40 x 23cms
It's pretty small, but I love it, I do. It defines how it was and how I felt.
I don't want to sell it, but I made a deal with myself a long time ago about THAT, so $400 and it is in a cool frame as well. Money is just a symbol but we NEED symbols.
I did it on the train to university when I was in second year, around 1998, I think. I love this piece. It is definitively unusual. I invented the face though it looks like one of my ex girlfriends, Sarah Mennie. I should track her down, though I believe she lives in Adelaide now. She was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. Anywhere. She was an alcoholic, and more mad than I was.
There was something utterly gentle about her, and she loved me so hard, so deeply.
I remember when I was coming down from a manic drinking bender and I was having an intense anxiety attack (two of the LEAST descriptive words in the english language - when you are having an anxiety attack you are convinced you are dying. It is one of the most horrible things that I have ever gone through, an unstoppable avalnache of fear - anyway:) -
And she held me so tightly and started crying too. I know she loved me, perhaps more than anyone else in my life. I didn't catch her beauty in this piece, but there is something of her in the eyes, some doomed gentleness.
Ah well. I cheated on her. I was manic and 21. I was a bastard. I am sorry, yes. Sorrowful, yes. Oh, Sarah, I still think of you. I hope you are ok, I hope that you have lived. That you have stopped drinking. That you are happy.
"Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands." T.S. Eliot.
Another quote from me this time:
"I have
to wait. Just a few weeks, a few million seconds, if that's enough.
It's moving slow but heavy (radius and inertia and depth) like an oil
tanker or a tectonic plate. Hurts too much. I'm too tired.
I lost the keys. I thought I had them for a while but they turned out
to be the wrong ones. I was wrong again.
I have no will.
Come on, give me the crook of your arm to cry on.
I'll tell you
about the menagerie of moons and press your hand between my hands and
wish wish wish."