Robertson
16 members found (show all)
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Scott Robertson
Canada
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Andrew Robertson
United Kingdom
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Ian Robertson
Australia
187 creative works found
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Thought since this seems to be my most popular piece I should perhaps upload a version of it big enough for those who care for it to have access to BIG PRINTS. So here you are then :) - Paul. Through A Glass Darkly. By Paul D Robertson Pastels 140 cms x 97 I like this piece very much. Sometimes in my work I can witness myself taking leaps of quality, and I believe that this is one of those times. It is an indescribable sensation to see my own hands make something such as this. I begin the with a person, a woman, before me, some materials – paper, chalk, paint. At the end of the slow still hours quickening my fingers, I surface from the fugue and wake from the trance of working. And sometimes I have something before me that is beautiful that did not exist, that what the world did not hold before I began. And it will last for centuries. I love the idea of obscured reflections and scattered and refracted light – my desire to work is pushed further every time I stumble upon something I know I must pursue. In many of my works, whenever it is practical, I will place a left-hand print on a wall or smudging a piece of glass. I have done this for years, and I will never stop. Recently the idea occurred to me that since this has become one of the defining symbols within my work, I could execute a piece based entire on the idea. So I made it happen. I forced it into existence. And I am so left handed, you see, that I almost walk with a limp.
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watercolours… / Finished this TODAY – 22 nov 2007. Tis of my friend and ex Kylie, who rules. / This piece is part of a diptych (did I put the ‘y’ in the right place?) / The second work is “For What They Have Seen The diptych… Blame Your Green Eyes, For What They Have Seen The song that sang the title (I wrote it this yer sometime. As in 2007. I think.) 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 and here’s a rant… from around 2002 or so. heh. I have coped sooo welll for soo long I have tried so hard I know u will / understand, I gave up drinking and it nearly killed me so many times and I / WANT A DRINK RIGHT NOW this is why I keep a dry house except when it is / raining or i play with the hose / haven’t had a drink since ‘98 not a sip not a drug nothing to ever / stop the shit in my head from going round and fucking round and i feel so / SICK all the time / what the fuck are we all looking for where is an answer? i have read / Descartes and Kant and Nietzsche and the bible there’s nothing the fuck / THERE! / i can’t stop shaking and it is hard to type, but i will not call some / guys in white jackets with sombre kind expressions and very clean shoes. / i have taken my clonazepam n i did NOT od even of i wanted to; i will do / some WORK and call my doctor tomorrow and this desperation will continue, / part of the answer, the real answer is that there is NOT AN ANSWER and i / will have to trade my mind for my life for a while WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF / DEAL IS THAT?? EXCISE my personality remove expunge it – all my work will STOP / and it can’t hold me close to it hangs me - / balancing and teetering but heavy with velocity and density but for right now my meds r squia=shing down my brain like a printing press / and i / i have avoided it one more night. / i will sleep / i willbe ok / but i migh / maybe i can finally find someonewho can beat me at chess…t o to hospital / tomorrow if they let me take my paint and my giant books. / I have had some experience with ppl in complete denial of the reality of mental illness. I didn’t tell anyone at uni about my bipolar. After i had graduated, i had made a lot of friends, and eventually told them about it. reasonably soon after that i had an acute, and prolonged manic episode. They basically thought i was just being a prick by shouting “I am king!!” from anything tall i could find and stand on. the worst part was when i crashed after that – no understanding, not even an attempt. They were (mostly) completely against any sort of treatment. / These ppl were very important to me, and i was living with several of them for this period. Fortunately my family was able to help, and i stayed with my father for some time. While i was acutely manic (really starting to lose it thass fer sure) i had a psychology STUDENT explain to me how i wasn’t sick, the drug companies were exploiting me, in my infinite naiveté. I was a lamb to their wallets. Being manic, I tore her to shreds. She was very close to one of my friends and flat mates – told her and everyone else that i had yelled at her because SHE WAS sTUDYING PSYCHOLOGY. Scary thing is she was about to graduate and go out into the world with this idea. scarier still that someone in the psyche faculty had taught it to her. i don’t see any of the friends that i had made at uni – indeed i have very few friends. I am cautious (um apart from right now with um women). I always tell ppl about my bp if they become close to me. / It is incredibly common, and still amazes me how little ppl know, or more importantly, WILL ACCEPT AS TRUE. / me: / “i have bipolar affective disorder.” / Member of Public (shall be acronominised to “MOP”) / “huh?” / me / “i have manic depression.” / MOP: / “oh. sure. NO YOU DON’T!! HEY AND SHUT UP I’M TRYING TO READ tv week!! Don’t you know what’s happening to ridge and Taylor??” (um had to do some research but Taylor is a psychiatrist apparently? hahahahhahhahahaaa hahaha) / hahahahahaaa i forgive her / she is hot. / rambling now huh? sorry. / hm yeh. sold a painting… yay. paid my bills yay. got fined for crashing into that guy . boo. hiss. / am having scary efexor withdrawals. boo. hiss. yuck. boo. hiss. halucinating. boo hiss… little natalie portman monsters scuttling around at the corner of my vision. boo hiss. not even naked. booo hiss. painting more than ever bfore in my life i think. yay. tried very challenging watercolours yesterday an d did em with no wu-ckerings. yay. 2 in one day. yay. can’t afford to frame all this new stuff but will try n get the grant folks to give me more moneys. yay/boo? am lonely. boo am scared BOO! (gah runs n hides behind chair) my efexor (anti depressant) withdrawals… i have these shaky things and i think i am starting to act like a mad guy more than usual in public. The hallucinations are real, tho no natalie portman (boo hiss!). just keep seeing things out of the corner of my eye that are not there. I mean i think they aren’t. / very bad thing is i nearly had an accident today trying to avoid one of them. yeah and i was driving, didn’t mean, like a bedwetting accident or anything like that. / I am trying clonazepam and valium (together hand in claw, probably a bad idea. oops) they make me cranky and now i am forced to