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"IceBergs" - photograph, Lindsay Colborne
There's so much more to these people.
In 1981 I worked as Camera Assistant on a feature film which was shot on Moreton Island just off the coast of Brisbane, Australia. You won't have heard of the film although I did see it on TV once. That is to say, it was on TV once, just once. This photo of some cast and crew members was taken during a swim on a rest day. What a beautiful place it was and what beautiful people. You spend six days a week living in tents on an island, making a film, getting little sleep, working hard and closely with 25 other people all with their job to do, each job interconnected and woven together to produce three reels of film that can be tucked under your arm or burnt to DVD and frizbee'd away. On the seventh day you rest in the company of friends with whom you hold a bond.
"Bird Tree" - Parrots in my Chestnut Tree, Winter, Lindsay Colborne
There was only enough room on the feed tray for two or three at a time and so the birds would wait their turn sitting in the branches of the Chestnut Tree.
When I was living in Olinda in the Dandenong Ranges just east of Melbourne, Australia, there was a Chestnut tree right outside my window. I placed a small tray of parrot seed on the window ledge in the hope that I may attract the Parrots and Sulphur Crested Cockatoos to my window, with the idea of taking close-up photos of them by setting-up my camera just inches away on the other side of the window glass. It took a few months to attract any birds at all. But slowly they came to the tree, and cautiously from the tree to the feed bowl. At first, the slightest movement I made on my side of the glass scared them away. They did not understand my strange and complicated ways any better than I did. But over time as they saw that my movements, though odd, were predictable and harmless, they stayed longer. After 12 months I had regular visitors to my window. They each had different personalities. This one shy, that one forthright. This one fearful, that one bold. I came to know and love them all, but always, i remained on the other side of the glass.
I've lately been thinking a lot about the trees and the birds and the beautiful people in the hills, feeding the kookies by hand and looking out through the trees to the lights of the city. Now is the winter of my discontent, and it's only autumn.
"The World of Men 2" - Photo + Mulberry Splat Painting, Lindsay Colborne
Here's the mulberry splat wall of men. It goes down there and around the corner with a gap up here to put a person into and complete the picture.
"The World Of Men" - photo + Mulberry Splat Mural, Lindsay Colborne.
This is a small bit of a large mulberry-splat-mural-painting that goes down the wall and around the corner. The mural is especially designed and constructed to be mono-coloured (primarily blue) and mono-subjected (the subject of men) so that it is not actually "finished" until somebody stands in front of it - and I take a photo to record that moment in time when the painting is finished. When the person moves away, the painting is no longer finished. When a new person stands in front of the mural, it is once again finished, but in a different way. A different conclusion. This painting is finished and then not finished and then finished again in a different way, over and over.
The above photo is a record of one of those finished times.
There are more.
"Splatt" - Mulberry splat painting, LC 1994
When I was living in Spring Hill in Brisbane (Australia), I had my 2 door 1966 XP white Falcon HardTop parked at the side of the house underneath a large Mulberry Tree. During the Mulberry season I discovered why it wasn't such a good idea to park my pure-white 2 Door XP Falcon underneath a Mulberry Tree. One morning I walked outside, took a look at my car and stopped in my tracks. Many mulberries had fallen from the tree and left indelible purple mulberry-splat stains all over my white-of-white pride and joy.
My first thought upon seeing the purple disaster was, "ARRRRGGHHHHH!!!!".
My second thought was, "NOOOOOOO!!!".
My third thought was, "Hang on... actually, hang on a second..."
And my fourth thought was, "...those mulberry splats look pretty good!"
I collected a couple of buckets of mulberries, stuck up some blank white art paper on the wall, invited a friend over, and we had a 'chuck mulberries at the pure white paper' party. Later on, after the splats had become permanent marks, I drew other stuff into them.
Getting the splats off the car is another story.
"Eating (The Fourth Wall)" - Toilet Mural, UQ Student Union, LC 1994
The Fourth Wall of Eating is the door.
I tell people it's a self portrait but nobody ever agrees with me. It was the first section that I painted and at that stage I really had no idea that i was going to do any more. I covered the existing appallingly bigoted graffiti on the door with a coat of white, and began painting. To get rid of that graffiti was the reason I was there, but at the same time I also saw my replacement painting as just another type of graffito, so I painted silently and secretly in the night just like a real graffiti artist.
As i did more paintings, people started talking about them and wondering who was doing them. We kept it secret for many months until people started to accept the "new graffiti". I heard one man say that his three year old daughter always insisted on be taken into that particular cubicle so that she could look at the cow on the wall.
