From the Kitsch to the Sublime

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I took my camera with me as I usually do on my morning walk with the dog. Although it was another warm day the sky was overcast and dull and I didn't expect to take many shots.
It wasn't until I reached the pelican that I took my camera out of my pocket, (and I was pleased I did because my pants kept falling down), and began to snap all things from the kitsch to the sublime.
Later in my walk I was moved to see a hastily erected cross with withering bouquets - a communal focus for the outpouring of grief for the 200 lives lost in the Victorian bush fires.




Many towns in Australia seem to cling to the quaint (?) notion that a BIG something will effectively represent their area on the tourist trail. Nearby we have the BIG COW and the BIG PINEAPPLE, further afield are the BIG BANANA and the BIG PRAWN and not to be outdone, our little town of Noosa has the BIG PELICAN.
Built many years ago for the Festival of the Waters annual celebration he is now somewhat obsolete in that capacity as the festival is defunct, however since he had a face lift and a makeover he has taken on the job as town mascot.





The Australian flag fluttering on the dinghy is a remnant from Australia Day. Unlike in America, it is unusual to see flags flown here other than on significant government buildings or at major events.



The Noosa River flows down from a lake system to meet my river the Weyba River, at the estuary and river mouth where they both flow into Laguna Bay. When we moved to this town over 30 years ago the council was diverting the river mouth by pumping sand to establish a long spit which effectively protects the beach and golden half mile of our tourist town. It was a very controversial plan and each time the high tides and cyclones strip the sand from the beach as they do on a regular basis, the harbingers of gloom and doom make nasty remarks about people interferring with nature.









Several years ago the county council constructed a series of DIY keep fit stations in an attempt to encourage it's citizens to become more active. I'm not sure that we are much fitter as a community. Now the council is painting bike lanes on all of our major roads, and building looplines of bicycle tracks.











Billy tea is bushman's tea made in the billy over a camp fire. Banjo Patterson's most famous reference to billy tea is in the first verse and chorus of Waltzing Matilda, " And he sang as he watched and waited 'til his billy boiled."






The river mouth is wide and shallow and the dangerous bar makes for precarious crossings. This acts as a deterrent to larger vessels coming in from the ocean. While we don't have a harbour we have a busy yacht club and plenty of put put boats, some houseboats and even a gondola or two!












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The Gift of an Image

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Images, like symbols, are mighty powerful things. They have the ability to evoke emotional responses right across the entire spectrum of human feeling.

Bombarded as we are on a daily basis by the multitude of images we see in the blogging world we are exposed to regular delights of beauty.
But I wonder if this over exposure to beauty can make us inured and immune to the beauty in the array of imagery we are presented with each day and in life itself or whether it heightens our sensitivities. I for one don't ever want to become blase about beauty.

I know I grapple with words as I attempt to express my wonder at the essence captured by these talented photographer bloggers and I feel that my hackneyed phrases and terms of appreciation have been dulled and sullied by overuse. But I persist in trying...

I also feel rushed when I open my blog and see, on my Blogs I Follow column, the goodies in store for me to read and view and know that in my eagerness to sample a bit of everything I am not doing each posting justice.

The new tick the box response reaction offered by Mr Blogger is a further means of diminishing our reactions to wonder and our ability to express those feelings in writing.

James Hillman said:

"The images are where the psyche is..
The gift of an image is that it affords a place to watch your soul."


If we want to get to know ourselves that little bit better, to plumb our depths, to wonder, to muse, and to enjoy these images - they deserve more than a cursory glance. They require more than an instant of our time.

I suggest that we allow ourselves a few more moments to savour the images, to let them talk to our feeling system, and to feel the throb of resonance, and to get in touch with our souls.

As Joseph Campbell said:

"The world is full of people that have stopped listening to themselves."

I don't want to be one of those people.


I want to be one of these:


"Images foster people of wonder rather than conclusions and make for people of wisdom rather than opinion"

Thomas Moore.




The buoy image is by Paul Signac, a French expressionist painter.

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FOO

~FOO is an acronym used in the healing professions for the often used phrase 'Family of origin'.

Here is my FOO. These are my parents. The photos were taken in the springtime of their lives, over 60 years ago.





From my FOO I learned many things - not least of which was how to 'be a good girl' according to the standards of 1950's protestant ethics and mores.


I would love to be able to say that I learned a love of words and writing through my FOO, and maybe that passion has flowed on down from my grandmother (see My Grandmother post of Feb 2nd), through my father who, in his retirement, has derived great pleasure from penning his salty adventures. He ran away to sea at the age of sixteen and joined the American Merchant Navy - but that is another story.

