still pretty down and not making any money. I was pretty insecure about this piece and didn’t show it until it had been framed for a couple of months. It is pretty much pure escapism, with darker undertones of course. / The girls don’t really exist, though I think that the place does, I found the pic of the tunnel on the net and got carried away adding my own stuff to it. / There is my left hand-print drawn into the light in the middle of the tunnel; starting a sort of trade mark with that I guess. / I do find solace in my work often, though it really is work and not play. This is a good example. It is somewhere, some elsewhere, a long way from where I was, dreamy surreal and dark. I love chiaroscuro and use it constantly, but why the hell not? The symbolism is a bit obvious now I think about it – “look there’s a light at the end of that there tunnel!” but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t really matter at all, does it?
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Pastels / 140×55 cm / Firstly, I would like to display a poem, / Transcendence! By C.C. Arshagra. Inspired by the pastel creation titled “Seething Landscape”: / by the artist “pauldrobertson” I believe time can heal the impossible / And open up the realms of storm / To finding the peace of soul’s reasoned being Enter the mind is torn together by form / The agony of bones discovering / The wisdom of the wild sky’s breathing And there is no more intelligence of fighting / When madness fills up the void with laughter / And transcends the broken world With a wholeness so unlimited © Copyright 2/25/2008 C.C. Arshagra From “The Oxygen Garden / Love Nature Poetry” press22 Manuscript by C.C. Arshagra (Soon to be a published work) HERE is the link to the rest of his powerful and original work on redbubble -. C.C. Arshagra This piece is fairly definitive of one of my major themes. The figure in the foreground is me, and I am looking at my watch. This is meant to be in contrast to the figures floating into the sky and the incoming storm. It is about subjectivity – in the end, we are all ultimately self-involved as it is our own perceptions that govern us and we can never know another. I am also, always, always, obsessed with time. It seems such a strange thing to me. The piece has a bit of history too – one of my closest friends was interested in buying it, but at the same time I had no money to frame a similar piece that I wanted to enter into a competition. SO I made him a deal – if he paid for the framing of the other piece I would enter it into the competition and if it won he could have this one for the price of the framing. If it didn’t win then I would give him a discount. Oddly, it won, so this pierce is now in Tim Jackson’s possession. The sister piece is called “Harbinger” and is on the same gallery in my webpage www.pauldrobertson.com / . It won the Katanning art award in 2002.
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House of the Fisher King. Oils, 170×58 cm Original Available For Sale (though I must restretch the canvas beforehand. I have never exhibited it) / / / This piece is about 10 years old. I did it while in first year university and it was one of the pieces that convinced me to study painting and not follow sculpture. The name is from Northern European mythology – the castle of the Fisher King was where the grail was kept according to some versions of the King Arthur myth. I have been considering freedom. I… have been honest, I think, more honest than I have perhaps ever been. / The degree to which we are free. Oh… this… this thrills me and breaks my heart and encourages me to play and play and read into the empty sky. I am convinced that we rarely consider the extent of our freedom. And how central this is – how toxic and erotic. / We have choice – we all know we have choice. / Do I have porridge? / Corn flakes? Do I ask my wife if I may drink her blood? You see. Our constraints – they are almost completely self-imposed. / We have many that are utterly inescapable and they are real and should be understood and accepted. Fight them and we hurt ourselves. I am not espousing pain. / We have our morality. Morality in itself is a beautiful thing. It allows us to accept kindness as a part of our world – how our world would be were we to control it. We select our morality and it selects us as we grow. And it must rule us. This is one of the true and great things about ourselves, about man. Its bizarre form shapes our lives and holds the corners of the shadows of the world. It is innate to each of us and we should follow its commands. / And we have our physical limitations. We have, inescapably and mysteriously, the guides of our tastes. Ah, yes. All these things hold us. / But sweet in the night and between our legs and in the hairy corners of our brains there are the things that exist in the cracks between these controls. What we must understand, what we CAN understand is that everything between the dictates that we know is within our hands. / We OWN IT. / This is fucking / OURS. I think that we forget that we have such choice. And I know that very few people will ever realise what they can do. Consider. Think. What tastes have you wondered about? What heat have you never touched? What sun have you never seen that you could choose to see… How have you wanted to fuck but have never fucked? / Your belief is also yours – it is liquid. / LIQUID. Christian – then believe that majick walks the earth – pagan – believe for a day that Christ was God’s son and that you may eat his body. For a day. Choose it. / Don’t be fooled. This is your choice. There / IS NO TRUTH WITH A CAPITAL T. No-one / Fucking Knows Here have this: / In the fifties there was a group of people in France who called themselves the “situationalists international.” And though I am quite sure it has been done since, they