sit on my rocking chair with a shotgun, chew some baccy n whittle and now and then shoot at the natalie monsters. had a wee bit of a collapse in the street, but got up again :). haven’t told anyone not online bout that. sensory overload. / it’s pretty strange, i think i recognise the brain-shivers that from a horror movie or book or comic or memory. / And yet i am not depressed. the painting helps a hell of a lot. focus i guess. / Am seeing my psyche tomorrow. i think i might have to go um to hospital but THEY ARE ALL NUTS IN THERE. and i don’t just mean the staff. maybe not. probably should. / and now, oh this is quite weird i think. i am quite used to having self-harm and suicidal thoughts- accompanied normally by mixed state, “black mania.” / But NOW i still have the same desires but in a very different way… almost like contemplating a far less important or destructive act. i am not joking now. only example i can think of is: do i have a cup of tea or stick this sharp thing in my neck? and i am not in a depressed state when thinking it. almost HUMMING. I come back into myself with a jolt of feeling, not afraid of it but guilty. Still wanting it. I have been trying to deal with this illness for a while (9 years give or take an episode since diagnosis) and most of this is new to me. it scares me in rational moments, but most of the time the anxiety is entirely SEPARATE from the rest of the symptoms. / i believe that my disorder has pretty much taken over. Even while typing this i have gone thru a few moods irrationally. Up mostly, but i cried when i read some of the other posts. / I am being a very good boy; i mean, i am eating and excersizing, taking lamactil and cleaning behind my ears and it has been a while since i have set any pets on fire. None of this makes any difference. I think it is well past time for bed. It is empty, should fix that. With perhaps consistency instead of diversity. Hmm. I have been having an odd month. I went back to my psyche and was prescribed lorazepam (like valium sort of). It was wonderful – anxiety evaporated, sleep pattern returned to normal, and I wasn’t stoned out of my head all the time after the first couple of days on a regular dose. / then I came off it. / I thought that I had some horrible flu or something bcuz I lay in bed for a couple of days with horrible shivers bordering on convulsions, stumbled around heaps the 2 or three times I got out of bed to get more water, and had mild fever-type hallucinations. Which were kind of cool cause I thought, u know, hey I remember u from a few weeks ago from my mixed state – hi! Isn’t it nice to see the synchronicity of our bodies in distress? / But then the anxiety returned and I did some research; also talked to my psyche about it and twas withdrawal apparently. Haven’t gone thru much like that since I was a-drinkin’ still. It is a very affective but highly physiologically addictive drug. / I have also been having continual problems with nausea. Have got ginger. I eat it. It sort of works. / Came back full circle to where i was what with shakes and mixed state symptoms n al, so now am on clonazepam (ten times stronger than valium but the same shit basically). I have had some real problems with this too – I am slowly trying to get myself off it as it affects my coordination and O MY GOD MY SEX DRIVE but tried to do it last week too fast or somethin’ and was a real mess. I went to the drug sites for both lorazepam and clonazepam to get a full view of the symptoms and all that I am going thru is well documented. I just happened to be in the bracket that reacted strongly to withdrawal. Must be my addictive nature. / Bleh. / So. / Where I am atm is that I am nearly off clonazepam (I had real trouble reading the details on the bottle bcuz I wrote PROTON ENERGY PILLS in black marker all across it) / I am only on half a tab a day (1mg) plus my lamotragine. / I think I am thru the worst of this one and out t’other side. If I go for 2 days without any clonazepam I go straight back to the way I was just before hospital (not quite as bad though – I think the lamotragine is working.) / And I have been working constantly. / And selling stuff also. Have had an artistic epiphany of sorts and am working it out piece by piece (um that would b entirely literal). / Problem is I am producing far more than selling (2:1 ratio) which is pretty good but blew all my money on getting all my work printed properly for a walking folio – and am still doing dumb things like I left the heater on for a few weeks and just got a pretty large bill from mr gas company guy that I am impressed they fit in my mailbox. / It means that it is hard to get things framed mostly. / I am much less death fixated also. / Am not going outside today. / I saw a spider there just last week.
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The Breede River which runs through the beautful little town of Robertson, 160kms from Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
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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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For what they have seen. Watercolours on paper. 100 cms x 70 or so. Finally finished the second component of this diptych today the first piece is Blame Your Green Eyes / / The diptych… Blame Your Green Eyes, For What They Have Seen hm – erm sometime after Christmas 2007 but not too long cuz I just ate reheated PUDDING which was FANTASTIC even though it is made with suet. Damn. Shouldn’t have thought of that. No really. Damn. 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. I am allowed. I’m special. Like Ralph in The Simpsons. OUR LITTLE DEATHS… (The chords also rock.) 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 The model is my beautiful, kind and talented ex and friend, Kylie. She is way cool. She has a remote control darlek. I mean. That… is cool. ooh. Ah. Hm. Um. / / I feel like I am moving through milk with a switch of wine or something more course (vodka gin nicotine steel? – the sting of some deadly chemical) threaded through it. Heavy limbs and tingles in my hands and feet. I am considering, remembering. Hard to see. / One of the unique flaws I have. (Unique? Did I just have the fucking audacity to say that?) My memory seems to work in a slightly different way to the way I understand the rest of the human world’s to. This has been made far worse and far more absolute by the ECT (for those new to this particular acronym it stands for Electro Convulsive Therapy. Shock treatment. ST. ILA. I Love Acronyms.) This in that I have realised how little difference there is between my memory as affected by the treatment and my memory unaffected. Little. None? / Say to me of an experience shared, and I will ask of you for more and more specifics, until I can build an image, or a sound, or a SENSATION of some ilk specific to that point, and then the experience in its entirety will flood back into my mind. This is little different from the way everyone else experiences things, excepting, perhaps, the degree of cues needed to spark the fire of