53

May 11, 2025

15 years ago today I took Michael to get his turtle tattoo for his birthday, his 40th. It was before we had fancy phones, and there are no photos of the day.

2 years ago he died, and I realised how few photos of him I had at all. The best moments of each year were spent with him, a rough morning selfie and lines of cans the only evidence they ever happened. The last couple of months were tough, with his 53rd birthday in hospital. He was my cousin on my mum’s side, my best mate.

They say everyone is unique, but maybe he was a bit more so. A rebel in the true sense of the word, subversive and destructive, with a burning sense of fairness and how everything could be done better. Happy to wait in the trees for his chance to throw a brick through the window.

He was definitely a contradiction. A perfectionist who wanted complicated solutions but a procrastinator who often couldn’t get started on them. Paranoid to the point of delusion about surveillance, he installed a tracker with a sim card on his motorbike, so that a company in eastern Europe knew his every move, to get the exact ride data he wanted. Loyal and generous to the point of going short of food to buy presents, but capable of flipping friendships into implacable feuds.

1 year ago my cousin on my dad’s side, Scott, committed suicide. We weren’t close, the last time I’d seen him had been a decade earlier at our nana’s funeral. He’d just turned 53.

Our dads, brothers, never got along, so the families didn’t meet up much. From a distance he always looked like a tough cool guy, plenty of mates, great at hardcore sports like waterskiing and kickboxing.

This year is my 53rd, and if I die I’m going down swinging. Not as an office drone, not wondering what those other paths would have been like. This tattoo is to remember Michael, but it’s mine.

Thanks to Jaya at XO Temple for his amazing work. And for politely bypassing my bad ideas!

bifurcation

April 29, 2025

There were a few birthdays back in the day that had meaning, milestones with parties, but now even the big round numbers seem redundant. This one just past was significant, for the excuse to get tattooed on the day, but that story is for another time.

The big moments in life never land neatly on those days. Some so gently you only realise afterwards when the seed has grown tall, and others like meteors that tear down what was standing.

I’m working on a drawing about the work switch from being an office-bound graphic designer to a high-vis-wearing brewer. A big choice made consciously, despite knowing the big changes it would wreak.

Looking back, it’s surprising how few real branches in the path there are in life. Some that seem momentous, like moving cities or having children, don’t actually change the track you’re already following.

The first I chose as a child, without knowing the weight of the decision. A teacher’s recommendation had won me a part scholarship to a prestigious private boys-only high school, to continue on the path of math prodigy. I’d hit puberty early, with a moustache and yearnings at age 12, and wanted to be around girls.

I’ve never regretted it, but I do sometimes wonder where that boy on the other path journeyed. Where they all did.

journals part 2

January 27, 2025

They say misery makes good art. I’ve had a great summer, finishing off with getting offered a new job while on holiday by the beach. I haven’t quite figured out how to draw that yet…

It’s been ten years and nine volumes since the last post about journals. A lot has changed in that time, the last two journals filled quickly with grief. Flicking through I found this in the first Moleskin, obviously bad sleep not being one of them!

“hubris”

January 1, 2025

I nearly did this as a wedgie drawing before the last was finished. The wheels fell off a few things and it felt like a reminder to not get ahead of myself.

But things have gone well since, maybe a reminder not to assume things will go badly either.

Bring on the new year.

“recursive”

December 26, 2024

Ironic that the most angsty pictures bring the most joy to draw. Or maybe just the law of averages, if most of them are angsty.

It’s been a slow year for drawing, but mostly for good reasons. Like spending 6 months doing a brewing course. It’s been a tough year for life, settling into a new normal that sometimes seems bleak, but fighting it and having some wins. Now there are no quiet Wednesdays on my own, to draw in peaceful solitude, I’ve learnt to carve out time and draw with the bustle of family breakfast around me.

I saw an old picture of the flower faerie growing out of the unnatural flesh, and thought about all the variations I’d done, about the layers of shedding, layers of renewal. Remembered an early sketch about confronting your own mortality, that a friend could only see as homoerotic.

This drawing had a slow and joyful gestation over a couple of months, with some wonky knees my only real gripe. I did at times wish for the freedoms of digital processes, to rejig the placement and colours without hard rework. But the accidents made it better, like starting the shadows with the wrong marker, making them way bolder and tying the figures together.

It’s about circularity, the possibility of regrowth, of new beginnings. But mostly about repetition, the seeds of the ending being embedded at the start.

Postscript: I didn’t get around to posting this until 5 days after writing the text… with a morning’s work experience mashing in, booking an interview for a brewing job, and a successful family Christmas in that time the outlook is a lot brighter!

“effigy”

September 1, 2024

Nothing too profound to say about this one. After rejecting the message of this idea in the last post, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And what a joy to work on it’s been, learning to push myself to do it in awkward gaps of free time now I’m spending my Wednesdays at the beer course. A life option that I didn’t discard despite what this drawing says.

What does it mean that the negative ideas are the most satisfying? Is it cathartic to get them out on paper? Or are the things I want to say about happiness shallow?

Either way, there are a few small technical things I’d change about this, and I wish I’d thought to set the bonsai on fire, but the icing on the cake was unplanned. The blue ripples were a last minute addition and they really bring the whole thing together.

Maybe that’s the profound thought. Keep rolling the dice, and jump when the numbers go your way.

“some assembly required”

March 27, 2024

I started this one a while ago. It had a bit of the new year’s resolution to it, more I’ve got to do something than knowing the direction. Things have changed along the way, mainly seeing a counsellor, which is helping.

If the pieces of the model were choices that could be made, the notebook idea was about the options that have gone. About letting go of them.

Today I went to a campus to explore a beer brewing course, looking towards the future. Tomorrow I go to spread Michael’s ashes in the forest, one last time looking back.

“compartmentalised”

February 7, 2024

Is it life imitating art, or the reverse? Neither are turning out the way I expect.

Feeling like I had no burrow to retreat to, no place in our house that was mine, I bought a partition. Built myself a wall around my desk to draw in peace.

Emotionally I’ve been doing the same. Telling myself I’m embracing moments of joy, but most of those moments are on my own.

There’s a metaphor here somewhere. That the mess and pain are still on the other side, that those moments of peace and joy are so bright because of the contrast, because of the darkness around them.

I stated drawing this as defiant, but it just feels isolated instead. Art imitating life.

untitled octopus drawing

December 20, 2023

The original idea for this came early last year, back when my biggest worries were getting old and disillusioned. I started drawing it later when I knew better.

It all got too hard, both life and drawing, and it stalled until six months back. It came together surprisingly quickly and I sent a photo of the finished pencils to Michael.

“Where’s the Prince Albert?!” he joked.

I was feeling so positive I even wrote the words to go with the finished drawing…

“It does sometimes happen that I’m happy and I find myself lost for what music to listen to. My bookmarked songs are all anger or despair, or both.

No issue choosing today. I started this drawing late last year, and put it on hold when it wasn’t coming together. I’ve had a new idea brewing the last week or so, with the plan to reuse this drawing board and erase what went before… but it still fit. Also with anvil, sledgehammer and clamp, just with a gut octopus flavour of pain rather than a bone android flavour.

New year, different child, same despair. The happiness never lasts long enough for a drawing, let alone a theme that repeats.

Restart the playlist.”

The next day Michael was dead.