The thing they don’t tell you about getting back on the horse is that usually you have to chase it around the paddock first.
I bought the letters above to stick on my notebook, in an effort to narrow my focus after I realised how much catching up I had to do. The very same day, a friend emailed about a cool upcoming project, so I had to add the question mark (they don’t sell question marks with stick-on signage letters).
Some tiny birds from the margins and interstices of my notebook/journal. I quite like the faint shadow on the owl (top right).
They aren’t illustrative of anything in particular except, perhaps, horror vacui (what else are dragons for?).
The brown birds were, however, suggested by some sketches I did in the Qld Museum on Saturday, while I watched children being towed away from fascinated contemplation of fossils to look at snakes, and being blindsided by the actual height of a bush stone curlew.
Materials:
(NB: some of those are affiliate links which means I might get a very small commission if you buy something after clicking through, but I do encourage you to buy/order from local art stores if you have them!)
I am, for secret reasons, keeping an Observation Journal at the moment (if you’re into that sort of thing, people over on Patreon are getting to see a bit more of it, while I collate my thoughts).
It’s been unexpectedly helpful (and in some cases given rise to a terrifying creative velocity) in getting back into art after spending several weeks mostly horizontal.
One of the activities that developed sideways was a personality study of my favourite paints.
Here, to begin with, are some of the favourite paints:
That’s a sample card with dots of Daniel Smith watercolours (the David Taylor palette). The dot cards are so very useful for tiny pieces and fast work and, particularly, for travel. I often refresh them with more paint.
Looking for Observation And Reflection activities I could do, I realised I kept meaning to order tubes of all my favourite colours, and that this was an excellent chance to note which ones they were.
So I just made a list of all the colours from my most-used sample card (above), and then without thinking too much made very silly notes about my thoughts on them. Quinacridone Magenta, for example, “lipsyncs to Dolly Parton”, while Moonglow is “actual magic”.
It was soothing and fun, but also useful information. You can see there ways I use the colours, and how they make me feel, and what they could be. It made me fall a little more in love with them. I adore the tiny jewels on this page, and now when I pick up a colour out of the wildly expensive box of tubes I ordered (finally! this exercise definitely contributed to me getting my act together), I think, “Oh yes, I know you!”
I want to do it again with other tools of the trade. Personal, idiosyncratic opinions on nibs and inks, rulers and blades. It was a gentle and kind way to handle them all again, as well as creating a reference, and falling in love.
Anyway, I’ve been talking with a few friends who have stalled on projects or pursuits recently, and this is for them. Perhaps, with no project in mind, just get out, handle, order, comment on, your tools and materials. Make friends again.
This is for the type of notebook with a spine you can look down when the book is open (hardcover or case bound).
(Edited for clarity)
(Edited again to add: This also works with multiple ribbons. My current version has four.)
At the Whitegrass Airport on Tanna, F (small and organised and quiet) and her husband C (with a cheerful smile and hair in an impressive top-knot) and the driver whose name I never did quite catch collected me. F and C climbed in the back of the Hilux and we set off over unpaved roads towards the other side of the island.
We stopped at a co-op to buy three eggs. A few kilometres further we picked up more supplies and some extra people for the back. We passed an inlet where some goats were climbing, and a group of peace corps workers walking down the road and came to another smaller store with Bible verses painted over the door and a hurricane lantern hanging in the trees nearby to advertise a kava bar. A little girl wanted to join us but was only allowed to pass up bunches of bok choy and fresh peanuts with their stems tied together. Then the owner of our truck appeared and took over driving. He was friendly, but spent most of the drive on the phone, swearing at one of his drivers (a new mobile phone company had opened across Vanuatu the week before, and the coverage was better than in Australia). We went back to the co-op where some chickens ignored us, then back to the small store and bought potatoes and bok choy and added a few more people to the back. It must have been at this point that the little girl joined us after all.
We turned inland – past coconut palms and overgrown plantations, bougainvillea apparently coexisting peacefully with other plants, farming families walking down the road waving and smiling and swinging their bush knives, cows tethered on banks or blundering loose in the road and regarding us with that particular unimpressed expression native to all cows, past extravagantly-tailed roosters and neat compact pigs which waited intelligently for the truck to pass before crossing the road. We stopped at a little outdoor market under a spreading tree and the driver bought more fresh peanuts, still on the stalk and with a sweet vegetable crispness, which we ate as the truck laboured over rutted, slick hill road.
