Sucking the juice of a weed

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Okay, that title was only to catch your attention. I don't smoke it, or eat it. But the sourgrass or soursob has invaded the gardens lately so I'll write about it. In tidying up the back garden to dig up and plant more vegetables, we first had to get rid of a field of yellow flowers which are the weed Oxalis pes-caprae (Bermuda buttercup, Sourgrass, Soursob) a flowering plant in the wood sorrel family Oxalidaceae. So when is a plant a weed, and when it is a beautiful flower? This plant is indigenous to South Africa, but is now classed as an invasive weed in many parts of the world including the United States (particularly California), Europe, Israel and Australia. It is often called by the common name sourgrass or soursob due to its pleasant sour flavour. This sourness is caused by oxalic acid, which is toxic in large quantities and may contribute to kidney stones so they say. When we were children we used to pull up the long stem and suck on the stem for the interesting taste. I told Peceli as we gardened that I used to ‘eat it’ and he wouldn’t believe me. Okay, we didn’t actually eat it. The weed propagates through its underground bulbs and this is the reason why it’s hard to eradicate, as pulling up the stems leaves the bulbs behind. Anyway I thought it would be interesting to make a drawing of it and not just dismiss it as a useless plant.

A clean house

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Not much happening here today, just a morning at the church office and cranky when someone changed the settings so I had to fiddle a lot before printing out the newsletter for Sunday. The lawnmower is fixed so Peceli did a tidy-up while I pulled out weeds that look like lovely yellow flowers, and the printer-scanner is fixed. While tidying up the computer files I found scraps of writing so here is one small story. True of course.

A clean house

She told me that the kitchen had a lovely wooden floor which her neighbour would polish, on hands and knees, every morning of the week from Monday to Friday. That’s not all because the floor was under a roll of lino which she had to move each day first. A square of lino rolled up carefully then placed back. But that’s not all. On top of the lino she spread newspapers, the Herald Sun right into the corners covering the whole floor. She did the same for the passage from the front door to the kitchen. By 10 a.m. each day she knew she’d done a good job, a decent job and her space was perfect, covered by the Herald Sun.

Why, I asked the storyteller.

Well her husband was a home decorator and he said to his wife, ‘Edna, you must keep the house tidy because I might bring a client home and if our house is not up to scratch, well. I’ll lose a client won’t I?

I suppose she did for herself also. That floor was her life. But who saw it under the newspapers? No-one. She knew it was done and felt proud. Did he ever bring a client home?

Not that I’ve heard of. But if he did he would have to phone on ahead to tell her to remove the newspapers.

Perhaps they lived in a muddy street.

Oh yes. This was in England in Yorkshire, very muddy.

Perhaps it was about traipsing mud into the house.

No not really. She made sure he took off his shoes at the door. Everyone had to.
I only know about her obsession when I had to give her a letter that had come to my house by mistake. We lived down the road. We were near neighbours for fourteen years and that’s the only time I entered her house. He called her his Wee Woman, my husband told me. I suppose he was proud of her in his own way.

If walls could talk

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Geelong Art Society use a very old hotel as their venue for exhibitions and classes, the Shearer's Arms. If walls could talk. John Day began business as a hotel proprietor near the corner of Aberdeen Street and Shannon Avenue in 1847, succeeded a year later by Joseph Lewis. By 1850 there is recorded a brick, seven roomed public house with stables and a garden. J Grant was at one stage refused a license on the grounds that the "Shearers Arms" Hotel has become rendezvous for thieves and undesirable characters. The building is no longer licensed and served as flats before becoming an Art Gallery and studio. The heritage listed Shearers Arms gallery in Aberdeen Street, Geelong West, is in desperate need of refurbishment. There surely are many stories in those old walls!

Put your shoes on Lucy

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The 2010 Fletcher Jones Art Prize exhibition is now on. The winner is a strange depiction of - I think - a bag lady lying on top of her possessions, barely painted in parts with a rather frugal use of paint. There's a nice touch in the corner with those shoes! There were at least six very good paintings, in my opinion, and probably about ten, that were rather ordinary. I particularly liked the following: Katherine Hattam Snakes and Ladders, Grant Hill Calistamon Court, Jason Moad, Museum 111 (Phar Lap), Tony Lloyd On a Dark Night you can see forever, Victoria Reicheit Panic, the latter being a pile of books stacked diagonally.

The spiel from the Gallery is as follows:


An exhibition of selected entries submitted from around Australia for this $30,000 acquisitive painting award. Fletcher Jones has generously sponsored the event that assists with the development of the Gallery's contemporary collection.

