Creature, page 2
SHADE
I KNOW
JUST DO WHAT THEY TELL YOU
LITTLE FARMER
ERIC
A DANGEROUS GAME
NEVER FORGET TO BRING A GIFT
WHY DID YOU MAKE ME THIS WAY?
THE FAVOURITE AUNT
READER
THE WAY
WALKING WITH MOTHER
TALKING WITH FATHER
HOME-MADE OWL
HOME-MADE CHAMELEON
Clockwise from top: MAIL PARROT, TENNIS MOUSE, BEE-EATER, WOMBAT
Clockwise from top: CARPET SHARK, HOUSE CAT, MINI HUMAN, COIL SPRINGBOK
ANYTHING YOU CAN DO, I CAN DO BETTER
NEVER BE LATE FOR A PARADE
NEVER GIVE YOUR KEYS TO A STRANGER
ENEMIES
SECRET
TENDER MORSELS
MERCENARY
THE GREATEST CAT IN THE WORLD
TELLING YOU EVERYTHING
UNDERTOW
NIGHT OF THE TURTLE RESCUE
MOTHER AND CHILD
LOCKDOWN
ALL YOU NEED
THE MUSEUM OF ALTERNATE HISTORY
WALKING HOME
THE MOTHER THING
THE GOOD LISTENER
EMOTICONS
A GIRL AND HER CAT
FAMILY PORTRAIT
THE COG
MYTH & METAPHOR
If you can hold this weirdness in your mind, you might just be ready for reality.
One of my favorite picture books as a child was Dick Roughsey’s The Rainbow Serpent (1975), a retelling of the Aboriginal story of Goorialla, the giant immortal snake that shaped the landscape of Cape York Peninsula in northeastern Australia. In the Dreamtime, the period in which the world and its stories came into being, Goorialla searches the landscape for people of his own language group and upon finding them teaches them how to dress and dance. But he also swallows a couple of young men seeking shelter from a storm, for reasons that are wonderfully unclear. As Goorialla sleeps on a nearby mountain, fellow tribesmen cut their kin free: the boys fly out of the serpent’s stomach as colorful rainbow lorikeets. When Goorialla wakes he flies into a rage, smashing the mountain into smaller landforms, killing some of his people with falling rocks while others hide forever by transforming themselves into the plants and animals we see today.
This story made intuitive sense to me, as a child, beyond anything logical, and decades later I’m still struck by Roughsey’s hypnotic paintings of the rainbow serpent, especially the vacant red pools of the creature’s eyes, such a perfect representation of inscrutable wisdom and passion. The landscapes are equally disquieting, distinctively Australian: plains with low horizons studded with elemental trees and people, stretching to infinite possibility while at the same time flattened to a nearly shadowless frieze, a distant memory, like fossils pressed in time. At the center of it all is the enormous serpent, Goorialla, coiling, dancing, awakening humankind to the elevating force of sacred art, only to crush it all with sudden violence. Which, true to his deeper nature, is yet another act of inexplicable creation.
The word myth, originating from mythos—speech, narrative, or fiction—has come to refer to any story that seeks to explain a natural or social phenomenon, notably involving at least one supernatural creature, whether a colorful serpent, an angel, a talking fox, or a cyclops. The word metaphor comes from a Latin phrase meaning “to carry across,” to transfer the qualities of one idea to another. As a storyteller and visual artist, I tend to think of myth and metaphor as more or less the same thing, and a useful way of framing my own attraction to imaginary creatures and the urge to charge them with narrative force, inspired by the very first stories ever told around a fire, or even before any flame was struck.
As they walk, fly, swim, and crawl, these creatures follow the deep ruts left in our cultural psyche by thousands of years of storytelling, everything from ancient religion to intergalactic space opera. Sphinxes, dragons, golems, and droids: these are things that infuse—and will continue to infuse—our everyday language and dreams, passed on through print, screen, and backyard conversation like hereditary strands. As an artist, I always like to check the “truth” of an image by trying to assess its similarity to those myths that fascinate me the most, like that of the rainbow serpent. Does a drawing or painting feel strange enough, yet also real, like the memory of something that happened a very long time ago? A story I may have seen, read, or heard about elsewhere? An old question in search of a contemporary answer?
Importantly, no good metaphor should be too transparent, too specific in the sense that one thing means or represents something else. I’m not a fan of symbols, signs, allegories, and allusions, where a painting or story requires decoding or special knowledge. Even a five-year-old should get a fair gist of any well-rendered narrative without having to ask for a meaning, hence my attraction to books for young readers as much as books for older ones. The long-eared creatures that colonize an alien landscape in my book with John Marsden, The Rabbits (1998), might draw upon Australian history, but they are too strange to properly signify it, nor do they need to be so particular. If anything, it’s the overall feeling of weirdness that is being shown, and this is the thing I’m most interested in as an artist—how things feel rather than what they mean, not unlike my first impressions of The Rainbow Serpent. The world around us and how it came to be is surely too strange a story to be reduced to clever signs and symbols. The best metaphors are always left open, unwritten, yet still feel true, regardless of who you are or what you know.
