Changing over time

‘On Transients’, Artwork by Trevor Neal

WHAT TO DO?

I had a conversation with my dad, a school teacher who’d helped me navigate the ‘what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life?’ aspects of teenagehood. We sat in the garden of my childhood home —I’d returned for the weekend feeling antsy with the need to work it all out, the pressure of finishing university closing in. Crunch time. “Why not a retail manager?” he offered. And at that I lashed out. I was finishing a degree. Sure, I wasn’t as intelligent as the lawyer, banker big-time acquaintances that I’d been surrounded by at the University of Melbourne, but didn’t I need to be more? Ignorantly, I felt insulted. At some stage during my tirade, I drew breath and Dad had a chance to remind me how much I’d loved the retail work I’d done while studying. I had loved chatting to people about interesting things and objects in store, seeing some of them awkwardly shuffling, trying pieces on and shyly, peaking in mirrors, wondering what’s ‘them’, whether they dare. The golden moments were seeing them leave a little more confident in their own skin. Maybe derived initially from an outfit that made them feel that a little of something trapped inside had broken out, but it’s a feeling that had legs. I’d loved it. “We just want you to be happy,” Dad sighed. Insult turned into relief. But I still had no idea what I wanted to do. Was it retail I liked or something else it brought out in me? Rather than work out the answer for myself, I booked a series of sessions with a career advisor instead.

•••

THE CATALYST

Years and several jobs later I reconnected with our family friend Trevor Neal. As a child I’d perused Trevor’s home shamelessly. Full of art, ornaments, photography books and interesting pieces of furniture. Everything, just-so, came together in a naturally welcoming way. I’d ask questions. What’s this? Where’s it from? And everything had a story. Trevor had begun professional life as a teacher before embarking on a 14-year career that led him to senior management in the global pharmaceutical industry. But one day in 2012 he resigned and found himself running down the stairs of his Vienna office building. A weight seemed to lift, “Thank goodness that’s over.” At the time he thought he was referring to that particular piece of office life, later he realised he was feeling the release of saying goodbye to corporate life all together. He became a maker and artist, spaces he’d been forever tinkering in, though not devoted to. A budding art and design lover myself, I wanted to know all about his work. Through a meandering set of conversations spanning years, I worked out that it wasn’t just his work, but how he came to it — that was what I really wanted to understand. I was still looking for career advice. Or so I thought…

Upon returning to Australia, leaving corporate life behind, Trevor started his furniture business ‘More than Palatable’ —and he literally started with palettes. “I’d take the tram from Mooney Ponds Junction, where I was renting, up to Highpoint Bunnings, picking up an old palette and other rubbish. So, I’ve gone from this senior corporate role to being at the back of the tram surrounded by rubbish.” His first wheeled coffee table sold on Gumtree for $150. “I’d had vastly bigger pay cheques but never one that had been more satisfying,” he recalled. ‘More than Palatable’ grew utterly into its pun, as Trevor’s work was no longer about striving for a typically ‘palatable’ version of success.

A couple of months of email threads passed before I visited Trevor over a weekend in his home on the hills of Gloucester in NSW, where he lives with his partner. Merrick, a gentle giant of a wolfhound-kelpie cross keeps company, peering out from under his eyebrows, sticking to his owners like Velcro. In the living room of a morning, a ceiling-height timber, deco-style divider made by Trevor houses mementos within its nooks, while Melbourne duo Vika and Linda plays through an upcycled retro radio. “The things in my home are emblematic of my experiences and make the house a home, a place to belong. The furniture I make is an extension of this, functional for life while simultaneously reminders of journeys taken…it’s the nature of recycled materials,” he pinpoints as inspiration.

A little way down the hill, Trevor has built his 140sqm workshop; charcoal-painted steel with a timber deck and immense sliding timber doors, timber recycled from a Mornington Peninsula demolition. Inside a dining table is a work-in-progress. Crafted out of wood from Daylesford’s old Rex Cinema. The piece is an example of the way Trevor moulds materials into a new chapter.