came up with the first reasonably realistic critique of capitalist society. / The fundamental point that they called attention to is something that is really obvious to everyone but rarely actually SAID. / The idea of capitalist society is this – / You will spend your life doing something that you do not want to do. You will do this in order to acquire things that you do not need. Which is of course not only basically irrational and absurd, but when taken into the extremity of suffering that we go through, I think it is actually pretty much classifiable as well, HAH Insane. I feel this around me – it is all some great masque, the most accomplished and shared masque humanity has ever worn. Look around you at your desk, your clothes, the complexity and precision of each of your Cleaning products We must be aware of absurdity. I think that perhaps embracing it is the ultimate act of absolution. / “I forgive you. “I do. “You are absurd.” / If we can know it, just know this continually… more than that though. It is not capitalism that I abhor that drives me wild in the night. This is the joker’s face, but we are the skeins of wicker in this wicker-man (obscure reference perhaps. A wicker-man was, apparently, a form of Celtic sacrifice en masse. They would build a giant from wicker. They would fill it with people. And then they would burn it.) We bind ourselves and each other. We are, each of us, each step and breath living absurdity defying reason to apply meaning and importance to meaninglessness and impotence. / I don’t think this is wrong. We have no other choice. But we must, we should, we shall, we can, we could, we will, we may, we might, if we can if we can / We should KNOW this. / That this is what we are. Beautiful, impotent and meaningless. Absurd and completely free. Dipped in genius and majick each cell a miracle in its massive unlikelihood. / Awareness gives us power. It gives us choice. Ask, always. Love to all Paul
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Pastels on paper 120×70 cm Sold it and this is the highest res copy I have crrrrrrap. What the fuck is going on? What are we doing? How can we ameliorate our lives with simplicity when we know what we know? Or think we know. / Shit shit shit shit shit shit. / I have a huge lack of understanding. / That sentence was supposed to continue, but stopped somehow. Burns me up. You even have Cat In The Hat Pajamas, and I mean, how cool is that? / Excuse me, I just thought I would skirt ambitiously around the subject for a while. I have no idea what to say and am feeling a little romantically disturbed by attempting to begin to break my silences begin to gnaw at the old gauze, reeking and tough, that covers my lips. / So. Today is a day for honest extremity. Makes me feel more at home all of a sudden. I feel much more comfortable when everything confuses me. I always feel like some small and viciously real creature is crawling up the back of my scalp and whispering that it’s all a lie when I have some semblance of feeling in control. / Nothing like a spanner in the rabbit. / I have climbed my way back into my safety haven and behaved like I had supposed, had always supposed that I am supposed to. Security wraps its warm but a little spiky arms around me once again. I’m so desperately trying to sell out that I even manage to forget the oaths I swore to myself when I was a teenager… and when they creep into the back of my mind I slap them around with a few extra anti depressants and paint a happy picture (I am lying why am I lying I cannot and have never been able to cheat with the lines and colours of my work. They betray me in acuity, in dread. And the meds do nothing. I have taken none for months at a time, I have taken ten times the dose for months. No difference. Side effects. Shakes, rashes. A median of despair punctured with pinhole panic; with sobbing collapse. Degrees of sickness inviolate and unaffected.) You actually know what I’m talking about. How strange. Catharsis rears its unlovely head. / I have desires I can’t even begin to describe. There is something about losing your mind that is more real than anything else, more tempting and free; a claw hook in the back of a healthy brain. / I never thought you took me seriously. (Why would you how could you why would anyone?) / I have hesitated and stuttered and smoked too much and stared at you when you weren’t looking. Allowed myself to pine. / We are fools in a world that does not tolerate fools. / I have looked and looked, and I always thought that feeling this way and being trapped by the sadness, the sadness… / I thought – that this was a common excuse for not living. Not doing and earning like everyone else. / It isn’t a common excuse. It’s an uncommon reason. I would like to spend a week with you and just see how similar we are; just for once talk to you for long enough without being interrupted to know, maybe to just stop lying. Can you imagine that? Honesty in life seems impossible, but it might not be between us. / The fallacy expands. / How often do you lie a day? Think about it. Coming to each other and saying: / “Well, today, I really thought about suicide, and I had to make myself eat even though it made me want to puke. I felt each movement I took as a jarring blow. I spoke to other people… other creatures in the world even though I could not find my breath and I gasped and clenched my uncertain weak fists. I still spoke because I had to I had to and the rope the knife they swell rotten and sweet in every turn and thought and they live in the fear booming in my heart shivering through my feet as I step through the world. / “But I am alive and I have my hands before me and my scars are old. I have lied well enough to hide, for this time at least. / “I thought it took all the strength that I have to do these things, but it took more to them to you.”