Similarly, the most memorable passages of traditional myths—especially my personal favorites, creation myths—defy any learned logic as if that’s a necessary condition of engagement. Clouds are made from the brains of a dead giant thrown into the air, the world rests precariously on the back of a tortoise, a creature with an axe emerges inexplicably from a cosmic egg, people and animals swap bodies willy-nilly, skipping barely a heartbeat or mention. There is a deliberate obfuscation of reality, testing the suspension of disbelief, as if to say, “If you can hold this weirdness in your mind, you might just be ready for reality.”
The dream-logic of myths is no doubt just that, borrowing from what is arguably the antecedent of all fiction: dreams. You need only recall the visions of last night’s sleep to know our brains assemble stories in very strange ways, in myths and metaphors that seem to acknowledge rather more than our conscious selves care to. What I love about drawing, especially loose and unplanned sketching, is that it approaches a kind of wakeful dreaming. I don’t often know exactly what I’m doing, but I let the lines uncover latent forms and intentions, like finding shapes in clouds or characters in ink blots, a flow of associations without too much calculating force. The process suggests some connection with more universal mythology, the tendency to let imagination run amok without relinquishing a safe tether to more familiar reality: masses, edges, textures, colors, and other recognizable elements that can be rendered by the material grit of a brush or pencil. Creatures in particular remain identifiable as beings that are clearly delineated on paper or canvas, stepping into a tangible, matter-of-fact reality of light and shadow, while at the same time drifting beyond description. They have weight and yet they are weightless.
In this way the best myths, fairy tales, and their descendants in satirical fiction—I think of works like Animal Farm (1945) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726), which had a big influence on me as a young illustrator—usually offer very flexible moral instruction. They don’t belabor us with didactic lessons, nor do they bless us with allegorical keys. Instead, they ask us to simply pay attention to our own hearts and consider the narrowness of our desires and prejudices, to weigh carefully what is right and wrong, and for what good or bad reasons. Are we a little like Orwell’s pigs in believing that some people are more equal than others? Are we more like Swift’s calm and rational horses, the noble Houyhnhnms, or the impulsive humanlike Yahoos, obsessed with pretty stones? The answer is never simple.
On one hand, the creatures of fables ask us to measure truth against falsehood, meaning against feeling, responsibility against freedom, and to engage other common dilemmas of human selfhood. On the other, to consider new ways of thinking and behaving altogether, to speculate about other possible selves. Any strange creature, wandering in and out of a myth, has the potential to resonate beyond the clarion call for moral humility, to something even more profound: conceptual humility, to realize that what you know is only what you know, a bunch of human presumptions, and probably not much to boast about in the scheme of things. The most enlightening encounter may well be the one you haven’t yet had, a thing that might call your most dependable notions into question, scuttle safe definitions, and stretch your mind just that little bit further. This challenge to complacency isn’t necessarily a threat, but rather a welcome relief. A freedom from comprehension, a playful joy. After all, the idea of a novel and nameless living being—as all animals, including us, inherently are—never fails to fascinate, and any brief sighting in a sketchbook always invites a memory, a passing recognition of something we know but find hard to explain. Perhaps the beginning of yet another strange but strangely familiar story …
FOUNDLING
FUTURE EATER
BIRTH OF COMMERCE
MARCH OF PROGRESS
SOWER
TOWNSHIP
THE CITY RISES
THE SHIP
THE RABBITS
THEY WON’T KNOW THE RIGHT WAYS
SUBWAY
CICADA
THE OLD COUNTRY
THE ARRIVAL
1854
CARGO
WHERE WE BURY OUR SECRETS
THE SOUND
ALL WE EVER WANTED
THE POISON MERCHANT
Clockwise from top: PILGRIMS, SOOTHSAYER, TANGO, TEACHER
Clockwise from top: BLUE MOTHER, CLAY MOTHER, STONE MOTHER, STORY MOTHER
THEORETICAL PHYSICIST
ELEMENTAL FORM MOVING TOWARDS A LAGOON TO BE BORN
THE STUDENT
THE GIFT
OLD SCHOOL
PREPARATIONS
AWAY WE GO
THE HARPY
THE SILENT SEA
THE RIDDLE
THE PACIFIST
THE SOURCE OF ALL THINGS
HOMEWARD
NEVER LEAVE A SOCK ON THE CLOTHESLINE
HUNGER
CLOUD
CYPRESS
Clockwise from top: BELIEF, LOCK, LENS, TOMB
Clockwise from top: FLEDGLING, EYRIE, CAVE, LIGHT
THE ROOMS
THE VILLAGE WEAPON
ANOTHER WAR ALREADY LOST
THE LAST DEMON
ENDGAME
BIRDS
Something about the very existence of birds seems impossible.
