Illustrators Australia Exhibition

Should be a good exhibition. I have two pictures in the show. You are all invited!

Icecream Truck

I was out walking with Dog this afternoon, when the icecream truck went by.

It drives near where I live fairly often. With so many apartments, there are always bound to be a few kids wanting to buy an icecream.

The icecream truck used to always play 'Greensleeves' but lately, it often plays 'Lambada'. Did they change the tune to catch the attention of the demographic that pays for the icecreams?

Today, the truck played 'Greensleeves' and it reminded me of a man I knew, who was once a little boy. The little boy's mother often didn't have enough money for icecream, so she told her little boy that when the truck plays the music, it is the driver's signal that he has run out of icecream. For years the little boy believed this story.

The man grew up and had two children. He told his children that when the truck plays the music, it is the driver's signal that the truck has sold out all its icecream. But his children never fell for the story.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year! (Slightly belatedly.... well..... I'm not exactly known for my punctuality.... )

I have a feeling that it will be a very great year.
Malo and I watched the New Year's fireworks from our balcony. We couldn't see the fireworks cascading from the harbour bridge, because we're too far away, but we had a great view of all the fireworks in the sky.
We had our own little party, we lit lots of sparklers and we drew patterns and words in the air with them, we shared the sounds of celebrations of people in other apartments., and at midnight people yelled 'Happy New Year!" to each other across the buildings. Malo also insisted that we listen to ABBA, so we did.
Dog hid under the bed. He doesn't like fireworks, even if they're far away.

Thank you

Dear readers: thank you for reading my blog this year, and for your kind comments, even though my posts have often been intermittent at best.

I plan to blog much more regularly from now on.

If you would like to win one of two calendars I am giving away free, just let me know in the comments below. I will randomly select the two winners next Friday (4 Dec). Free postage to anywhere in the world included :-)

At last

The 2010 calendar is finally ready. The illustrations are a bit of an assortment: a few linocuts, a couple of watercolours, pencil drawings, even a multi-plate etching and a screenprint. here are some images that are a few years old, but I liked them and thought they needed to come out from just sitting in an art folder.

As usual, the calendar is printed on recycled card and is in a CD-style cover that folds out. If you would like one (or more), you let me know via the Edition9 website, or here. If you already have a cover from a previous year, I can send pages only at reduced cost.

Hope you like it!

Comet

The moon sleepily cast its silver light over the meadow, as the gentle cow still nibbled on dew-covered blades of grass, late into the night.

A strange box-shaped comet burnt across the sky, but nobody saw it, and nobody heard it.

Alien food

I found these pictures again yesterday. They are from a few years ago.

They reminded me of the time when Malo told me that he was half-alien. For some months, my little half-alien would only eat mash potato with sauce pictures. I was endlessly peeling and boiling potatoes. Mashed with butter and milk, then got to work with the sauce bottle. There were sauce family portraits, sauce drawings of the moon and the stars, our car, our house, and Malo's name (frequently). But these are the only ones I took photos of.

Anyway, he survived the mono-diet and seems to eat 'normal' food now.

The cosmologist said...

I vanished for a while. Sorry if you missed me. I slipped into a wormhole and took a while to find the way out again.

Anyway, last night I had dinner with my friend Catherine and she told me that she recently had a conversation with a cosmologist. That must be an interesting job. I wonder, are they physicists or philosophers or both or neither? The cosmologist commented that, when humans on our planet look up at the dying sun in 5 billion years time, those humans will have as much similarity with us as we do with amoeba.

For me, that idea is simultaneously completely comprehensible, and utterly incomprehensible and beyond imagination.

White laminex

When I hear the phone ring, the first thing I do is pick up a pen or pencil. The second thing I do is pick up the phone.

It doesn't matter if I don't have a piece of paper I can use right there, because the top of my desk is white laminex.

As I talk on the phone, I subconsciously scribble and draw and take notes on the laminex desk top. When there are so many scribbles that there is no room for any more, then I wipe the top of my desk clean with eucalyptus oil or metho, and I start again.