At last we came over the top of the island and saw the sea on the other side. The horizon seemed as high as we were and the mother-of-pearl ocean fell down to the shore far below us. Down there was an iron-grey plain of ash and the volcano – smaller than I imagined but more barren, a black cone smoking distantly and rumbling.
On the other side of the plain, which was cut by clear streams, we found an ash road between the trees and almost ran over a puppy. Someone recognised it, so it was picked up by one leg and added to the back of the truck. We drove to the driver’s bungalows, unloaded most of the people and supplies, then went back down the ash road and up a rutted side road to our bungalows. I put my bag in my bungalow and then W (driver) and P (guide) and I left in the dark and drove to the volcano.
The main ash roads had been smooth and firm, but the track to the volcano was very rough, well beyond corrugations, and by now it was very dark. We drove to the base and then P and I walked up, P a bit behind me, shining the torch on the path. It didn’t take long to reach the top and then we were on the edge of the volcano.
K and B had described the volcano to me, but it would have been hard to have been prepared. I had been mesmerised by Isabella Bird’s descriptions, but this was not a lake of fire. Instead, a great black sulphorous pit fell away below us, and from the darkness at irregular intervals fire flew upwards. The earth would gather itself with a great roar like the rushing of the sea and then glowing molten rocks would fly up into the air, from far below us high into the sky and fall, whistling and glowing orange against the night. There was more than one cone and they would explode alternately, sometimes a hiss of glitter, sometimes howling and shrieking. Many of the glowing rocks fell back into the earth, but some seemed to stop suddenly in mid-air, fallen on the sides of the cone which was otherwise invisible in the darkness. Huge rocks rough with glassy knobs lay around us, fruits of more violent explosions – some within the last few weeks.
It was hard to turn away – it felt disrespectful. Walking back down, the volcano rumbling and venting behind us, I looked across to another mountain, cold and dark, with the plume of the milky way sailing up from it like an explosion of ice.
(Part 1 here; Part 2 here; still to come: Part 4 “Things that didn’t kill me”)
While in Vanuatu, I went on two jaunts by myself. On both occasions I expected to be thrown in with an existing group of tourists, and instead was alone with a guide. The first was a Saturday rainforest trail ride through some of the prettiest cattle country I have seen. The second time, I went to Tanna to see the volcano.
When I was little, a combination of factors (to wit: living in a wooden house with a wood-burning stove; living on a cattle property in a drought; growing up on novels of the Ash Wednesday fires; a well-read National Geographic with pictures of Mount St Helens; a children’s encyclopaedia which described in sufficiently lively detail the tale of the farmer in Mexico who found hot rocks popping out of his paddock and a week later the farm was covered by a live volcano; and my family’s general inability to get out of the house in a timely fashion) gave me nightmares about fiery pits and infernos for years. And then I read Isabella Bird’s accounts of climbing up and looking into volcanoes on Hawaii, and generally being Victorian and fabulous, and decided that I would quite like to see one. Her descriptions were awe-inspiring.
I did very little research before I went to Vanuatu, partly because I do fly by the seat of my pants and partly because I didn’t expect to be doing anything on any other islands. But then K and B washed in on the tide bearing tales of maritime adventures and videos of the volcano and I realised that I was right there, in Vanuatu, only a few islands away from a Real Live Volcano.
The rest of the group were kind enough to encourage me to go (and then give me a hard time later about skipping out on work), so when I went to the markets to buy cucumbers and pamplemousse, I kept walking to the thatch-roofed tour agencies and found an overnight trip to Tanna, including everything except dinner and the fee to enter the volcano area, for only a few hundred dollars. One of the shiny shop-front agencies offered a trip for over a thousand, but that did not include flights. The next day I collected my tickets, and the next morning I worked, had a quick lunch and caught a bus to the airport.
My poor maltreated Moleskine. It is held together with duct tape now (on the inside, so I can’t pass it off as industrial punk) and has been soggy and dirty and flecked with volcanic ash and had a near miss in the Port in Port Vila.
But it survived and the picture pages are scanned and up as a set on Flickr: Vanuatu 2008 Moleskine.