The original idea of stopping people from writing immature and bigoted graffiti on the toilet walls was a success. They still graffitied the paintings but only in the flat colour areas and now the graffiti used the painting subject matter as a starting point for the graffiti subject matter. For instance, in one of the ribs of the man on the door somebody wrote, "No man has ribs like this", and later in the next rib down somebody wrote, "This man needs Jesus", and a few weeks later in the next rib down somebody wrote, "This man was Jesus".
The graffiti in the women's toilet in those days was usually much more enlightened discussion & ongoing written debates on various topics. It was far more entertaining than the crass bigoted male toilet graffito one-liners.
"Eating (Three Walls)" - Toilet Wall Graffiti, UQ Student Union, LC 1994
This cubicle has a meat eating theme. Starting with the rain forest on the first wall, clearing the rain forest to raise beef on the second wall, eating the beef as hamburgers on the third wall and the 4th wall, which is painted on the door and the subject of the blog entry immediately above this one... the effects.
"Eating (The Third Wall)" - Toilet Wall Graffito, UQ Student Union, LC 1994
I worked at the University of Queensland Student Union from 1991 to 1995 and in that time I went to the toilet many times. Information like that would normally be filed under "things you don't need to know" and this case is no different except that I needed to explain why I was in those toilets everyday day, and that's also fairly obvious, so I'll start again...
The old UQ Student Union male toilet cubicles used to be covered with so much bigoted homophobic racist immature and uncreative graffiti that i came to loathe going in there and subjecting myself to it everyday. So I decided to do a bit of graffiti of my own and create virtual themed cubicle worlds, a different theme in each cubicle. And above the urinal, paintings of faces of men looking secretly across and down to check out the size of other men's willies. And in the spot above the sink where the mirror used to be, a painting of someone checking himself out in the painted mirror. Etcetera.
I haven't been back to UQ for years but I'm pretty sure the building that these paintings were in has been demolished and replaced, so the only place my graffiti cubicles now exist is in my photographic records and in the memory all those who pooed and weed in them.
"Sacred Women's Rock" - (acrylic, oil, newspaper) LC 1999
I painted this picture at the Sacred Aboriginal Women's Rock in the Dandenong Ranges a few years ago. It's marked on the signs and maps with a white-fella name, but the locals know what it really is. And some of them know the energy and power of the place. The Women's Rock is a broad and nurturing expanse of rock on which one or many people can sit peacefully or lie in the sun and be at one with nature for a little while. It's a place to relax and unwind and know that everything is as it is meant to be. Just below is the Man's Rock; a much smaller shaft of stone protruding abruptly from the ground and just big enough for one person to sit on the top. Sit here if you need to fill yourself up with energy to attack the day.
WHY IS THERE NO ROCK IN MY PAINTING OF THE ROCK?
Before you go down to sit on the rocks, ask permission from the spirits of the place. If they say no, don't go. If you think it's beneath you to ask permission from the Spirit of the place before entering the area, don't go. in the past, we wouldn't have been allowed to go anyway. I had been going to the rocks daily for some time before i attempted to paint them. I needed to know I was accepted by them and I'm sure that I was. But going to sit on sacred rocks is a whole different thing to painting them. i have to go deep into a thing to paint it, and although I could feel that the rock was sacred, and I could sit on it and feel it's energy... back then I don't think I was ready to go deep into that sacred place, and I think the rock knew it.
I started several different paintings of the rock and each time I ended up painting only the trees around it. It wasn't that I couldn't have forced myself to paint the rock itself, it's just that i gravitated towards the trees. The new energy of the trees was easier to deal with than the old energy of the rock which contains so much memory of that place and of all the people who have come there for thousands of years. We feel the memory of places and things. This is why we are drawn to old growth trees which have avoided the axe for hundreds of years. They contain a memory and a power that we can feel and connect with. The big old companion trees to this rock had been cut down by the white settlers over 150 years ago for the wood and also to allow people to see the view. The whole mountain was dairy farmed and treeless. It wasn't until the 1920's and 30's that the farms were pushed out and the trees began to grow again. That's why all the trees on the Dandenong Ranges are the same height, they all started growing at the same time about 80 years ago. And that's how much memory the trees that have grown back up around the rock have. But the Sacred Rock is hundreds of thousands of years old and holds all of the memory of that place.
At the time, I thought the rock was saying to me, "You're not allowed to paint me".
Now I think it was saying, "How about painting the trees? They're nice."
And they were, but now it's time to go back and add the bottom bit to that picha.
