The price of art
Hey Sam,
that’s a prize home.
It’s up in Tallebudgera Valley, has a pool, a shed the size of our dance studio, trees, even an outdoor fire pit. We bought a ticket for it even though it’s a bit white for my taste. To me it looks like something that’s crawled out of an American TV show and planted itself on the side of a hill.
If we won I wouldn’t complain but if I were given the choice (and the money) I’d go for something more ‘log cabin in the woods’ vibe. The overall size of the house doesn’t matter to me but you have your own opinions. Lately you’ve been telling us you want a bigger house, you hate where we live, you want something more like your Grandparents or your Uncle Andy’s, but you’re missing an important point:
We’re artists.
A family of artists who, in the American TV show mentioned above, probably use the drugs being sold by the people who own the big white house on the hill, a family that are likeable but inevitably suffering at the end of the first season because of some bad choices they made in episode four.
It’s a cautionary tale.
About drugs.
And the fragility of an artist’s existence.
My first ‘real’ job was at a petrol station when I was 15 but it didn’t last long. I can distinctly recall the sinking feeling of watching yet another car drive off with a petrol cap sitting on top of it’s roof, glinting in the sunlight, winking at my failure to remember the most basic task of my short lived gas station attendant career. I can also remember my friend’s face, the one who got me the job, watching the same winking petrol cap as he filled another car. His look, when he directed it at me, contained a lack of comprehension about how I could be so vague.
Art is the only job I’ve ever really had and maybe the only one I was ever suited to. I was described by my teachers as an ‘absent minded professor’ and my Dad told me recently he just assumed I was a bit dumb (his exact words I think).
When I watch you teleport yourself around the house in your Darth Vader costume, ending up in cupboards, or on top of the kitchen bench, I know the same thing is happening inside you, an imaginary world that often seems more real than the one you inhabit day to day. You make a small buzzing, teleportation noise as you run from one place to another, appearing in a new location with an astonished look on your face, as if you have no idea how you got there.
Since the quarantine ended and you returned to school, we’ve been told you’re behind in class. Your teacher says it’s because you have too many ideas, you’re off in your imagination, you can’t focus on simple school tasks. We’re working hard at home to bring you up to the level they say you should be at, even if it means you have less time to teleport.
It seems odd to me that having too much imagination as a six year old is a problem, but perhaps that’s because I’ve made a life out of being in my imagination. It’s always been a land of solutions, not problems.
We didn’t win the prize home (I guess you already knew that) but we didn’t self destruct like the family in the American TV show either. We’re still in our two bedroom flat that has the ocean lapping at it’s heels and salt eating its iron. Your room is still the one at the back, with too many toys because you won’t let any go, and a map of the world stuck to the wall with all the places you’ve been marked in round, red stickers.
There are green stickers there too, for all the places we want to take you next, but in this post Covid version of the world, green no longer means go it means wait and see…
From our tiny flat (two bedrooms, a kitchen attached to the lounge, a bathroom with no bath), I can see blue waves crashing through the pines and the sound of the ocean is so loud we shut the balcony door when we want to watch a movie. I love this place, not just for the view but because we have spent five years here, five of your six, mapping ourselves in terrain that is constantly reforming.
Our way of life has been weathered over many years of doing what we do. We know you should never build too high because the soil is sandy and you have to be ready to move on. We’re nomadic because the crops don’t last.
We think; most people couldn’t live here.
We know; we wouldn’t survive elsewhere.
No matter how small our flat might feel to you, there is space around us, and it’s not just the space of the beach either. It’s the space we create through the work we do and the people we work with. You might not always see it but our world is open to the horizon because art can do that. It clears space like a wrecking ball.
Landscapes we all thought immutable are changing, rivers are breaking banks and mountains are crumbling into dust. A whole world is reforming before our eyes but in our small part of it we also have you, a river carving its own canyon through the dirt.
We have to keep adapting to the changes as they come, even though they seem to arrive faster and faster, like a world in time lapse. Now, more than ever, it’s clear the nature of life is uncertain, but if we have one advantage it’s that we know uncertainty well. Our landscape has always had tectonic activity and instability has always been a part of our imaginings.
So we’ll make you do your homework to help you find your way in this world, but we’ll also give you enough time to play. Enough time to imagine yourself teleporting around our tiny apartment even if, in reality, you are just running from space to space.
Love,
Ragnar.