This sketchbook has fewer receipts and brochures and tickets than the American one (although there are one or two pages of receipts and boarding passes I didn’t scan in), and is better scanned and – in the drawings at least – more colourful due to my acquisition of more markers. My handbag was (is) full of markers (and pencils, erasers, sharpeners, gel pens, blending pencils, etc).
But next time I will carry the book in a ziplock bag. Just in case.
—–
Now, so far I only have one question to answer about Vanuatu, and my answer is: no, to the best of my knowledge there are no longer cannibals in Vanuatu; that doesn’t stop the tourist trade trading on that piece of history; and from time to time startled linguists have been ‘discovered’ by anthropologists searching for cannibal tribes.
Any other questions?
Next time I will:
And the journal itself is up as a set on Flickr: USA 2007 Moleskine.
In the grand tradition of not making up my mind until the last possible moment (as usual, some time after take-off) I browsed through travel journals in newsagencies and online trying to determine an optimum combination of categories – should I include expenditure? an itinerary? what about an address book? How much space should be allotted for each day? How did artists organise their travel sketchbooks, if at all? Were journal, diary and sketchbook incompatible?
I settled on the winning combination on the flight over: The debden notebook would retain its usual structure – infodump with index. I put all postcard addresses in there (indexed under “contacts”). Otherwise, it was used for directions, reminders and a futuristic science fiction story involving cryogenic sleep and prosthetic limbs and lawyers on motorcycles and mafia connections and the rule of law (the true hero) and consisting only of the bits in between the action.
The sketchbook was divided into two sections.
Section one was a planner: each page featured four hand-drawn boxes with the date (a sticker), month and day of the week. In these I jotted down a very minimal account of the day, and only missed the last four or so. For a random example, 17 October – Wednesday reads:
Up 9-ish.
Watched part of the Waltons and Little House (guest starring a very young James Cromwell)
Breakfast @ Free Port (“Good food, legal drinks”): cinnamon scrolls.
To North East to wait for Martha to get off work.
Lunch at Bova’s.
Back to Martha’s to drop off a sub for Nick.
Through Eyrie to Presque Isle.
Drove around Presque Isle, monument, lighthouses.
Stopped at visitor centre.
Back to Martha’s for pie. Spoke to C.O. on phone.
Back to farm.
Downloaded photos. Kathy & Mommy organised for me to go to Pittsburgh.
Section two was everything else (I micromanage content, as you can see). The date headers went in as each day came along. I sketched as I could through the day, wrote only a little, and at the end of the day added in any cartoons or drawings (often from photos on my camera or phone) or bits-and-pieces that remained.
I had an idea that if I wanted a list of expenditures I could start from the back, or keep lists of Things to Eat on the index cards in the back pocket, but none of these were necessary.
And the journal itself is up as a set on Flickr: USA 2007 Moleskine.
I did not want to repeat the pattern of previous holidays which resulted in collections (envelopes, packages, bags, boxes) of papers, brochures, tickets, advertisements, envelopes, squashed pennies, packaging, cards and labels.
This time, I implemented a policy I referred to as Cut Things Out and Stick Them In.
Every night, before bed, I had to cut up the papers collected through the day, cut them up, stick the relevant sections into my sketchbook-journal and Throw The Rest Away.
There were a few late nights, but it was not generally an onerous task and tiredness could make me brutally selective. As I carted the glue stick with me, dead time in airports (“the planes in America have never been so safe or so late”) and planes and trains or while other people were in bed could be used productively.
My bags were lighter, there were no folders to sort or store when I arrived home, and I don’t regret throwing out anything I did.
Best of all, the journal was always up to date. I could not show photographs to people, but I could show them scraps and sketches, and when I arrived home, the journal was almost complete: pictures drawn, scraps stuck in, observations made at the time. All that remained was to add in the few pieces that had fallen through the cracks and into the back pocket of the sketchbook: a menu, some currency, a greeting card.
Scraps, however, were not the only things that were stuck in. Before I left, I treated myself to one of the unsung treasures of the stationer’s: numbered stickers. I took a package of black-on-white to label the days in the planner at the start of my sketchbook, and white-on-black to label each day as I progressed through the sketchbook. It was unnecessary but fun, with some of the mild excitement of an advent calendar, and knowing that as each day was sketched and written and pasted, I could mark it off and start a new one with a fresh new sticker.
The sketchbook is here: USA 2007 Moleskine.
Other parts:
Kathleen Jennings 