memory, and also the extent and exactitude of my recollection. Like a flaking mirror. Like tigers in tall grass. / Like zebras stacked and wrapped in horizontally striped black and white socks. / The interest lies, perhaps, in this specific shard. I do not believe I have more of a facility. I think I have less. I think that I am in this manner more stupid than the people that I know intimately. Than those that I read about. In some sense I am dumber, I guess. / I can’t see memory, anyone’s memory, as being a continual, smooth line of experience. / You can drop a lit match into turpentine and it will sizzle out. Also into petrol and methylated spirits. The flash point is over-ridden by the impact with liquid. Zz-sh. Fire-free. / We are formed by our memory and choice, and so much, oh so much so, by the threads of what we have found to be the most powerful and beautiful. I believe that what I have seen informs others of their beliefs and the tenets of morality that instruct them is in actuality some kind of AESTHETICS. Take me down to my essence, to where I brood in my hind brain animal honesty, and you will find this. I believe that it correlates with how everyone (yes, bathe in the light and beauty of this instinct) forms the core of their beliefs. How we are formed. / BY BEAUTY. / And then from an extension of one selection after another built partially from each other and extracted and separated each time by aesthetic appreciation every instance. / There is some inseparable connection here between memory and action. We remember in some unconscious manner what we have chosen to believe, what we have found most powerful in the past, what HOLDS MORE MEANING FOR US THAN ANYTHING IN OUR EXPERIENCE – and this informs us how we should ACT. How we answer the phone what we eat who we sleep with what pets we have our reaction to the flies buzzing around our brilliant heads, how we will SPEAK and what we will say. Every choice we make. What we are thinking of as we lie dying and which fucking CEREAL we pick. / These things link hands and tell us whisper to us. Beauty and memory. Instinct and experience. Move my hands over the dirty keys and glance outside into the hot white summer light. I choose. We choose. I am informed as to how to choose. By a process I don’t and perhaps can’t understand. / The way we move and behave is extracted by the shattered lines of our memory. It is NOT a procession of smooth and comprehensible awareness. / I think this is what is dictating what I am writing. / And since I feel that I am in this way DUMBER than others, well, hm, I am left in an ocean of unconnected experience. / Bleh. Maybe I am just being a wanker and reading into everything wayyyyy too much.
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Pastels on Paper… SOCIAL MECHANICS The hell in the wall. I’ve never been able to understand social mechanics. It seems that people will have an intense dislike for me and I can never work out why. I slip through the fabric of the social menagerie and seem to offend people every step I take. I am not cruel or vindictive. I don’t have that in my nature. I guess it might be that I get angry and lose my temper and wax lyrical in the face of stupidity, but I don’t do that very often. It remains an eternal mystery to me. People float in and out, sometimes they’re cruel, sometimes flippant, but always enigmatic, and I feel like I have (of course) a scream in my throat at the absoluteness of the lack of communication. We’re all fucked up, some of us have been crippled by life’s great turning wheels, and yet there is no solidarity. 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, a universal silence under and inside the endless chatter. Shouting out our apathy and miscommunication. 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. My features will collapse into the gargoyle that many seem to find in my traditional and bland features. I will be sibilance and palsy. / But time is so slow so slow to me now People seem to me to be moving in stutters of motion and talking in riddles, though that in itself is nothing new. / No, not anything new at all.When someone asks how it is that you are miserable, look at Johnny, he’s got cancer and both his parents have just died and have you smelled his breath? It’s tragic. How can you be sad, look at your life, you have everything? I have always thought, well, I’m sad for Johnny too now. And I’m guilty, that’s for sure. And I’m sad for the kid I taught when I was on teaching prac’ that was so wrapped up in autism she couldn’t even fucking see, and I’m sad for the old woman I saw all covered in makeup and perfume for NOONE and I’m sad for the aboriginal kid I saw today, who’s father’s shattered alcoholic face was buried in her sweet golden hair.
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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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Pastels, 120×90 cms. Yeh… well, you know I am such a damned romantic! Hope and mebbe lust and some mismatched socks that are still really warm?Poetry? / Sure - ‘Sharita’: Tired like the edge of the night like three fingers of an early dawn / scratching in the wet opacity dirt. / Sitting on my lap like a warm stone on a cold day. Given to me wrapped up in sweat and cotton and so real / so tiny / so real so / warm; something else / something different, / something new entirely? / History swarming up in both brains and clotting us / but sweet with exhalation (transfigured water-struck and full full full.) Each one a curled ankle an epic plan a throbbing / psychosis a gift a laughing sickness a gaseous truth. A ride home in the night when it’s too late / for trains or pity / and neither of us needs it anymore / Anyway and for once that’s okay, / That’s okay. / Sleep late into the warm night. / Sleep warm into the soft night. / Loss like breath for each of us, / but I’m smelling skin
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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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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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Oils on Canvas. / Found a better pic of an old work, long sold. / Peace amidst atrophy; the oddness of it, a decaying world in which beauty sleeps, careless and comforted. 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, holding the world clenched in vehemently, intensely ALIVE wonder. Both faces of Janus for me, for you, a dark and hungry god. 