The Intoxication Of Shadows

THE INTOXICATION OF SHADOWS.

Available For Sale

Oils on Canvas, Paul Robertson.

90 x 72 cms.

This piece won the award for the international competition:

The "Emotional Compass Art Award."

Technically "The 41st Annual Congress Art Awards"

– for the –

"Royal Australia and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists."

The fact that this was a psychiatric convention sponsoring an art award is in actuality entirely incidental. There were pieces there with price tags over 50 grand. One or two were actually good. Well. One. In this instance the psychiatric context had nothing to do with my bipolar, nor was this connection even how I learned of the award.
This is not the first time the whorls and worlds in my work have crossed paths with psychiatry, and found response, reaction. Even cash. My last psychiatric nurse bought the pieces “Stairwell I” and "Jane dressing" as have other mental health professionals. Odd.
This is my first international award. It is a big deal for me.

I made this painting up almost entirely. The idea of the sublime, beauty and ecstasy. Is it not beautiful?

Sure, yes. Shadows that are beautiful. I finished it on my 34th birthday. Marks and notches in time. For which I was given a PADDLING POOL from a friend.

AND she ALSO made a CHEESECAKE!
Wow.

Another award... my ex Kirsty tells me that that makes it 19 awards altogether, but I can only find 11. She is probably right. I wonder where the rest of them ar e...

And I make steps, such steps. Further oh so much than a frightened and sad younger version of myself could have believed… far further than any reach of my short, muscular and scarred arms could ever have been imagined touching.

PAUL AND WORK – sad stories about trying to work out how to hold a shovel. It’s just a big spoon, you know. Where a man can call a spade “Loretta.”

I didn't’t believe I could make any money from painting, even suspect it, until I was 28.
“God made the world from the void. But the void shows through.” Paul Valery.
I knew there was so much inside me, so much boiling, RAGING at my ribs and throat!
I didn’t start painting until I was 23! 23!
What if I had started only 2 years before then, in hospital and in hopelessness? Five years! Ten?
I didn’t write then! No words, no paint. If I had started when I was still a beautiful teenager self-centered in furious self-hatred that was endless and all that I knew.
Never an image seeping scraped beautiful and new from my hands.
I gave up writing poetry at 14 to leave more time to masturbate! I had never had cause to regret this choice. I do of course… but regret eats violent and useless and I must work NOW work WORK WORK!!! Now that I DO know!
Paint while I yet live while the beauty and courage beat behind my lips scalding and frightening!
Remember what you were.

