Oops. I’m a little late for my quote this week.
Thought this was a good one….
Have a fantabulous week everybody!!
There have been moments in my life where I have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. One of those moments was when my Great Aunt Nellie died in the early ’80s. I was still at school and couldn’t afford the fare all the way to Ireland for the funeral.
I wanted to go to the funeral because I loved Great Aunt Nellie but also because I wanted her work as a keepsake. Great Aunt Nellie was an amateur painter, mostly of landscapes. The professional artists in the family scoffed at what they called her naive, underdeveloped style but I loved everything she did. I have often said that I would like to be a painter and if I could be, I would be a painter like Great Aunt Nellie was.
Great swathes of colour covered her canvases – vibrant, vivid as any colour you see in nature when you look out the window. There was a feeling of wildness, of abandon and of joy to her work. It was as if what she saw and felt was immediately captured and spread across the canvas, that one moment as it was, unrestrained, perhaps a little riotous, definitely undomesticated.
I say undomesticated because Great Aunt Nellie painted at a time when women in her sphere did not make a living from the arts. Rural Ireland in the 1950s was an incredibly patriarchal society and fathers with four unmarried daughters were unsupportive of any of their children who looked to be engaging in activities deemed self-indulgent and a waste of time. So Aunt Nellie worked in a button factory, making thousands of mother-of-pearl buttons every week for the silk blouses of rich ladies, continuing her painting in secret.
I liked that about her – her drive to create no matter what, her rebelliousness – it really appealed to me. I liked it as much as I liked her paintings.
Great Aunt Nellie was stuck in the factory six days a week and didn’t have much time to get out and find subjects to paint. She walked two miles home every day in the early evening. That’s when she began painting sunsets – when she got out into the wide world at the end of the day after the confinement of the factory, sunsets were all she saw.
I don’t know how many she had all up but when I visited her when I was 15 she showed me over 200 of them. Oranges, pinks, blues, yellows, blending together in a resplendent celebration of colour. Those sunsets were just about the most glorious things I’ve ever seen.
When Great Aunt Nellie died much of her work was found mouldering away in a gaerden shed. She had given up on painting by the time she reached 87 years. As far as I know most of her paintings were thrown away. That’s why I talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time because if I had been in Ireland at the time I am sure I could have salvaged some of those paintings. Somehow.
I asked Great Aunt Nellie once why she painted so many sunsets. “Sunsets are full of hope because they’re beginnings, not endings,” she said. “They mean the day is having a rest, ready to start all over again in the morning.”
In the spirit of great Aunt Nellie I have begun collecting sunsets. The colours start slowly, whispers on violas in a string ensemble. Lines of pinks and the softest of oranges. Mauve creeps in too.
The trees and streetscapes are thrown into silhouette as the sunset grows into bold oranges and reds. The rest of the landscape is almost rendered insignificant by the sublime sunset splendour.
The sunset pulls you in, comforting as a scarf warmed before the fire, wrapping you softly in its triumphant verve; undisputably a beginning, not an ending. Just like Great Aunt Nellie’s paintings.
SOURCE: perthnow.com.au
A lot of people I know are talking about Gina Rinehart’s shaking up of Fairfax Media.
Readers who don’t live in Australia (and I thank you all so much for reading…) may not know about Gina Rinehart so I’ll give you a little bit of a heads up. Bullet points are required, I’m afraid -
Great achievements, right?
Her personal net worth is estimated to be close to AUD $30 billion and she increases her wealth by a million dollars every thirty minutes. Amazing stats.
Usually I don’t spend much time thinking about Gina Rinehart. Her lifestyle, her persona, are so foreign to me she might as well be a fictional character.
But yesterday, Gabrielle left a comment on Twitter that stayed with me all night and I couldn’t stop thinking about Gina Rinehart and her love of money.
Gina Rinehart’s life is not exactly a fairytale. It would seem her children pretty much despise her (typical poor-little-rich-kids-trust-fund-dispute), her feud with stepmother Rose Porteous is legendary, and she recently pissed off a lot of Australians by importing over 1700 migrant workers to build her new iron ore mine in Western Australia (without the say so of our Prime Minister.)
The headline in today’s The Australian describes her as rich, ruthless and the ruler of a bitter house divided.
30 billion dollars seems like more of a nightmare than a blessing, if you ask me.
Can you get that much money and still be a decent person?
Does the getting of 30 billion mean you have to leave your sense of philanthropy and compassion for humanity at the door? For good? What about your sense of self? Who you are? Do you ever just have a good laugh or sit with your fingers crossed, praying your favourite doesn’t go home on the elimination round of Masterchef?
Normal things. Little things that require no money. Do you lose them when there is a 30 billion dollar price tag on your head?
I was talking to some friends about it and we all agreed that living the life Gina Rinehart does is for the most part unenviable. It would be stressful. You wouldn’t know who to trust. So many people (including the press and politicians) would be out to get you day in, day out.
The philosophical question is are you as spiritually poor with 30 billion as you are with thirty cents? It’s an interesting thing to think about.
Putting up with all that nonsense all day, every day where your motivations are to get more money, more power, gathering it all up before you again and again until your arms are full, until you are crushed beneath the weight of it,until you feel like you are the most powerful person in the world, that no one matters as much as you do; acquiring more and more and more so that your brain is bursting, until your skin is splitting as if you have found yourself in a scene from a Roald Dahl book, until you have no choice but to spontaneously combust……… KERSPLAAAAAAT - it must be a form of masochism. It has to be. As damaging as people who punish themselves for failure.
The nature of money…. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it. It’s a dangerous, insidious thing. Large amounts of it should be kept under glass or in a lead-lined vault; away from us, underlit and dingy so it looks ugly and unappealing. So it doesn’t make us love it more than ourselves or each other.
I’ve done a lot of pondering here. Too deep for a Wednesday afternoon. So it must be time for a bit of fun courtesy of http://www.danilic.com (unlinked for security purposes)
Perhaps this is the future for the Sydney Morning Herald under Gina Rinehart.
Enjoy.
(click on image to get a better look)
 | gel on Looking To Nature |
 | bluebee on Looking To Nature |
 | Gabrielle Bryden on Looking To Nature |
 | Querulous Squirrel on Looking To Nature |
 | adeeyoyo on Looking To Nature |
A Novel Place