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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PAUL IS A LITTLE TOO AWAKE Do you feel as I do? my brothers and sisters? deviants and mutants and freaks and angels? – does it move you like this. Like – THIS? It swings and burns and riots inside me sometimes – sudden tastes uncertain and anomalous – each sense fitted up and mis-wired with invention. / Show me that synchronous similitude: Following Orpheus as he follows Eurydice into the dark. The dark that I have been sucking, gulping into me since I first lifted my wide wide gaze to the moon. Rising ancient and cold. Eating darkness and it tastes…. Human like you, yes! Let me exist as you, I want to sear your mind show me where you hide your kindness so that I can rip it from you with my red real teeth. / Sad and soft sounds sticking in my throat, in the softness behind my words. Behind my panicked, violently blue eyes. / I once… I made a man cry with my work – Triggers in his own bruising mind clipping sore and real and true. / A strong man and brave. A man… my oldest friend; he whom I have not never seen shed tears. Not in twenty hard years of the hard corners of a brutal and difficult life. He has healed himself now. He is in love with his wife. He would kill and die for me… / Women and men have shed tears at my work. / They have I have seen them I was there I saw I saw and my memory is quick sometimes and it frightens me with clarity so sharp and real. I trace the path of their tears in the air before me. AND I ALMOST SOB. / Stop it. Stop it stop it. The emotion, unnameable, is colossal impossible. / Stop. / Deep breath, try. Shudder once more. My own tears hot on my cheek. Sip something cool, open a fucking window? Put the kettle on again forget put it on again forget and remember that I have done this twice and limp back to my work. I stand. I twist my strong, deft hands against each other. I fail without simple answers, stuttering ambiguities sincere and desperate. A gasp of longing slips from my tongue flicking outwards from my undecided lips like a creaking leather whip. / Calloused and scared and still and always smeared (STILL YES! WHY I CAME IN HERE! REMEMBERED YAY!)with paint. It is so beautiful. It frightens me. / I step numb to the bathroom twist taps in unfeeling slippery fingers paint. It makes things…hard to grasp. Hah! Puns rule… Shock and cold and it tastes so sweet and I could drink such water as this, forever cool. False insectile legs pricking my skin even as I scrub it, prickling through my hair. / I pour clear cold water in a winding trail down my back and hold my head under the tap for as long as I can bear. / Oh, to find a baptism such as this – at the hands of one so replete with belief that what they may have been disintegrates before the throb of divine insistence. Baptised by a drowning. / For this act, to find faith in warm human hands… In some symbol ancient and quivering with the force of certainty. With fucking CERTAINTY (“doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one” – Voltaire, the wily old bastard). With faith. / Measured in millions of long dead believers embraced in the sweet surety of ritual – beneath the crying cup. / Dust strewn under hard, calloused hands. Angels? And dust? We must be both! Concentrate! / As the cool water runs over the yielding welcome of my eyelids. / The last and least peace that I can find. / My own faith… zealot of nothingness, disciple of CHANCE. Rhapsodist in ephemeral accident so pure its coldness burns. / I hear the hiss of the plumbing, the booming blood surging in my ears. I breathe some rushing strand of the water and cough hard. Enough. / I bang my head, on the tap, even as it vibrates to my sight in the tricking slight of hand of mild hallucination. / Only me. Shiver and shake. Force out each claw into a supple human finger, nails painted deep sapphire blue. They are calloused from my guitar, still stained with my paint and sore from the incessant scrape of life at their raw nerves searing just under the skin. / Squint and glare at my reflection. Snarls have always just looked completely silly on my face. I must smile. Smile smile. The shape of the bone, the skull, under the gums. / The sink is covered in paint. Faucets young but obsolescent. Plastic decay matching my own. / Flick my hair back just so and water sprays lightly. It seems to fall in jerky staccato accelerations and infinitesimal pauses. Some of the drops on my open palm. They roll and rattle into each other like flawless crystal marbles before dissolving into water once more. / This. Endless. Endless. Impossibility… this mammoth UNNAMED and UNNABLE emotion. That my senses distort when I must see to work to breathe to work see to paint to live. / It is so heavy. I want it and hate it and crave a name for its crippling mass upon my heart. / For now… / Trick it with beauty. Paint. Be brave. Courage my friends, my siblings, my lovers. / Angels and dust. Concentrate!
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A Clockwork Crow by Paul D Robertson Pastels, 100×85cms Winning Piece, 2002 Wongan Hills Art Awards Sold. This piece is important to me. It provides a clear example, perhaps the most clear I have, of the narrative symbolism that lies at the core of my work. I am an existentialist. This sounds complex (it isn’t), and a lot of people don’t know what it means exactly so I will explain briefly. It comes basically from working out how to live in the absence of a belief in God; from atheism. / If God is removed from our ideas about what constitutes our lives, then it would seem that what we are would be, by that very fact, diminished. It denies us the framework that has traditionally defined our place in the universe, and it also appears to deny what generates the fundamentals of our morality. I don’t believe that this is the case. Existentialism means that we exist, and that is all. There is no afterlife in this belief, no final judgment or even, for that matter, a judge. It doesn’t allow for the reassuring presence of a mighty being watching over us and directing the events of the world. So it seems that the meaning of our lives is less. But it works differently for me. / That our lives have a finite and absolute end does more than leave us homeless and lost in the void. The only thing that is certain in our future is the surety of our own death. This sounds bleak, and in many ways it is. But what it also does is apply to our lives and existence an ultimate importance to us, a preciousness that comes from the very belief that life is fleeting. It gives each moment that we live power and BEAUTY because this is all we have. This is what most of my work is about. / Clockwork Crow is a potent example. I use narrative symbolism because of its clarity to me personally, and I try and accomplish beauty through aesthetics as part of the narrative: this is where I find meaning in my life – in the exquisite splendour of the instant that we exist. / People have different interpretations, always – art is subjective after all. But what I intended when I painted it was very clear to me. The beautiful girls holding each other… it is the perfect and absolute moment. They are doomed to change and this is what defines their beauty and gives it value and importance. They are comforting each other in the face of this. / The crow in the window symbolizes change and death. The clock represents the inevitable passage of time. We are trapped in the moment, if it really is all that we have. If religion – God – is removed from belief: then we must find comfort and solace, we must find MEANING in each instant we exist. It is THIS that constitutes out lives.