•••

Credenza and artwork by Trevor Neal, image by Caitlin

Merrick outside Trevor’s workshop, image by Caitlin

AS UNEASE DEVELOPS INTO A SENSE OF SELF

Some artists leave the womb with a compulsion to create, driven by necessity. It’s all they can do, and nothing else will do. For others the need to create isn’t as obvious but it emerges more gradually from a restlessness. Describing this growing unease with my professional life to Trevor, he recalled author Stephen Covey’s theory: the feeling is a little like you’re playing a role in a script written by someone else.

Catching the late morning sun over the rolling hills of Gloucester, coffee in hand, lounging on the timber decking in seating that Trevor had handcrafted, I asked why we fear change and why it feels risky. In one email he’d discussed how his sense of self developed, as the years went on, he became aware of the institutions framing society and that often a sense of self develops either within or despite those surroundings, “For me, for as long as I could remember I had this feeling of not fitting. I did almost everything that my family, community, society asked and expected of me and always within myself I felt unfulfilled. My sense of self was not just eroded through participating in a life that wasn’t fully owned by me but even more so through the knowledge that I was allowing it to happen. On reflection, just about every institution I can name was stifling me.”

•••

DEFINING THE NON-NEGOTIABLE

Making a significant change to pursue a creative life takes guts, considering our bank accounts and the fact that we’re fundamentally connected to other people in life. Feeling these pressures, I put them to Trevor. “We all have to make decisions for ourselves in the context of the responsibilities we carry. If we were to wait for just the right conditions to come along, we would most likely never get the chance because we couldn’t ever take the chance. In my experience it’s not possible to have it all. Only the thing that is most important to you can ever be for certain. Everything else carries a value to be negotiated, including your commitment to living your own truth.” As someone easily (though gradually less so) influenced by others’ opinions of me, I pushed Trevor further. When you know you need to make a change, and you’re clear on what your non-negotiable is, how do you manage other people? In some ways Trevor could relate to my angst, “There were people who had an expectation of me that was purely related to their own needs…So for my own survival I had to say ‘I can’t carry the responsibility for your life’, and it’s a sad goodbye. But people of great value who love you for you — not what you do — find a way to come along. Those are friendships that go through transitions well because those friends need nothing from me.” He referenced a poem by David Whyte that he found comfort in, Sweet Darkness. A poem that made clear to me that authentically feeling like you belong can’t be faked.

During COVID-19 I had that moment, staring out the window, realising that what I was doing with a majority of my week wasn’t what I wanted to do for the next 40+ years, so I made my own change. Part-time work with dedicated week time for freelance writing. Some friends told me I was ‘brave’, but a friend who has known every version of me since childhood was awash with relief, telling me she’d never felt prouder of me. She wasn’t proud of something I was doing, rather she recognised that I was being more myself than ever. 

•••

‘On Darkness’, Artwork by Trevor Neal

TO YIELD TO RISK OR UNCOVER COURAGE

When acquaintances asked me what I do (because we always ask that, what someone ‘does’ implying work, not what they’re interested in), and I explained my freelance arrangement, the word ‘brave’ continued to come up. The word ‘brave’ then started to niggle at me, heightening my sense of risk.  I asked Trevor about how he views ‘risk’ in this context? “I think of risk having a negative connotation, of being fear laden. I learnt that some people aren’t capable of walking with you through big change and their responses are more about their own fears and anxieties. It can have a harmful effect on one’s sense of self because of one’s own heightened sense of vulnerability… Even commentary around being brave can be laced with similar meaning. That said, I’m more interested in courage because it’s fundamental to make your own journey. I also think one emanates more so from the mind, while the other is of the heart. A creative journey has to be mindful of both but I think by definition it tends to be heart-centric.”

When I think of heart-centric creatives, I think of the Patti Smiths of the world who came from nothing and unconventionally floated through phases of life instinctively before forging their very own, specific version of it. For some, being inspired by seemingly fearless artists, understanding the path they followed, can be a reassurance that creative life is possible. At least that’s how it felt for me, until Trevor, inadvertently, caused me to reconsider.

