Terracotta Guard – acrylic on canvas – 177x57 cms
At last! Here is Blog #20, after many weeks, on my new-look, professionally-managed website. Apologies for the long break, but I’m making no promises to reform. You just never know what’s around the corner!
The Painting:
The fine big fellow above is based on a terracotta guard from Emperor Qin’s tomb. Originally he would have held a wooden spear or similar weapon, but Time long ago wrested it from his grasp. In spite of the size, the canvas being roughly the same height as myself, he was completed quite quickly, and stood as a life-sized sentinel to shock people as they entered the door of the (then) Cessnock art gallery. My main tools were a gigantic paint brush to slap the background on, a (defunct) credit card, and the end of a pencil: see The Archer on Blog #16 for a similar treatment.
He has been criticised for a shortness of the lower body, but hey, I used the exact proportions of the original. I guess that the workers in clay didn’t want to waste a lot of material on legs, but also, I think the models themselves, two thousand plus years ago, may have been rather short-legged.
Poetry Section:
Have you ever encountered a bird, unseen but certainly heard, that from it’s leafy hide shouted “Circle!” followed by another (variable) word? These feathered creatures drove us crazy for three weeks, then moved on, having inspired the following:
Circle Little
A close but totally unseen bird has cried
from a neighbour’s massively dense tree;
he called ‘Circle, little circle!’ (and you may say that I lied)
in its accent of cockatoo or parrot.
No, I could not find him, no matter how I tried,
and each time that I stepped out upon the deck,
‘Circle, little circle!’ was triumphantly decried,
until little circles haunted me;
But 3 weeks later, off it flied.
Story Section:
(Whew, I was running very short of material, when to my relief I discovered some old writings of mine during a clean-up. I hope you don’t get tired of reading about life in New Guinea during pre-independence days.)
A Spell In The Kitchen
An Australian woman living in Lae, realising that some local cooks were unable to read English-language recipe books, determined to write one in Pidgin English.
Her command of that language was a little shaky, and she often consulted her own cook for assistance.
The Pidgin word for egg is kio (pronounced kee-oh). Unsure of the spelling, she asked her cook, “How do you spell kio?”
The cook frowned. He was silent for several minutes as he thought. Then his brow lightened and he triumphantly proclaimed, “Ee, gee, gee!”