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pastels, water and mould damage (the mould is dead now though. i think.) / I did a sketch of a renaissance masterpiece, though which one escapes me like the name of the first girl I kissed… / The sketch got left in a badly made cardboard folder, in turn left in one of my less spectacular residences. / The damage made it more. Sometimes it does. Don’t count on it though. Also I love the Orpheus myth, of course. Child of Morpheus; the Greek god of Dream. I look at my hands. It is almost inconceivable that so much could be wrought by something that seems so simple. Everything I am surrounded by has come from the these three jointed fingers and two jointed thumb, from this slab of muscle and bone, a wedge of ordinary, common flesh. Objects smoothed and cut and furrowed, drawn and built, made from machines made from machines made by hands, adapted from older machines, drawn delineated, carved and cast. Astonishing capable and versatile tools, a pencil holder and maker, world altering gun builder, love-maker, architect and destroyer. Or, as Monty Python put it in the Meaning of Life, people aren’t wearing enough hats. Ask…. How was this day spent? Did the hours that passed over me, under me and through me, add up to anything at all? Were my gritted teeth and reaching spine accomplishing strength or waste? / And hey, what the fuck, what difference would it have made, as the walls the ceiling the floor the air itself teems and swims and brims and squirms with seething, irresistible life, a wild mutating sea of it dancing on our skins. Each swaying humming atom of each cell a wonder of placement and order, we wear these miracles, hold them inside us, unconscious and what are we but an illusion within an illusion a Russian doll striated with consciousness lapping our own inevitable sensory LIES? / Spoiled and rotted with delusion and memory, hot with denied futility, with aching rasping vanity, digested and recreated each sweeping fucked up morning. How many times will we watch the moon rise, the sun rise, watch a storm wracking the steaming ocean, open our mouths to the pure rain, fuck under the fluted cadence of the stars, how many, how many, before we never again have the chance? / Find the value, a heart skip of means, an agony of choice. Lips mouthing violent truths – touch the hand of a child, thought and love over proof and cost. / Calm ourselves in walking sleep and waking ruin. How many of us are blind to it all? To even the first stuttered consonants of the questions? / Am I really the one with the delusions…? / It’s true, it is. I have never been able to even hold a JOB. I can barely pay the bills I need to be able to survive… I am in so many ways what would be described as a contemporary failure. I don’t own much that has not been given to me. I exist at the very end of means, I am in the lowest bracket (and here’s something in brackets to make my pointed point) of income that this society has, and this society measures success by dollars. And yet I can exist only on its sufferance. Were this any other age, I would starve. A supplicant, as I have always been. Ah well, ah hell. / It’s not only that, of course. I am getting older… and though I rant and rave and rave about value and awareness I have no idea how to amplify what I already have, and if the way I live now is any more authentic or real than anyone else. I could spend my hours, I have considered this, I could spend my hours and days helping people, working towards the easing of suffering, fighting against real monsters. I don’t know where or how to begin. / Bleed white into the dark. Wish and wish and wish again.
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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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Charcoal and Chalk 89×68 cm not shown it anywhere as yet, still unframed and unsold. dumb really. hm. I used architecture a great deal in the earlier parts of my career (not actually very long ago now). I invented this piece – I was trying to get across some of the desolation I felt. I have since largely abandoned using structures in my works as central features, I find that nothing in my experience works as effectively as the human figure itself we say so much, so very much with the slightest curve of a pale finger. Still. Ruins are cool. You should see my lungs :-) Fear rant… yeh… When what happens is this: / A moment, an image. A shock of realisation – if that is what it is. / I lift a drink to my lips and there is a red stain on the glass – a viscous, crimson liquid. My pupils widen in shock and I drop the cheap tumbler from my fingers, spilling fluid down the front of my shirt and I think – I know - / For this, this is not sane this is a moment of insanity this is not real. This is so far from real that I am lost. / Can we – does it work in this way in this manner, are we aware? Is knowledge, awareness, a proof of sanity in itself? Is this absolute saturated fear a concrete ridge of rationale? Is it the pace the meter the rhythm of madness? / Can the insane know that they are insane? / OK, ok, yes. Yes. / One from another a step into the fucking light and find a handhold though it is sharp and rusted and tears the hand that grips it – and with creaking bones wrapped in thin flesh lever and pull until once more we are convinced… that this world that we see; that this light that spills over these keys from this screen is the wholeness and purity of the world. / The panic is an illusion a confabulation and is the evidence of wild instability in its very focus and sharp bite. The fear itself is the only answer. It is the depth of it the breadth of its reach in our hearts and fingers that we must, we must control and hold. / That the dark stain existed: that it can be seen by rolling eyes other than mine flashing white and weird in the night: this is not the question that tears. / It is the blind panic itself. Its own monster. Cruel and huge grinning up at me. What happens to us when we snap into focus and listen to the singing blood in our ears. When we know that for this moment despite anything else any appetite or false glow of reason any tight wires across our skins or brilliant lights drawn across our minds – that we can see in our bloody heads and straining fists that for this time this great time this whole moment this exactitude of clocks and paucity of stuttered beats that this is insane? / The thought itself tart and violent in our throats and hands. Defiled and filthy with awareness and self generation but / What / The / Fuck. / Because there is no lie greater and more true than one whispered to ourselves in the night – peeled back in the pain of fear in sweat and tremor in stretching BONE. In the deep moaning terror of silence. It is our own selves creeping behind us, in the shadows, the shadows, the empty stairs of our minds. / This is the horror the truth about black claws that drip and rip. / Of laughter misplaced, hollow. Shuddering and inexplicable. / It has never mattered; more than the soft flesh at our temples, beneath our wild, wild eyes, our wounds sure and sore rough beneath our fluttering eyelids. More than the depth of the shadows in the corners of our cold rooms. It is the cold / INSIDE US / That we must fear. / The sharpness of sudden breath, of smoke that is STILL. / The turn of a jaw the clench of old teeth, feet pressed together bones indeed that TWIST that were never meant to twist whose arc was defined and pure something, yes, / Some part ancient and chill in the deep shadows. / Utterly cognizant inflexibly real frozen in awareness crisp with line and light. That there are bodies hung from hooks somewhere in the skeins and flares and redness; torque and wire-tight flesh lies masques. That there are within us inside us each, monsters and horror. It is that these things that they are that they have us in their dry white grip (our own). / This is the truth. / Our perceptions matter not, never as deeply as our fear. Tease the fear from the hungry wetness of our heads pull it like an old suture from an infected wound; hot to the touch burning and sick. / It is this untamed cut and flare of pain. A bleeding eye that chatters its etiolated bleaching freedom and dawns starring our vision. Fired with life. This IS us, it defines us we are made from fear a mangled hideous groping. The spark in absolute darkness – / It is our genius. / It turns us flesh bone thought and gall into the depth and dismay of the real. The stain spreads impossibly around me, clutching at my skin. / I am out of my mind. I know secret things. I am more alive.