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Watercolour on Paper 100cms x 70 or something x 2 as there are two of them hence the x 2 part. Am adding the song that I wrote from whence I took the titles to the two works… and to the diptych that contains them both. The individual works are here, with a fair bit more text (finally figured out I was leaving out the colon on the linking process. Yay! Go go power Paul!)... The first piece is Blame Your Green Eyes / / The second… For What They Have Seen and the uncropped version Blame Your Green Eyes For What They Have Seen Uncropped OUR LITTLE DEATHS… / You nail my guitar to the bedroom wall / You lick your lips promise me more / Take my nail polish, go out to score / But I can’t, I won’t help anymore. That final appointment waiting in line / A scar on the flesh of your inner thigh, / A casual promise and a white lie / Where the old bridge splits the hot night sky CHORUS / Our little deaths / Holding your breath / I’ll always be less / Always a mess / Ill never confess / To the cuts on my flesh / Or the tears on your dress / Are all we have left You carry the heat all bloody and keen / Hot with this fever since you were 15 / Stones you’ve kept for each lie you have been / Blame your green eyes, for what they have seen We kissed on the beach last Halloween. / And now we’ll never forget the shit we have seen / The hell in the wall the gorgeous machine / The tiny mad children that we have both been - Paul Robertson, sometimes afraid of trees.
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Pastels on really crappy paper. / Charcoal and chalk. / Here… have a song folks. written played sung and recorded by me. I wrote this the year before I stopped drinking, in the most hopeless time of my life. The same year that I drew this. BEAT IT THOUGH HUH!? Nuts to YOU pathetic existence! / DARKLING“ The file is 1.5 meg and all you have to do is click on it once. It will auto-open. Try it. Listen to me. / Lyrics: / I thought I felt your hand touch my face / My valentine has hollow eyes. / All the stories that we told ourselves. / The frozen motions of our lives / CHORUS: / I watched your face while you came / And the blade that turns in your mind. / Your breath against me in colours again. / And your face a hot white line. / Is it because I’m a liar or because you’re a whore. / That makes me want to give up, just give up, and open my neck onto the floor. / You know you can touch the dead child inside you. / It’s enough, isn’t it, the things that we go through. / CHORUS / I watched your face while you came / And the blade that turns in your mind. / Your breath against me in colours again. / And your face a hot white line. I need you to sing to me. / Come down into the street. Trace my scars with your fingers. Lie to me. About what you see. -END LYRICS.
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Round and round the sun we go; the moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death we die of vertigo.