Early on in our emails I’d asked Trevor the age-old question flung at creatives– who are you inspired by? “Well, the ones I admire most are the ones we’ll never know the names of. Not a dollar to their name, but they are living their truth regardless. They get by, they own their life and accept full accountability for that life and they call themselves a … musician …because they are.” Trevor’s words took me back to an essay I’d read by Joan Didion, On Self Respect, where she argues that “character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.” I later realised why I’d found Trevor’s response disconcerting, and why it changed the way I considered inspiration. It underlined that you can be inspired by others, but you can’t follow them. There is no map and no guarantees. Instead, courage and self-respect erode the need for them. A little light-bulb moment — we were no longer having a conversation about working, but about living.

•••

Image by Caitlin

AN ANTIDOTE TO EXHAUSTION

In Trevor’s loungeroom, a large photograph hangs above his hand-crafted credenza. It depicts an old furniture store in Berlin. Only the façade is left standing, with chairs now littered haphazardly around it. Shot by Trevor, this photograph is one of many of his own pieces of art in the home. Several world-wide adventures have seen him produce vast, powerfully contemplative landscapes. These, thematically, are an enquiry On Darkness, On Journey and On Transience amongst others. Pondering Trevor’s work, I’d mentioned a perennial kind of fatigue that I felt was blocking my own artistic practice, that I couldn’t wait for an upcoming month of overseas travel I’d booked to re-energise me. He gently recalled a story he’d heard poet David Whyte tell, “David tells of a regular meeting he would have with a wise old friend, a Benedictine Monk. And on this particular occasion, David was feeling absolutely exhausted as he greeted his friend at the door. As he ushered him inside David asked him straight out, ‘Brother David, tell me about exhaustion…’, to which Brother David replied, ‘The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest.’  David Whyte responded, ‘The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest. What is it then?’ Brother David says, ‘The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.’”

A story that has weighed on me since because what my version of living wholeheartedly looks like may be something I can only understand incrementally. Although I’ve made a change to my career, am I ‘living’ day-to-day doing what I love most, or do I now just have a more creative life on paper? I can choose to feel disheartened by questions like these, or use them to inform my next move…sitting comfortably with the fact that living wholeheartedly, for me, may be an everchanging notion, as much about journey as destination.

•••

RECOGNISING THE VALUE OF TIME

Recently I’ve read a touch of philosophy. In a year where a pandemic continues and war breaks out, the Stoics seemed like somewhere to turn to for perspective on my smaller problems. Although I’m sure it’s been shouted often enough from the Ted Talk stage, this time I heard clearly. And for some reason I needed to hear it from Seneca to realise that despite words like these having been spoken for thousands of years, society’s values still largely don’t accord. In c. 65 AD, in a letter to his friend, Seneca wrote:

“What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily?... Hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrows. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing…is ours, except time…What fools these mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity, - time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay…For, as our ancestors believed, it is too late to spare when you reach the dregs of the cask. Of that which remains at the bottom, the amount is slight, and the quality is vile.”

In the weeks after I leapt off my own ‘corporate hamster-wheel’, the change I made attracted others and creatively minded people told me about their side projects, about what they wished they were doing with their time instead of their employment. They asked what made me actually ‘change’. I kept relaying a version of Trevor’s story. So, in one way or another, this meandering essay of an interview, is putting pen to paper in an attempt to adequately answer that question. Although I’m not ‘there’ yet, still somewhat compromising, our threads of conversation have woven together to leave me with some certainty. My struggle to achieve work-life balance was always doomed because time is, for me, a ‘non-negotiable’—because every moment of time is simply life, and finite. Not a morbid thought, unless I find myself living as though it’s slipped my mind.