Around the age of eleven, I took a shortcut through the dark neck of a local park on my way to a friend’s birthday party, glittery card and hastily wrapped gift in hand. A scrum of squawks and feathers passed overhead, one of numerous bird wars that seemed so elemental to the canopies of Perth’s northern suburbs, filled as they were in those days with twisting, shaggy masses of tuart trees, alive with raucous life. Back then those trees were so ugly to me, so irregular and graceless. Unclimbable, rough, infested with spiders and other insects for which phobias are just waiting to be invented. The cursed home of broody, attacking magpies (the great dread of spring) and all those other volatile birds.
But much later, when I started painting my local landscape as an art student (too lazy to seek out more exotic subjects), I came to know these trees quite differently. I studied their bent masses of foliage, rising and hanging, forming caves or mouths, arcades and towers marking specific districts, thoroughfares, places to meet, hide, and nest, all shifting with the rake of a golden westerly breeze in the afternoon. Taking time to look—the true purpose of drawing and painting—I saw another neighborhood above my own, another country, a vast empire of birds. Compared with the structurally flimsy pretensions of human suburbia—a flat sprawl that survived only by the good grace of plumbing, petrol, and electrical wires strung everywhere like confessions of a conceptual weakness—these tree worlds were old. They were all that remained of the original coastal plain, but remain they certainly did. When painting them from the roof of my parents’ house, I came to realize how old this land really was. And also how interrupted it was by humans.
As a child, though, I probably more often felt the opposite. That humans were interrupted by nature. All this scrubby bush, well, if a bulldozer happened to come along (which they did seem to do, every other week), then good riddance. Too many bugs, too much sand, too many wasps, flies, and bees; gum leaves so stiff and flat on a driveway that no broom could move them; and an army of ants just waiting to rise up and overthrow us. Postcolonial hubris runs very deep and is so quietly transgenerational that you can’t even see it if you’re always busy sweeping and complaining, retreating indoors to read books about English gardens, Germanic fairy-tale forests, and white swans (not the black ones down the road). Too busy trying to get to a birthday party, worried about missing a piñata or some other fun cultural confusion.
When a small wattlebird fell from a tuart tree in front of me, a deeper empathy snapped to attention, a deeper reality. A compassion that bypassed all other thinking with a sense of kinship and purpose. The ruckus of birds ripping into each other moved on to another canopy, and I dutifully waited near this crashed aviator to see what would happen. It floundered about, a fluffy, dull-colored heap on the quiet grass. Clearly just a fledgling, perhaps it had strayed into the wrong territory or escaped a crow. I knew enough to diagnose a broken wing in what was now a nice snack for local cats and dogs. I bundled the bird carefully in my cap, mindful that you weren’t supposed to touch a bird with your hands (I couldn’t remember why), and ran all the way home, quietly pleased. The dark and ugly tuart trees had chosen me to save it. The birthday party could wait.
This small wattlebird became a family companion for many months after we nursed it back to health, taught it how to fly and feed itself from native flowers, even how to extract caterpillars from cocoons. It was not a pet so much as a neighbor, coming to live independently in the suburban wild, holding its own among other fierce birds and wily cats (including our own, which succeeded only in catching the bird’s detachable tail feathers), roosting in a tree by our window every night as if to maintain a polite orbit. Like an old friend it would occasionally land on our heads, hands, or shoulders when we ventured outside, poking its beak earnestly into our mouths or, with a noisy thrumming sound, our ears. It was never clear if this was a gesture of affection. It may have been that the bird was simply hardwired to check anything remotely floral for water and calories, things of some scarcity in the semiarid forests of its ancestry. Up close, you could feel the complex unity of an animal with its environment, a physical poetry. The way its clean feathers smelled faintly of sea breeze and herring, just like the wild, windy beaches down the road. How the tiny red ear-wattles had the vermilion wrinkles of a red-cap gum pod just before the flower burst out, the faint dusting of yellow pollen above its eucalyptus-twig legs, its eyes gleaming like hard resin. Every time, it felt like a tangible privilege to have such a creature perch on my finger as if I were just another tree branch, as if the vast spaces between us could so easily collapse, and I too could become part of an older landscape.
My fascination with birds grows with each new encounter, and I tend to paint them more than any other creature. I could offer an easy artist statement about why that’s so, about grand metaphors of flight and migration, themes which also interest me, and for which birds are especially useful imagery. But the attraction is much simpler than that. Something about the very existence of birds seems impossible. They are ethereal creatures of the earth and air, unimaginably refined and complex, yet so common as to be the first animal we usually see when looking through a window, or hear when stepping through a door. They are a perfect example of something simultaneously ordinary and miraculous just beyond our walls, both physical and mental.