by pauldrobertsonI have been learning more and more and more. I think I understand the genesis of Christianity now. I have read a book on Greek mythology, on Celtic, on Norse. They are all tied in together, and these stories, all these stories and stories, interlaced and beautiful, they are the products of madness themselves. The most daring ideas, the most exquisite – these are outside the workings of a mind that fits the requisite barriers of societal acceptance – more much more than that – they are outside the limits of working within a mind and not causing it pain. Nietzsche’s abortive saints, one and all – all of US that is what we are. I have started drinking green tea all the time. I swear it gives me some kind of little rush. I have even tried to learn more about eastern philosophy… got some INSENCE for fuck’s sake, but the philosophy is, of course, just as dense and vast as its western counterpart, and it is slippery to me. Though I have already learned that so much of what took the west till the 18th or 19thc was already understood by the 5thc BC in India. There are holes there too where the west went forward and the east never considered. It is frightening in sheer scale. Vast. I understand that I will never know it as deeply as I would wish to. / I remember when some confused DICK decided I was colourblind when I was about 8 years old. I was devastated – I could never be a pilot or an electrician. I had no desire to be a pilot or an electrician until then. But I feel the same kind of loss every time I realise that I can never know as deeply as I wish to the twists and surges of brilliant humanity that move me. / There is not enough time. / Ah, time… everything is fucking RELATIVE. How fast are we going? Well… to us, we are still. Everything else moves, each of us anchors the universe because THAT IS WHERE WE SEE FROM. It doesn’t matter if we are mad and we see monsters and hear voices – they are as real as the rest of the world, they ARE because for each of us the things that define our world are what our senses tell us, there can be no other truth, EVER, this is it, the world that we see, distorted by our minds and full of panic and magic and fear – this is no less real than the first vision of a perfect newborn child or the last of an ancient man’s eyes before they close! If our memories differ from what our senses tell us, if other people tell us that things vary from our fevered and mad perceptions, what does it matter? How can we trust these things more than what our OWN SENSES TELL US? / The slide into hell, tell me again why I should trust the words of someone who does not feel the things that I feel, why I should believe that my hell is less real than their / FUCKING / OFFICE / When my heart swells and bursts with conviction stronger than the deepest oath, stronger than the faiths for which people die and kill, I am supposed to believe someone outside my mind with words as uncertain as the TIE that he wears, that I do not know or love, that MY world is wrong, and that THIERS is the real, the pure, the right and absolute. / Or the paradise of high euphoria, give it up! Go back to pain return to ugliness and sorrow and grey, spurn bliss and the conviction of genius, blooming pleasure in our veins, believe it is a lie? / It is such a GIFT. Our own bodies slight of hand against age and pain and omnipresent atrophy, a chattering blissful and horny twist of relief, give it up give it all up for harsh light and slow ugly time. “If we had a keen sense of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar that is the other side of silence.” “Do not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” “Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend far more than cool reason ever comprehends. One sees more devils than vast hells can hold. That is the madman. The lover, all is frantic, sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet’s eye in a frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and as imagination bodies forth, all is made compact. Gives to airy nothing a local habitation. And a name.” Breathe the sweet breath of madness tie your mind to itself in switches and arcs of pleasure and lights and pain, in stutters and twitches and flights and bursts of colour in your vision. / We are all so bound to lucidity. To rationalism. Ah hell. And to it we eventually return. I wish I was my cat. “I am a brother to dragons / I am a companion to owls. / My skin is black upon me. / And my bones are burned with heat.”
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(or kissing the vacuum.) ah yeh well. polina. i rescued her and she came to live with me even though i sure as hell didn’t want her to and within four days she was cheating on me online. i was never anything but intensely kind, and though i fell for her, it was the betrayal that cut and cuts me still. / not that she cheated – i eventually worked out that something was goin’ and hacked her pc. that meant i read her chat logs, and she ridiculed me. it stopped me painting for FOUR MONTHS. i couldn’t stop thinking about her but was not going to acknowledge her after i broke with her by painting or writing anything about her. i could have easily destroyed so much of her life. she was engaged before i met her to the son of the russian orthodox priest and she cheated on him also. everything about her was based on her extraordinary appearance, and she was born russian… this image was important to her. it was why she had got engaged in the first place. she didn’t plan to marry him… she just… liked all the attention. but i didn’t let them know. i didn’t do any of the things in my power to hurt her. i didn’t email the poor bastard who had been engaged to her. i did another piece of her, a portrait. i wanted to GIVE IT TO HER. to show her that even though i knew i could not gain, that simple altruism EXISTS. that it was a part of me. i knew how important the piece was to her from hacking the wh… her email. she wanted it. i told her that all i wanted her to do was to show me, even in a small way, that the gift mattered to her. that it moved her at all. she wanted to hurt me so much that she sacrificed the portrait itself. / she was five hours late to collect it from me. FIVE hours. i have it still. it is in this room, turned against the wall. i drew her more beautiful even than she shone in her outward manifestation… that genetic accident of young beauty. i don’t mind this piece though. it is the first and still the only time i have painted or drawn myself looking beautiful; and not deformed by my life, my raging searing heart. and though polina was very young, which like most of her life, she lied to me about also – i believe that we wear our sins. that we are formed by our love or hatred. our features cannot help but follow the curl of sneer; furrows of a bitter mouth. laugh lines are called that for a REASON. we are made beautiful as we age by WHO WE ARE – picture of dorian grey, yes? oscar wilde? / at least i like to think so.