The exact colour of failure.
That would look cool on house painting colour charts amidst the other made up names! Eucalyptus green, sea green:
Frustrated beaver brown, carnally excited prairie dog off white, mandrill’s ass pink, gothic fake hair black, contemporary fear washed out blue, hippy belief system hypocrisy green and HERE everyone’s favourite, a square all to itself! A BIG square with bright lettering in all the colours that are utterly unlike it! FAILURE GREY.
I remember an almost divine moment of clarity. I was 19 or 20. I looked at who I was and what I was. I looked without madness or ethanol at the world that we have. I turned my young form, so hideous to me, before the light of judgment and the brightest of unflattering and searing lights: my own. I looked at what there was to DO. What was I supposed to DO?
So many people are hunted and haunted by this question for so very much of their lives. I did find an answer. But at that point, at the brutality of my own insight and honesty: I could not see ANYTHING in this society where I could even remotely succeed.
At that point, in violently exclusive terms, there was NOTHING that I could envision myself a piece of.
I knew even then.
Of course I did.
I KNEW that I couldn’t hold onto even the most menial, simple kind of work. That even labouring was not something I could sustain. That this most simple of all human endeavours was so completely out of my grasping aptitude. I thought that perhaps just by force of will, by desire and by forcing myself to work brutally hard, as hard as any man could: That then I could learn to be one of these men. Some of them held pride in their backs earned by thousands of hours of pain
I had already given up on working in any other capacity. The fear that I gave in to with every breath had taught me. Anything and everything else – any kind of work would only be another cut upon my arms. Another failure and a natural extension of the curse.
Ineptitude so vast. Endless. Yes. At least whilst I laboured and failed and was fired and was rehired somewhere else and was fired: at least there were different men each time. The tasks were different with each slip of blue paper. Stack this. Pack there. Pick this up and move it over there and do the same thing with the next fifteen thousand of them. I worked for a group called “Blue Collar People.” I went back to them and they would hire me again and again. My failure cost them nothing. They were paid an equal rate to that which I received. $11.35 an hour, for me and for the company that had allowed me to pretend that I could work for my own food without fucking everything up.
I had already failed at digging holes. I dug them in the wrong places. I would concentrate and listen to the foreman at the building site, at the factory. In pits, by the roadside.
I would try and remember each word of instruction as a whole etymological state; a standing wave of meaning and linguistics. I would capture him whole in my vision.
“Ok mate, just dig a trench from there to there, right?” (The busy tattooed and inarticulate man would move on.)
I would CONCENTRATE desperate not to lose this too, not to face humiliation in front of such hard and uncomplicated minds as these. With the need to buy cigarettes and the cheapest alcohol desperately urging me – the deep hard wish to stop being tortured by social security. I would concentrate and try and see the instructions for skeins of purity, lines in a soliloquy of simplicity. I begged my ethanol-poisoned mind (I am an alcoholic. I have not had a drink since 1998) with every shred of will within me to concentrate upon the foreman, to see what he was. To learn how to BECOME him. Because anything was better than who I was. Even a small aptitude. The conviction, his conviction of capability, for just one, only that first, morning at dawn. I tried to sink my mind into him. Into the concept I held of him. Deft hands. Ease at this, only this, the least task I could find.
I imagined family; I imagined strong male friendships that I could never understand infused with the smell of motor oil and the muscular weight of mechanical aptitude. I imagined frustration and loss. I tried to see him in school and felt his keen sense of failure as he slowly accepted that his gifts were practical. That they were common.
I ENVIED HIM. At least he could succeed at this, at something, at anything. While I gaped, copied aped and failed.
I wanted so desperately to be adept at some kind of work, at anything where I could hold on. If I could just not fail in such a way that would lead to my dismissal so immediate: curt and blind and devastating. “Yeah, look. We’re gonna haveta letya go mate.”
I had an “ugly face” that I would wear, twisting my features, so that I would not be too pretty. I knew that sometimes men would forge dislike into hatred into violence simply from the planes of my face.
I had an affectation of accent of the most plain erudition and the simplest sentences. I would not correct whomsoever I was with when their enunciation failed them nor even when their English was so flawed as to be barely intelligible. I would pretend to understand their words when they muttered and swore and hope that pretense would lead me to base ability.
That then it would allow me into the secret of who they were. How they could survive where I could not. I thought if I could learn the bare minimum of human skill that I needed to earn such subsistence then I could at least swear aggressively alongside them in the certain knowledge that I had earned the small things that I needed.
Maybe convince them with earnestness and toil. Maybe I could hide the desperate anxiety and sincerity that I wore. Become blasé and relaxed. Easy-going. Tension and anxiety forcing my teeth together and my guileless hands into permanent impotent fists.
I tried to learn the specific semantics of their language, the signifiers of these big men that I so needed to emulate in order to survive. I pretended to know WHAT EXACTLY THE FUCK THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT when they spoke loudly of the mechanical imperfections inside their cars.
I faked enthusiasm and knowledge when they spoke passionately of the football team they supported with utterly baffling, mysterious fervour. With their religious zeal. Pantheistic...
“Geelong on Saturdee? We smashed ya West Coast poofs!” (wasn’t Geelong in Victoria? This man had never lived in Victoria! How could he have an altar to these sportsmen, I thought that the way this functioned was akin to patriotism? No? And this man uses inclusive syntax as if he were a part of the team! Clearly he is NOT in Geelong, or FROM Geelong, nor is he a professional football player! I don’t understand – Paul shuts up before he lets the depth of his ignorance show like a petticoat on an old woman.)
I tried to learn the difference between a Ford and a Holden. Why that mattered. How that could matter. How could that matter?