The 2010 Fletcher Jones art prize was awarded to Tim McMonagle for his work, The happy song (2009). McMonagle's work was inspired by the languid demeanour of a homeless woman observed by the artist while on a residency in New York in the late-1980s, McMonagle's painting depicts a dishevelled, barefoot figure reclining on a vast and bulbous mound representing her worldly possessions. Discarded high heel shoes and a plastic drinking cup are positioned in the foreground: symbols of the consumer culture from which she is seemingly displaced.

Reminiscent of the social satire of 18th and early-19th century British artists such as William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray, McMonagle's ‘dream-like' composition offers a contemporary parallel to the social commentaries of these earlier artists.

Using the square format that has become a signature of the artist's practice, the work is rendered in a severe mono-tonal palette, the sepia tint emphasising McMonagle's strong drafting skills. Thick impastoed paint, juxtaposed with light, almost scumbled passages test the possibilities of the oil medium.

Floral pictures perhaps as boring as politicians?

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Becoming repetitive I know, but I made some more variations on the original picture I made of a bowl of flowers which was not much more than colouring in between the lines. Today I had a look at the Fletcher Art Prize and will write about it tomorrow, and we had our little chat about Madame Bovary in the book group and most liked the book, though it was overly long. Next month it is The Lacuna which I've read but forgotten about.

Hey, wasn't that debate last night awfully boring? So contrained, no jokes, no joy, no fun at all. Even the three worms were boring, but they did show up a bias - women like Julia, men like Tony. I hope my pictures aren't as boring as those two!

Not much on TV today

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Having a few hours spare because I did not accompany Peceli up to Melbourne today for the Fijian church program, I thought I could watch TV but only found a program on wombats! So I fiddled with images and checked out whether the newer hard-drive will work well. I've also been reading an article in Eureka Street, The Mingled Yarn, about racism, imagination and perception. It's accessed by linking to Eureka Street magazine. The writer, Bronwyn Lay, is my niece and she lives in a French village with her husband and children and studies over the border in Switzerland. What a wonderful life! I've written more about this in the babasiga blog.

Colouring inside the lines

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Without a computer and the easy way of exploring colour and texture using computer graphic programs, I just had to use real coloured pens and paper for a few days. So I found some unfinished pages, fiddled with one already half-done and started one new one. One I just got tired and didn't complete! Anyway here they are - photographed because they were near to A3 in size and the scanner is A4. Fyansford and Barwon Edge grounds and Van Loon's Nursery still figure.

Veronica and Joan of Arc

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After five days we have our computer back, plus another hard drive after the last one gave up the ghost. Speaking of ghosts, a friend gave me a book by Veronica, a local writer who had told me several years ago that she was starting a manuscript involving a conversation with Joan of Arc. Well, that's some task. Veronica explored France going to the pertinent locations and the frame of the novel/non-fiction is to describe a town or city as Veronica/narrator experienced it, then to have the ghost of Joan explain the story of her life. There were a bit too many scenes of battles and naming people as I would have been interested in the life of men and women of the time - food, hygiene, etc. as well as the literary conceit of having a ghost talk in English and dress as a medieval boy. There were rather too much historical detail as well as the battles between France and England the obsession with crowning the new king. I wanted to know if Joan met up with her precious saints. Anyway, a good job done Veronica.

Geelong Writers

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Yesterday was the Annual Meeting of the Geelong Writers which has been going for about twenty years and the new committee members are pictured here. We usually meet in the art studio behind the Shearers' Arms Art Gallery which is an inviting place, though not posh, or as comfy as Beav's Bar where we used to meet. I took a few photos around the place. I was Secretary of Geelong Writers for about ten years but handed over a few years ago (when words started to fail me a bit) and it's good to get fresh ideas. An upcoming event will be at the Geelong Art Gallery with ten responses in words to paintings in the Fletcher Prize exhibition. This is always a very good event. Funding for some of our events comes from the Victorian Writers Centre.

Like jazz or classical music

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I've been trying to experiment with shapes and colours so that a visual image reminds me of music - not single lines or a single contour of one instruments but overlapping like sounds made by an orchestra. Whether it works or not, I'm not sure. It might be just an incomprehensible mess. It certainly isn't the sounds of silence! Though the original photos were of flowers, these pictures have no reference to them by now. Just abstractions.

The bold and the beautiful

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Three at a time - some pictures from the flower photos. Now I must put on my shoes and take 'Madame Bovary' back to the library (for our book club read this July - but it's a long, tedious read and I don't know what all the fuss was about,) and pay the telephone/internet bill, when I find it!