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150 cms x 120. / Bitumen and oils on canvas. The name means involvement or the act or process of involving. I have been having a great time experimenting with the variety of tones and hues available when I mix bitumen (the stuff that people fix their flues and gutters with) and different colours of oil paint. This piece is done from an old photograph of mine that I stumbled across on file. I have found it VERY HARD to organise to have two models pose for me at once. Often individuals will volunteer but when I ask them to pose together they get skittish and suddenly seem to have otter things on. I find that having more than one model is far more satisfying and complex than one. I guess I will have to make it happen more often. I have plans to do just that. (I added something in bad taste about arranging threesomes in general but one of my friends smacked me across the nose with her feminist taste control rod and so I didn’t.)
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Miserabelia I suppose… / “It is the old wound my love… it never healed.” / CHarcoal and chalk. 70×27cm / Background info I guess – I have chronic bipolar disorder and scans of my head showing how a third of it doesn’t work at all, and I am an alcoholic and have not had a drink since ’98. / I began to draw this piece that year. I finished it tonight (April 2006). / So it is a self-portrait from the late 90’s, just before I quit drinking. At this point I had very little left, really. No. I mean, REALLY. I was doing a hell of a lot of weights using an ironing board for a bench. / I wrote this song at exactly this point in my life. / DARKLING / just click and it will play… 1.3meg i think.
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Still got this one… fairly new. / white pastel and dark charcoal. It is the old wound my love. It never healed
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Oils On Canvas. 190×145 cms / This piece is based on a photograph of an altar, I think it was to Athena, that i found in an old book. I placed it in water. Atlantis? First mentioned by Socrates – or rather by Plato referencing Socrates, since he never wrote anything down. Did it exist? Who cares. It makes for a cool story. I am a passionately, fervently commited athiest. My disbelief is central to who I am and sacred to me… I am fascinated with theology, and religious history in general. From an archeological sense. I do find a great deal of it conceptually beautiful. I often receive a spiritual reaction or interpretation to my work. It is not spiritual. passionate, and human. This is as inviolate and as much a part of me as memory, as love. As pain. / Here is part of a rant I wrote on faith. Not truly against it. Beautiful in its own way. Yes. FAITH… Here. Try this: / How strong is your faith? / Is it more real than the evidence of your senses? Of your other beliefs? In the validity of your sensory perceptions? Are emotions that are not spiritual less powerful, less True, to you? Test your faith in the violent light of THIS context. Stand your faith against these words, if you can: / “I SPECULATE that I can touch the face of the woman that I love with the rise and the fall of every breath that I take. / “I OPINE that the woman that I ache for, that I live for, her for whom I would die all deaths, lives and has a mind and heart. That her lips, the softest in a million worlds, TRULY DO touch mine warm and wet in the morning. I SUPPOSE that my friend is real. He who stood beside me as I warred, exhausted and failing, against the softness of death. That I may embrace him. That he will feel it, as I feel the strength in his arms and the old love in his eyes. / “I PROFESS TO BELIEVE that my eyes see this screen. My eyes that have served me since seeping light into colour into form when I was a tiny child and new to humankind. When I saw and I saw and I want the feeling that I have forgotten, of seeing colours, such colours in this world! My eyes: the shock of blue and back and red that gave me, gifted me in spectacular benevolence the holy face of my mother. / “I HOPE THAT IT PROVES TO BE THE CASE that my hands that have fought, fists and wards against my enemies – that have and written and worked and bled for me – are mine own. That they do exist. / “I TRUST in the veracity of the fingers that have forged everything that I have made. With which I touched myself tenderly as I felt the first stirrings of sex. The fingers that hit the keys in front of me and that have brushed against the warmth of what humans I have known. That have shown me the texture, the heat, the shape of the world. / “I ASSUME IT TO BE TRUE that I can hold close to me the child that I have sired, that I have loved and taught and feared for. That I really, REALLY CAN feel the warmth of her sweet breath against my chest as I carry her with every