		THE INTOXICATION OF SHADOWS. Available For Sale Oils on Canvas, Paul Robertson. 90 x 72 cms. This piece won the award for the international competition: The "Emotional Compass Art Award." Technically "The 41st Annual Congress Art Awards" – for the – "Royal Australia and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists." The fact that this was a psychiatric convention sponsoring an art award is in actuality entirely incidental. There were pieces there with price tags over 50 grand. One or two were actually good. Well. One. In this instance the psychiatric context had nothing to do with my bipolar, nor was this connection even how I learned of the award. This is not the first time the whorls and worlds in my work have crossed paths with psychiatry, and found response, reaction. Even cash. My last psychiatric nurse bought the pieces “Stairwell I” and "Jane dressing" as have other mental health professionals. Odd. This is my first international award. It is a big deal for me. I made this painting up almost entirely. The idea of the sublime, beauty and ecstasy. Is it not beautiful? Sure, yes. Shadows that are beautiful. I finished it on my 34th birthday. Marks and notches in time. For which I was given a PADDLING POOL from a friend. AND she ALSO made a CHEESECAKE! Wow. Another award... my ex Kirsty tells me that that makes it 19 awards altogether, but I can only find 11. She is probably right. I wonder where the rest of them ar e... And I make steps, such steps. Further oh so much than a frightened and sad younger version of myself could have believed… far further than any reach of my short, muscular and scarred arms could ever have been imagined touching. PAUL AND WORK – sad stories about trying to work out how to hold a shovel. It’s just a big spoon, you know. Where a man can call a spade “Loretta.” I didn't’t believe I could make any money from painting, even suspect it, until I was 28. “God made the world from the void. But the void shows through.” Paul Valery. I knew there was so much inside me, so much boiling, RAGING at my ribs and throat! I didn’t start painting until I was 23! 23! What if I had started only 2 years before then, in hospital and in hopelessness? Five years! Ten? I didn’t write then! No words, no paint. If I had started when I was still a beautiful teenager self-centered in furious self-hatred that was endless and all that I knew. Never an image seeping scraped beautiful and new from my hands. I gave up writing poetry at 14 to leave more time to masturbate! I had never had cause to regret this choice. I do of course… but regret eats violent and useless and I must work NOW work WORK WORK!!! Now that I DO know! Paint while I yet live while the beauty and courage beat behind my lips scalding and frightening! Remember what you were. The exact colour of failure. That would look cool on house painting colour charts amidst the other made up names! Eucalyptus green, sea green: Frustrated beaver brown, carnally excited prairie dog off white, mandrill’s ass pink, gothic fake hair black, contemporary fear washed out blue, hippy belief system hypocrisy green and HERE everyone’s favourite, a square all to itself! A BIG square with bright lettering in all the colours that are utterly unlike it! FAILURE GREY. I remember an almost divine moment of clarity. I was 19 or 20. I looked at who I was and what I was. I looked without madness or ethanol at the world that we have. I turned my young form, so hideous to me, before the light of judgment and the brightest of unflattering and searing lights: my own. I looked at what there was to DO. What was I supposed to DO? So many people are hunted and haunted by this question for so very much of their lives. I did find an answer. But at that point, at the brutality of my own insight and honesty: I could not see ANYTHING in this society where I could even remotely succeed. At that point, in violently exclusive terms, there was NOTHING that I could envision myself a piece of. I knew even then. Of course I did. I KNEW that I couldn’t hold onto even the most menial, simple kind of work. That even labouring was not something I could sustain. That this most simple of all human endeavours was so completely out of my grasping aptitude. I thought that perhaps just by force of will, by desire and by forcing myself to work brutally hard, as hard as any man could: That then I could learn to be one of these men. Some of them held pride in their backs earned by thousands of hours of pain I had already given up on working in any other capacity. The fear that I gave in to with every breath had taught me. Anything and everything else – any kind of work would only be another cut upon my arms. Another failure and a natural extension of the curse. Ineptitude so vast. Endless. Yes. At least whilst I laboured and failed and was fired and was rehired somewhere else and was fired: at least there were different men each time. The tasks were different with each slip of blue paper. Stack this. Pack there. Pick this up and move it over there and do the same thing with the next fifteen thousand of them. I worked for a group called “Blue Collar People.” I went back to them and they would hire me again and again. My failure cost them nothing. They were paid an equal rate to that which I received. $11.35 an hour, for me and for the company that had allowed me to pretend that I could work for my own food without fucking everything up. I had already failed at digging holes. I dug them in the wrong places. I would concentrate and listen to the foreman at the building site, at the factory. In pits, by the roadside. I would try and remember each word of instruction as a whole etymological state; a standing wave of meaning and linguistics. I would capture him whole in my vision. “Ok mate, just dig a trench from there to there, right?” (The busy tattooed and inarticulate man would move on.) I would CONCENTRATE desperate not to lose this too, not to face humiliation in front of such hard and uncomplicated minds as these. With the need to buy cigarettes and the cheapest alcohol desperately urging me – the deep hard wish to stop being tortured by social security. I would concentrate and try and see the instructions for skeins of purity, lines in a soliloquy of simplicity. I begged my ethanol-poisoned mind (I am an alcoholic. I have not had a drink since 1998) with every shred of will within me to concentrate upon the foreman, to see what he was. To learn how to BECOME him. Because anything was better than who I was. Even a small aptitude. The conviction, his conviction of capability, for just one, only that first, morning at dawn. I tried to sink my mind into him. Into the concept I held of him. Deft hands. Ease at this, only this, the least task I could find. I imagined family; I imagined strong male friendships that I could never understand infused with the smell of motor oil and the muscular weight of mechanical aptitude. I imagined frustration and loss. I tried to see him in school and felt his keen sense of failure as he slowly accepted that his gifts were practical. That they were common. I ENVIED HIM. At least he could succeed at this, at something, at anything. While I gaped, copied aped and failed. I wanted so desperately to be adept at some kind of work, at anything where I could hold on. If I could just not fail in such a way that would lead to my dismissal so immediate: curt and blind and devastating. “Yeah, look. We’re gonna haveta letya go mate.” I had an “ugly face” that I would wear, twisting my features, so that I would not be too pretty. I knew that sometimes men would forge dislike into hatred into violence simply from the planes of my face. I had an affectation of accent of the most plain erudition and the simplest sentences. I would not correct whomsoever I was with when their enunciation failed them nor even when their English was so flawed as to be barely intelligible. I would pretend to understand their words when they muttered and swore and hope that pretense would lead me to base ability. That then it would allow me into the secret of who they were. How they could survive where I could not. I thought if I could learn the bare minimum of human skill that I needed to earn such subsistence then I could at least swear aggressively alongside them in the certain knowledge that I had earned the small things that I needed. Maybe convince them with earnestness and toil. Maybe I could hide the desperate anxiety and sincerity that I wore. Become blasé and relaxed. Easy-going. Tension and anxiety forcing my teeth together and my guileless hands into permanent impotent fists. I tried to learn the specific semantics of their language, the signifiers of these big men that I so needed to emulate in order to survive. I pretended to know WHAT EXACTLY THE FUCK THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT when they spoke loudly of the mechanical imperfections inside their cars. I faked enthusiasm and knowledge when they spoke passionately of the football team they supported with utterly baffling, mysterious fervour. With their religious zeal. Pantheistic... “Geelong on Saturdee? We smashed ya West Coast poofs!” (wasn’t Geelong in Victoria? This man had never lived in Victoria! How could he have an altar to these sportsmen, I thought that the way this functioned was akin to patriotism? No? And this man uses inclusive syntax as if he were a part of the team! Clearly he is NOT in Geelong, or FROM Geelong, nor is he a professional football player! I don’t understand – Paul shuts up before he lets the depth of his ignorance show like a petticoat on an old woman.) I tried to learn the difference between a Ford and a Holden. Why that mattered. How that could matter. How could that matter?

