I've been thinking much about last summer's Australia trip, lately, doing
this latest batch of drawings. So, a little nostalgia....an excerpt from AU field studies journal--from our time camping in the mallee woodland, Calperum Station (June 22, 2011).
....I stopped a little ways out of camp to pee, and as I was
looking at the ground, saw… a paw? Yes—a severed paw, blue-black, four claws,
the fur matted and the wrist trailing off into attenuated, amber-colored
tendons. I stood up and looked around, and not ten feet from me was a kangaroo
skeleton, disintegrated past the point of viscera, but still holding together
and covered with skin. It seemed complete except that the skull was gone. I
would have liked to have seen that. But even headless it was an irresistible
form to draw and I pulled up my chair as near it as I dared. I'd brought a bug
head-net overseas with me that I'd begun to regret packing as I’d yet had no
call for it, but it turned out to be very useful now, over my hat, for keeping
the flies out of my facial orifices.
I did a few sketches of the desiccated body from different
angles before heading further into the bush to do some landscape studies. The
mallee trees were unassuming, but handsome, with graceful curves and shoots and
multicolored bark, and I recorded their shapes as best I could. There was
another beautiful plant growing out of the orange sand that commanded my
attention late in the afternoon. It looked almost like a cushion, round and
full and low to the ground. It was such a soft pale green, like a ring of tall
grass, and its interior was dark and flat, as though something had made
themselves at home in the center, and I wondered ignorantly if perhaps the emus
nested in them. I came close to one to examine it and when I reached out to
stroke its fronds, was shocked by how extraordinarily sharp they were. So much
so that I looked to see if they’d drawn blood. They hadn’t, but my fingers were
still stinging from where they’d been pricked, and I blinked in amazement,
trying to reconcile the reality with the cozy vision I’d been cultivating.
I was glad once again for my bug net as I
finished up and wiped the gouache palette clean--the flies buzzing around the
paint—and headed back to camp. Bk arrived as I was doing one final drawing,
a close-up of mallee leaves. His face looked wild from his day of solitude. His
pants were scintillating strangely in the dusk, and when he came closer I saw
that he had wrapped packing tape around his legs from ankle to knee. I laughed,
impressed. It’d been helpful protection as he trudged through the strange sharp
undergrowth, which he knew the name for: Spinifex. It was such a perfect name for
the spiny plant, all thin and sharp and alluring in the mouth! I was glad to
know it.