Unfortunately the reality was that there were few books in my home - a couple of volumes of the 'Bobsy Twins' and a few other pieces of fiction with strong moral proclivities that I had won in Sunday School, and a copy of 'Robin Hood' that was presented to me one year at the Christmas party given by my father's firm. The gift purchasers must have been confused as to the gender of my name.
So when I think, without being too philosophical and long winded, of three things that I have learned from my FOO I have come up with this:

From my FOO I have learned:

1. The importance of family
2. That your values give you steering and direction
3. And that hard work has many rewards.

What three things did you learn from your FOO?





* 'The Good Little Girl' comes from the delightful collection of A.A.Milne poems.
I superimposed a masking tape transfer of a photo of me as a child over the original image on the 'Good Little Girl' page.



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A National Treasure

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This dear little lady sitting in a corner of her home, looking for all the world like the subject of a painting, is an artist. In fact she is one of Australia's most respected and prized artists. Currently she has an exhibition at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, my state capital, showing pen and watercolour sketches from her travels around the world.




This sketch is of the Brisbane River.

But it is not for this body of work that she is well known. Olley is renowned for her intensely vibrant still lifes. Her paintings show enchanting arrangements of flowers or fruits within her own home, painted from a palette of subtropical colours.

Blue Agapanthus

If you take a look behind the artist you can see that each nook and corner of home is a still life.

Red Hibiscus

While she has been stunning art lovers for over 50 years Margaret Olley came to the public's attention in 1948 when she posed for Dobell's award winning Archibald portrait. In the photo above she is sitting below her portrait.

Poppies and Watermelon

Poppies and checked cloth

Demonstrating a fierce disregard for painting trends and fashions Margaret has always followed her muse. When asked in an interview if it was true that she painted for herself, she retorted "I do. Who would you paint for?" Olley was born in 1923, near Lismore, NSW, making her 86 this year.

Sweet Williams and Plums

Described as the most important twentieth century still life painter in Australia, Olley is also one of the country's biggest art benefactors, establishing a trust in her name to purchase works of art for public collection.
What a lady. She is truly a national treasure.





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Lo and Behold

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I just can't stop finding poems. The lines keep dancing across my desk, leaping down from the bookshelves and flying off the end of my gluestick to join together in a chorus that must be sung.

Meri at meriak.blogspot.com has also found herself in their thrall. She has developed her own special style of found poem and posted a beautiful example on her blog. She said that the words "gravitate like iron filings to a magnet" ... "and fall in love"... Go and read her great effort...

So here are a few more of my reborn poems:








These next two are slightly less found, maybe a little more rearranged, in that they come from the same couple of pages of Hermann Hesse's 'Siddhartha.'









My backgrounds are:
A Monet painting
Autumn in Japan - my daughter's photo
The cover of my journal
My river photo photoshopped
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Three Flamboyant Facts

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3 flamboyant facts that I have come across recently are:



1. Moths can detect the pheromones of a potential mate from a radius of five miles and within a smoke filled room. It seems the pheromone carries some DNA coding so that the moth can tell if the prospective mate is of the same genotype.





2. Moths and butterflies, when they move into the chrysalis stage of their life cycle, turn into a 'pupal stew'. Amazingly from that blob of goop they resurrect into a butterfly.
(As an aside, did you know that the Greek word 'psyche' means butterfly...)





3. Locusts are usually solitary creatures but when the rain arrives they breed energetically and thus their numbers become concentrated. This crowding triggers the release of serotonin which prompts the locusts to become gregarious and they swarm.

Photo from: The State of Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries.

Now scientists are looking for chemicals to prevent the serotonin from causing this behaviour.
Scientists know this release of serotonin occurs because it can be induced by rubbing the hind legs of locusts to simulate jostling in a crowd.

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A Serendipitous Poem

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The poems below are examples of 'Found Poems' - the serendipitous connecting of found phrases and lines. Found poems are fun and easy to assemble.

Here's how you do it:

* With your eyes, scan the paragraphs of a few pages of an old book for phrases that resonate with you and cut them out ( or photocopy and cut)

* Gather a few phrases and begin to arrange them and rearrange them until you have 'found' a little poem

* Find an appropriate background and mount your lines - and there voila... you are an instant poet.



The backgrounds to my found poems are, in order of display:


~ A nature photo taken by my son
~ My husband aged about six playing on the shoreline at Eastbourne, Wellington, New Zealand
~ The cover image from Ann Morrow Lindberg's 'Gift from the Sea'.
~ A corner of Bruegel's 'Harvest'


If you feel inspired grab your scissors and glue stick and then send me the results:

delwyntatton@hotmail.com

and I will make a communal post of our efforts at Found Poetry.












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