		So I watched the foreman and I worked. Badly. I saw this man learning his trade. I saw his easy manner, his surety. His ease with his mates. The sharp smell of machines and sweat; universal in his life. His fierce loyalties and unconsidered BELIEF: absurd absolute and inviolate. His hatred and prejudice. How sure, how assured he was: that gays were evil and Jews were not to be trusted with his scant earnings. I extrapolated the lines on his face and mourned for the youth that he had spent in the sun lifting and carrying. Fixing with his certain hands. How much he hates mornings in winter and such long hours, such long, long hours. It is these that have turned his hands into hard clubs healed over again and again. These that have turned his back into an agony he can only bitterly curse in incomprehension and dull fear. How these were his resources, and how some vague deity had condemned him to this. How he could never influence his pain. How what he did, like what I did, could never touch the world outside. The faintness of our similarity. How he broke his nose in a bar somewhere. How he still doesn’t know that he could get it straightened because he never took the time to look. How he hates himself for drinking, for wanting to drink. How he longs for it throughout all that he must go through. How in this I am like him. How we are so human and so completely fucked together. How I could not ever speak of any of these things to him. How all he sees before him is a hungover useless waste of space. A “deadshit”. How he will never look into my eyes. The completion of how his world had engulfed him. How he suited what he was and wore his ancient and indestructible boots with a kind of pride that I couldn’t begin to comprehend. How choice had evaporated before him and the jaws had snapped locking shut around him. How hard I wished for some kind of constancy and for the same jaws that had broken him to their will to open for me. How well the trap fitted him. To try and see why it could never fit me. But I couldn’t do it. I had at least two jobs that pretty much involved just digging and not much else. I was inept at digging. I could dig. But I would dig in slightly the wrong place. This was normally important. I knew that. I didn’t have a problem with authority. At all. I wanted to get it right so much that it hurt. When I was digging in the wrong place, I worked with fervour and commitment. After the event the foreman would come over with a rolled cigarette lit or unlit somewhere on his lower lip. His footsteps were sure. He knew this ground intimately. I watched his feet. I don’t remember these instances, only their echoes in so many other workplaces. I don’t think that these people were necessarily vindictive, though some clearly were. There would be a squint of confusion and disbelief. “How’d ya fuck that up?” I had just wasted whatever they were paying me and had proved myself a useless cunt. Which was in this instance clear. And also true. Then there were chances. These were dictated by the day itself. If I fucked up early enough, I would be assigned less and less complex tasks progressively. A common one was to be given a broom covered in ancient and mysterious waste. Then the instruction: clean up the floor. The floor was in these situations a vast industrial complex of machines and sweating men. I would follow the foreman and try and ask where I should start, what was used and unused, what were the materials that were to be thrown away? The anxiety would often preclude the possibility of speech. I would use my vox populi, coming from my face all screwed up and try to ask one of the other workers. I worked for a week at one time cleaning a factory floor of all the strips and dots of metal that I could find. These were necessary. They were not rubbish. I had put them in a bin that was for something else. I had to put them back. I never understood how the other people I was working with knew such immense detail.