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Watercolours on Paper / 64×38 cms it seems i am single again… hurts like a BITCH don’t it? / DARKLING (mp3 by me sung by me recorded by me) / Hard clay and salt, a cloudwall or a ground shudder. / Ions into charged air, thrashed flowers and chewed fingers, / blood on the corner of your mouth. / A topiary of flesh, vents of skin and / bouquets of lips pressed to mine. / Deep furrowed and rendered stone over a dull baleful, / challengeless and soporific stare. / Cold metal against my cheek in my ears and falling from my mouth. / Turn your face from mine again, close your wet dying eyes and / tilt your arching jaw at the sun. / Tread softly, tread sweetly step lightly with picking care / shoulders hunched and knuckles white. / Pink tongue flicking between white eating bones and pushed through a staring cry. / Hold my hand again like it’s truth, small and comfortless, pale and ugly and fragile. / Half-lit and only what it is after all. / Pinch my palm and let’s run and run and maybe scream, turning our heads / with our teeth chattering in the wind in the night. / Flayed open like a romantic on a stretcher; pull the lights from my eyes they are / crossed out with bright red chalk. / Miss a few pages and find me a space on the panelling, / arms crossed against the small of my back, / nails tight and fierce in the morning sun. / Words spread out around you scratched deep / and hard into the floor written puckered testimony punctured and called. / Pushed and held against the sky like a bad coin. / Seven lines misspelled and annealed, annotated and confessed. / Sealed and heated like that, like us, spoken and contracted. / Like us, always leaving. / Thick with motion. / Slow with deliberation. / Loud like a pane of shaking glass. Home now, go home my sweet born liar, A final glance at the corner swelled up inside / Changed accelerated ameliorated and broken. / Placed and turned once more; / Flecked with hardness and foam / Inappropriate like a sharpened twitch Collected and acquiesced / Like us / Tired and halting, / Clenched finger-prints over wet glass / and just one more FUCKING STEP / Wheeled and rattled and stabbed with a finger in the chest. / Chosen for it with a weave of threads / Exquisite and miniature, / Flush with their own heat / Heavy and viscous, slow with density / With care / With weight Like us, exhausted, hesitant. / Breathless and lonely, oh lonely yes / Tricked into empathy betrayed and reaching. As the light fades / As the game ends / As you close your eyes / Heartsick with it, / A hand hanging over the bedside / The other curled against / Your chest / Like a child.
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Watercolours 40cms or so high www.pauldrobertson.com One of the reasons why I Still love water-colours. For skin, there is a certain surreal quality that is harder to reach with other mediums. the original is far softer. Hard to get good representations. Hard clay and salt, a cloudwall or a ground shudder. / Ions into charged air, thrashed flowers and chewed fingers, / blood on the corner of your mouth. / A topiary of flesh, vents of skin and / bouquets of lips pressed to mine. / Deep furrowed and rendered stone over a dull baleful, / challengeless and soporific stare. / Cold metal against my cheek in my ears and falling from my mouth. / Turn your face from mine again, close your wet dying eyes and / tilt your arching jaw at the sun. / Tread softly, tread sweetly step lightly with picking care / shoulders hunched and knuckles white. / Pink tongue flicking between white eating bones and pushed through a staring cry. / Hold my hand again like it’s truth, small and comfortless, pale and ugly and fragile. / Half-lit and only what it is after all. / Pinch my palm and let’s run and run and maybe scream, turning our heads / with our teeth chattering in the wind in the night. / Flayed open like a romantic on a stretcher; pull the lights from my eyes they are / crossed out with bright red chalk. / Miss a few pages and find me a space on the panelling, / arms crossed against the small of my back, / nails tight and fierce in the morning sun. / Words spread out around you scratched deep / and hard into the floor written puckered testimony punctured and called. / Pushed and held against the sky like a bad coin. / Seven lines misspelled and annealed, annotated and confessed. / Sealed and heated like that, like us, spoken and contracted. / Like us, always leaving. / Thick with motion. / Slow with deliberation. / Loud like a pane of shaking glass. Home now, go home my sweet born liar, A final glance at the corner swelled up inside / Changed accelerated ameliorated and broken. / Placed and turned once more; / Flecked with hardness and foam / Inappropriate like a sharpened twitch Collected and acquiesced / Like us / Tired and halting, / Clenched finger-prints over wet glass / and just one more FUCKING STEP / Wheeled and rattled and stabbed with a finger in the chest. / Chosen for it with a weave of threads / Exquisite and miniature, / Flush with their own heat / Heavy and viscous, slow with density / With care / With weight Like us, exhausted, hesitant. / Breathless and lonely, oh lonely yes / Tricked into empathy betrayed and reaching. As the light fades / As the game ends / As you close your eyes / Heartsick with it, / A hand hanging over the bedside / The other curled against / Your chest / Like a child.
