Still Life

Making a picture

Since beginning this Substack a couple of years ago I’ve acquired about 50 readers.

Thanks to all of you who are interested to hear what I say. Thanks especially to a couple of people who have actually volunteered to have paying subscriptions, I’m really humbled and touched.

“Still Life” mixed media on canvas. 2012. Detail of work in progress. Pearl Red Moon

Occasionally I’ve referred here to “my old blog” which still exists at www.pearlredmoon.com. I started writing it in 2008 mostly as a way to amuse myself and keep a loose archival record of my artmaking. Looking back now I’m so glad to have it as a document of record. So much has changed.

In the last few weeks about 10 people signed up mostly I presume due to comments I’ve posted to other Stack channels and have come here curious to find out more about me. So this is a sort of potted history from the beginning

Still Life, 2012. Work in progress

I was born in New Zealand in 1959. Eldest of 3 daughters in a working class family. My father was an engineer, which sounds kind of middle class but in the 60s he got his qualification by studying at an adult education night school 2 hours a night, 3 days a week for a year. My Mum had been a retail shop assistant and after getting married gladly retired from working to be a housewife, as was expected at that time.

I was a clever student at school but suffered the crushing effects of child sexual abuse and my parents dysfunctional marriage, which eventually lead to divorce when I was 11. My mother did her best but she had to find full time work to support us and there was a lot of unintentional neglect. I don’t remember ever feeling safe or loved as a child, let alone discovering what family “values” were. It was all about worrying to have a place to live, pay the bills and keep food on the table. I took an overdose of pills when I was 15 because I was so afraid and depressed.

Still Life, 2012. Detail. Pearl Red Moon

The “hair” is stitched free motion technique on a sewing machine with several thread colours

At 17 I fell in love with a very bad sort of man, who was 18 years older than me. At 21 I was a single mother with a little son and his father denied paternity. I got unintentionally pregnant again 2 years later and hoping to avoid having to give up the child to adoption I went to an alternative lifestyle community and offered to give them my baby. Volunteers came forward and after my baby boy Aaron was born on the back seat of my Dads Holden Torana in 1981 they took him when he was one hour old after the midwife cut the umbilical cord which was still connected to the placenta I hadn’t given birth to.

I got pregnant again in 1986 and a week after having an abortion I left New Zealand to go live in Australia with my 6 year old son. My son and I rented a nice house in the Sydney suburb of Annandale a few streets away from my mother and two younger sisters who had all left NZ years earlier than me. I was able to make a living working from home doing outwork sewing for small fashion businesses but this isolation led to me becoming very lonely and I longed to find a committed male partner. So I scraped together $500 to join a supposedly reputable dating service but one of the men I met took me a squatter house and raped me with his 2 friends.

The men who raped me knew I’d gone to the Police so they stalked and harassed me for months. My car was stolen and burned out, my house broken into 3x, I’d get 10-20 phone calls a day, mostly hanging up but sometimes threatening my sons life. I worked like a dog to save enough money to get out of Sydney and moved to a small country town, changing my name to make it harder to find me. Years later the rapist was caught and we went to trial in 1991. He got 3.5 years in jail and deported back to the Pacific Island he was a citizen of.

Still Life, 2012. 43cm x 95cm.

Country living suited me much better and I was glad my son got to go to a small town school. Nearly thirty years later some of his best friends remain those kids he went to High School with.

I didn’t mean this to turn into an epic and are finding it a bit exhausting.

We’ll have to do Part Two another time. Part Two won’t be so dreary.

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About the artwork, Still Life

In the first picture you can see how the face is painted on a fragment of canvas. This allowed me to manipulate the piece as I stitched the lines free motion on a sewing machine that simulate hair. The head and shoulders, on a section of canvas was then moulded around and glued to a piece of 3mm thick board that forms the backing for the whole figure, down to the hemline. Heavy canvas fabric was saturated with a stiffening resin and draped over the figure from the upper chest down. When dry it was given a half dozen coats of gesso and painted.