gentleness I can find in my heart to her bed. That I can smell her hair and hear her steady breathing as I lay her down and step hesitantly away. That she is real. Her, my child. Her, whose sweet sleeping form I watch in the half-light for long moments, amazed a thousand times that a miracle, the best of natural miracles, found half of its well of inception within me. Her, sleepy in the quiet of evening. Whose perfect, perfect face I carry before me in my mind as a sigil, a ward, a spell of strength. Her whose need is a terrible weight and dire command. Her love the most beautiful thing I have ever known. / “I CHOOSE TO IMAGINE TO BE FACTUAL Her existence; the best reason to fight that there has ever been. That the stunning wonder of her birth – when my patella smacked the hard white tile floor and I found I was on my knees and tears of joy were streaming hot and salty down my face – ACTUALLY HAPPENED. / “I SUSPECT that the life that leaps and hurts and shudders inside me is MINE. / “I HOLD that I truly LIVE. / “I CREDIT, I POSTULATE, I PRESUME, RECKON RELY AND VENTURE that my body exists and that I am not a creation of a sickness in a mind without a world. / “I hope that I walk this earth. / “But I KNOW that God exists.” / Then this is outright, unmistakable. By choosing, swayed by beauty, experience, love, pain, to believe in God. We are howling into the night, screaming and frantic to hear ourselves. To BELIEVE OUR OWN VOICES! / With this choice, we are saying this: “The divine waits with every unexperienced second. This moment is FECUND! It is PREGNANT with hope!” / Perhaps it is not that we conceive of a divine past, but that we believe in such vast improbability to ordain a divine future. To make it inevitable. / The most beautiful symbols in the history of the Western world have shaped and tugged each essential violence. They are as omnipresent as ourselves. / These symbols have fired the lungs of ten thousand prophets. They have sustained fervour amidst tortures upon tortures, and death upon death in vast numbers lost to time. / Tens of thousands of martyrs have screamed their crucial and earnest fidelity. In gorgeous and compelling abstraction as their lungs were seared and they burned alive, as blood and pain and life poured from them. / These symbols have compelled children to hope. They have told billions of illiterate men stories. They have forced souls barely able to carry the weight of their hate to philanthropy out of fear of the possibility of their truth and the reality of their power. They have given beautiful hearts a means to twist our society from universal brutality to a place with unemployment benefits and public health care. To the point where slavery is almost unknown in this lost and vicious world. Wonders of love. / Because of these ideas, countless human hands have been raised. Weapons have been envisioned, forged, distributed. An endless number of proud human lives have been dedicated only as soldiers for God. Killers and rapists for a concept of love. Adherents to horror excused and endorsed in murder. Heroes for God even in their own hearts. Millions of lives. Millions. Of course. Considered thought exploring and exploiting endless possibilities of tragedy written into human flesh; finding revealing actualising and using endlessly creative machines with which to hurt other humans. The genius of the kill. Adherents to a God of pain. / From this source, from here: emotion blooming in human hearts inspired into conviction: / These tools of thought have led endlessly, endlessly, to war. / I wonder what has allowed such surviving rituals as the wine and bread to follow us from their dark and unknowable origins into the moments, the passions of our lives? Eucharist has an aesthetically seamless nature – “here, eat this symbol. Enact it. Force it to be real for you by participating in its arcane order.” / A process of transformation from concept to belief and hence forcing sensory input to lose its veracity. Fingers slip bloody from the emptiness of the unknown. I cannot begin to grasp what occurs as the ritual is performed, when this happens. As the symbols in the process of ritual are given belief. As they are given CREDENCE. / Drink. God created the world. This liquid the colour of blood was drawn from the endless flood of his wounds. / Eat. This explicit piece of the world is carved from God’s very flesh. You hold his skin, the meat of his body, within your mouth. Suffuse your senses with your faith, with your credence – extend your belief into gustatory frisson. Swallow. / BELIEVE..? / He is INSIDE YOU NOW. I am a passionately, fervently commited athiest. My disbelief is central to who I am and sacred to me… I am fascinated with theology, and religious history in general. From an archeological sense. I do find a great deal of it conceptually beautiful.
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