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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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charcoal and chalk 90×60cm I have a fascination with architecture and history. I have been trying to fill all the holes in my knowledge of world history for the last hm twenty years yikes. It is very hard to find the kind of building that I would like to photograph or paint in Western Australia. We are just too young a country, and I feel the lack of history keenly at times.The room I took from an image I found online and the figure is of my own invention.I sold this piece quite early on in my career (not that long ago really) for far, far too little. But hey, I got to eat well that week… and… / BEING WRONG… I found this letter today. i wrote it 8 years ago, when i was working as a stock manager and fucking it up completely, costing the poor bastards who employed me so much money… though I tried SO hard. it is I believe an example of believing in the wrong thing… not myself, i mean… anyway… here… Hey, babe. / I actually went to work today. I am learning all about stock management… / Yes. / I know. / I looked in the mirror today and had to look again to make sure it was me, and then waved my arms around a bit and tried some unusual facial expressions. I have approximately the same haircut that I did when I was fourteen. At least I’ve stopped wearing the pastel shirts though. It was me. / In the mirror that is. / Blech. / Problems with despair. I have given up drinking now. Oh, yes. No more hangovers in the morning for Paul. I have looked that cold frosty beer with the condensation forming on the outside and the perfect crisp bitterness and just the right amount of head on a hot day when I’m surrounded by friends gazing out to sea after a hard day’s work and said “no thanks, no way man, I don’t want none of your sublime idealised taste, nor do I wish to partake of the feeling of absolute release that you can bestow upon me with the simple action of me drinking you.” / And I’m better. / I can now not only get, but also hold a job. / Yea, verily, and I don’t feel that I am particularly likely to get beaten up or fall down any stairs and getting arrested is not really on the cards any more either. / But I am the same. I really am the same. / I don’t feel sick as much, and I’m not quite as anxious because now I actually know what I did last night, but I am the same. / The cool thing about being an alcoholic was that there was always the feeling that somewhere in my future was a sober version of myself that was going to take over the world and if I wasn’t cursed with alcoholism, then (and when that curse was lifted and the gypsies got back to their wagons) there would be world conquering Paul. Paul that was unstoppable. A Paul that knew what it was that he was supposed to do. / This vision, I think, really did sustain me in my, um, darkest hour. Or hours. / “Ooh, just you wait, world.” I’d be thinking as I tried to comb the vomit out of my hair. “When I clamber and scuttle my way out of this ‘ere gutter,” I’d say as I eased myself gently back into it and settled in the mud, blood and refuse, “why I’m gonna be able to, you know, just like, know how to live man. There’ll be this job that’ll be just, you know, satisfying like. And this woman I’m going to have we-e-ll. Is she going to consider me doomed and scary? I think not. Is she going to adore me? I don’t think that she will have any choice in the matter. That world peace thing? Fixed. The ozone layer? Painted over, man, and all those hippy faux intellectuals? In death camps, man, cause I’ll be runnin’ things. / “Pulitzer prize? / “Mine. / “Swartzenneger? Little guy compared to me. / “Pink Floyd? U2? Who were they? / “Picasso? I can’t even spell Picasso. Is there an “f” in there, I dunno.” / Why would I be depressed if I didn’t drink any more? And why would I possibly be angry if there was no blood in my eyes in the morning? / Why, if I could keep my hand steady, I’d be guiding the universe. / But this, sadly, turned out NOT to be the case. / It turns out that I wasn’t really meant to do any of these things, and though some of them may have been possible for me when I was young enough to take the path that would lead to the kind of success I had always believed myself destined for, those years have already passed. Not only that but in the process of the very very very slow learning curve that showed me that it was not really a particularly good idea to drink all the time, my confidence, my faith in myself and the power that I believe that I once held in my hands from that, got beaten out of me with a big blood spattered stick. / The truth, of course, is that I am JUST ANOTHER GUY. / I am JUST LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE. It’s very hard to accept. / And like, now I don’t have any excuses either. / But it’s not really a conceptual thing at all. It doesn’t have very much to do with the IDEA that I’m an average person. / I’m learning to cope with that, just like Doogie Howser had to, y’know, when he was passed seventeen and they kept the series going anyway. / The romantic worldview is the problem, you see. Particularly when you apply it to yourself. It doesn’t really work, and just fucking can’t really, can it? / I had to take the batteries out of the clock in the lounge room. It kept saying “tick” at me. It just would not stop. / “Tick. Here goes some more of your youth Paul,” it said to me as I examined the hairs on my forearm in minute detail again, “and – yep, just thought that I’d remind you. Tick . There was some more. And what are you doing with it? NOTHING. Tick. What can you think of to do with it? NOTHING. Tick. Oooh, there’s some more just dribbling away. Tick.” / I didn’t throw it across the room though. / I wish I could do stuff like that. I’m so fucking reserved. Wild boy no longer. I don’t hit stuff no more, don’t party no more, my body won’t even let me fucking sleep in any more. / I keep waking up at six thirty. / What the fuck is up with that? / I wake up in the morning and there it is. / Sword of Damocles or hole in the bridge or spark just not firing in the neural network. I wake up, and I feel okay, I’ll be making plans, considering options, lying there in the dark (my room has no windows, you see. Insular, really.) And then it will well up inside me, a cold palm on my young man’s heart, and I remember this feeling of loss, of open-mouthed breathtaking, unsupported grief. That that is me and my decree, what I know understand and loath. / We have options. I think that I am useful enough to be able to possibly make a difference in the world. But in the action of giving up drinking I had to let go of the delusion and embrace the understanding that I had always had in the deepest part of me. I know that I will not make any difference, not really. I am not going to be a great anything. (I DO HOPE, I DO BELIEVE, THAT I WAS WRONG, THAT I HAVE MUCH YET TO DO. I AM GLAD THAT I LOST THAT JOB. AH WELL… love to all, paul.)
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This text is a continuation of that started in the piece immediately preceeding this: sketching mad. I started drinking one afternoon was sure I didn’t go out or see anyone but woke up in a pair of dirty women’s underwear. / I was at a palatial house with a goddess and threw up in her spa. Don’t know her name I don’t think I did even then. / Winters were the worst always lost and drunk and cold always wet and so fucking far to walk in the rain. / Crashing twisting in fear and self-loathing, detesting, despising, abhorring leper outcast unclean. And so goddamned SICK pathetically grateful for whichever nutcase girl was looking after me and holding my long dirty blonde hair out of the bucket. / “Why do you hate us all Paul? Why do you do this?” / “I don’t hate anyone. I have never hated anyone. I am the avatar of dismay. I am the boiling man. I am just too selfish to die. / One of my good friends threw himself from a building and I stayed drunk for weeks. An old and loyal friend fought me in sneering drunken fury, both of so full of poison that we could not even form fists. Neither of us spilling heart’s blood whilst we fought, so young and so completely ridiculous. / Drowning men. / My ex-girlfriend spat in my face that day. Tried to catch a bus and buy vodka with blood running everywhere again from my own cheap knife the despite boiling inside me, rage a crevasse of pathetic sadness and grief for myself. For Andrew. For all of us feeding from ourselves eating our own venom until it bubbled and frothed in our mouths. I didn’t know where I was just fucked it all up and sullied the memory of a good man. Lost and wandering and crying fucked up and such a fool, such a fool so damned my scalding hell heated the slippery corners of my eyes. / He was the funniest fucker I have ever met. / Such waste. / S A D S I C K N E S S. / Fevers of blame and despair. Spreading between us like Andrews’ beautiful young body across the cement. / I miss him still. No note. His mother’s shuddering sobs shall not leave my memory and spilled in echoes over my ruin as I catalysed the manufacture of my own disgust. / Got so used to casualty wards where I would wake up (“seemed euphoric” I read on the chart) with stitches and no idea how I had got there who had taken me. Hit on the nurses, once one reciprocated I couldn’t fucking believe it. More psyche wards again and again I always liked the schizophrenics they were, at least, as mad as me. / Locked wards psychotics everywhere screaming at night. The half hour or hour or whatever the fuck it was we were allowed to wander around outside our cells, the men all of them except me, every one, ALL hung on the wire fence, heads at odd angles staring out, fingers through the chicken wire. Razor wire at the top. / I remember I had a chance to get out and go to the open wards an interview with three guys running the place. I looked forward to it for a week or something I don‘t know the haze too thick, chemical dust deep – I do remember the longing it I thought my articulation would save me again. I hoped and hoped waited got visited by three girls had tried to destroy with the holes in my heart, cutting arcing guilt betrayer that I was, liar, storm of pain my touch and words a plague of emotion. / They didn’t come back I think the number of doors with locks scared them though they all tended to think it was PRETTY FUCKING ROMANTIC. / I was tanked on some hardcore drugs I have no idea what. Varieties of thorazine the zine family yeah, a chemical lobotomy the pain whirling inside, a thrown running power saw spraying meat but no expression nothing connecting, shut out of my own body. / Got to the meeting and I opened my mouth in front of these psychiatrists and I could not SPEAK. Too wasted oh wasted yes but not in the fun way that’s for sure. / I could SHAKE though and I could drool cuz I couldn’t get my facial muscles under any sort of control. So I stayed there for another week or more weeks who the fuck knows? / Hated being there so I longed for squalour ethanol sex attention. Filled instead with drugs and shakes and sobriety. Polluted with chemicals worse oh fucking worse oh yes than my own toxic liquid destruction. / I DARE YOU TO FIX ME! / They had this thing where some poor lost mad bastard would stand up and say the THOUGHT FOR THE DAY after our group meetings with people rocking in the corners. They were all so fucked up most of them could barely speak some not at all others never shut up but they only spoke to people who were not there. I stood up and quoted Shakespeare for ten minutes. Midsummer night’s dream I think I thought it was nice and cheery for everyone. / “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…” / Got out and stayed on the drugs like a good boy but kept drinking and kept cutting. All the fucking useless things did was excise my personality make me impotent make my hair fall out make me fat make me slow and make me HATE. Worst of it was I could not react act my speed acuity lust passion poisoned memory gone awareness gone focused to an angel point into pure hissing SHAME. That I was born in a fucking PARADISE of love and that I had flared brutally, violently bright. I knew history enough to understand that we live in a utopia of humanism; I knew enough LIFE to know that I had been born raised loved and somehow STILL WAS by the most beautiful minds hearts and hands. / Mother. Father. Sister. Every kindness I had repaid with failure. I deserved every torture I could devise to inflict for betraying them so deep and hard, those who threw everything anything they could find to save me into the pyre of my fucking excuse for a life. / Shuffle along undead NOT LIFE PAIN but undead don’t fall and weep with acid logic with scalpel reason undeniable distress killing my father see his eyes watching me tear myself to pieces. Hooks of my own hurt see it in his shoulders slumped he has given up I hurt him so much he is dying ahhhhhHHH. Raised with passionate care, soft hands, sweet voices singing in the night care and care and care such a beautiful boy oh he is so beautiful the boy the betrayer the monster the liar the drunk. / Guilt an endless sun clawing every sense every thought and it was RIGHT it was TRUE the only thing I had ever done was break the bones in the hands that held me. Eat the life deserve this worse such a coward mouth red and sticky and still Life eater ALIVE I was still ALIVE why was I alive? i shall continue more posts tomorrow, serialised hm.
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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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Watercolours, only 20cm or so. just finished it… / here’s a song i wrote… I think maybe I took too much / Of that pretty, pretty powdery stuff / We knock over the washing up / Now we’re barefoot on broken cups… / She pulls at my clothes and I take her pulse. / And my kitchen is covered in dust… She makes me tea / She makes me tea / She / ... She makes me tea. / But we – never touch… / We never touch. She lay with me on the living, dying grass / Nothing endless, nothing vast / Frightened so scared / And pressed against the glass… She gets ice cream / On her purple dress / And then…just when… / I’m watching her get dressed / She says that patience / Is the saddest kind of shyness. It’s all that we have given / It is the shape Of our ruin But this isn’t a fever or a dream… / She’s wiping her hands onto her jeans / I ask her to stay, I BEG her to STAY / And that’s when she really starts to laugh Blown out like a light bulb a candle a mind… / We are… / So thin; / Our skin… / Is paper-light. / And she smiles… We fuck in a kind of trance / She calls it / Our Bone… Dance She makes me tea / She makes me tea / She makes me tea / But we never touch We… never touch
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Charcoal and chalk, 80×45 cms. Sold. / This piece was done when I was quite down. I think it shows in my work, It is unavoidable in art. Emotions will translate themselves into lines and shades unconsciously. Kirsty posed for me and I believe she was very down as well. Ah, well. Solace in art? Truth, maybe. Maybe not. Fortunately it does not diminish my skills, only my confidence. It is very clear to me which works have been done in times when I have been down: Small acts of Kindness, Funereal and Exit Music, etc. They all bear this soft hesitation. I wasn’t thinking of the Guns n roses song when i named it. At all.
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