Image Provided by Trevor Neal

Image: Caitlin Leishman

References:

·       David Whyte Poetry

·       Joan Didion On Self-Respect

·       Letters from a Stoic: Seneca

2021-2023

TÁR: A story of rise, and fall

A woman changes her name, dons a uniform of exquisitely tailored suits and, with genuine talent, sheds her old skin in order to become a world-class conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic – to become Lydia Tár. The film opens with an audience in shadows, spotlight on Tár who is being interviewed on stage by The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. Gopnik begins with a monologue introduction, Tár is clearly a maestro, offering insights on what it is to hear music, when music really starts. The shot pans back to a silhouette of a woman’s ponytailed head, her assistant, mouthing Tár’s words. This interview too is a performance. It’s the first hint that alongside talent, the ‘maestro’ is just one of the many faces this character has. The film explores all of them. The good, the bad and the ugly. Cancel culture, power dynamics, exploitation, love, lust and whether art can be appreciated despite the flaws of an artist, are all investigated in this film which works in the blurry, grey areas. It doesn’t seem to give a clear opinion on these themes, just lays out a story that points to the not-so-straightforward nature of things.

The film is set in music. In this case, the elite nature of it, the politics of it and the sound of it. But sound seems to play another role. What made Tár great, the sound of music she could guide out of an orchestra, also haunts her — misophonia, an extreme sensitivity to sound that disrupts her sleep and impacts her psyche. Visually the film has electric moments, the fierce movements of musicians as they are eliciting powerful or suprisingly soft sounds from their instruments. At other times, silence is the backdrop to gloomy scenes of Berlin that have an eerie, anxiety-provoking affect — not unlike a Daphne Du Maurier novel.

Some have criticised the portrayal of a world-class female conductor being an unlikeable character — considering it’s tough enough for women as it is without the rare portrayals of those who make it to the top spots being unflattering. Why make Tár quite so awful? A fair question but one that also prompted me wonder why women can’t be brilliant and awful, yet admired, in the same way many white male artists have been? I guess she’s a protagonist, not a hero. Criticism that the film is anti—women is complex, and there’s probably no right answer here. A couple of factors I consider are that it’s one of the few films I’ve seen in a while where all of the leading roles are female (albeit not a terribly diverse group). Secondly, the Dresden Philharmonic participated — the actors in the orchestra are world-class musicians, as their talent couldn’t be faked. Perhaps this involvement by musicians contributes to a sensitivity reading of sorts, maybe, maybe not. In any case, the film is a provocative conversation starter… 

After the film my partner and I spoke a lot about it, debated it, had a verbal relay of our different interpretations of particular scenes. We struggled — navigating ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ as we discussed, in a bid to find the politically correct or moral high ground on relevant issues raised. But here those issues are complicated, with characters playing in the space between right and wrong, through context. Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss and Sophie Kauer, directed by Todd Field, wrapped me up in this nuanced story. I don’t know anything about acting, except that if I don’t notice it at all … it must be good.

HABITUS LIVING MAGAZINE #55: CURATED LAYERS

Joan Didion: A unique sculptor of essays

Caitlin Leishman: Interpretation of Juergen Teller’s Joan Didion Portrait for Céline campaign

I borrowed a bundle of books from a former colleague, the kind of sunny person who leaves David Sedaris’ ‘Naked’ on your desk. Her taste in other books was also very much to my liking. Yet, I returned them all…except one—a collection of works by Joan Didion. On the spine are the words ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’

Didion’s subject matter might be mighty but her tone doesn’t get your attention by booming at you. Rather her voice makes her readers aware of things…quietly. Though piercingly. Her words have a habit of lulling me in, gradually creeping up and attaching until they suddenly elicit a visceral reaction, like a snake that seems to appear out of nowhere in one’s path, yet has been there the whole time.

Snakes appeared less metaphorically in her works. In the documentary ‘The center will not hold,’ she says this is because they should be avoided, but that to kill a snake is the same as having a snake. They’re still there. Echoing the snakes she avoided, her writing feels slick, elegant and all seeing, laced with warning.

When I consider the times in which she wrote and the subjects of her essays, think The White Album and Slouching towards Bethlehem, I’m reminded of Cookie Mueller’s ‘Swimming through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black’ which documents quirky, chaotic, heart-wrenching moments of her life during the same era. However, where Mueller wrote from within her events, Didion seems to be writing from above the fray. It’s as though Didion is gazing upon a crystal ball, not wishing to change or predict events, simply waiting for the image to become clear. She waits, pen at the ready, to demystify the everyday disorder that we can’t make sense of ourselves. It might involve interviewing Linda Kasabian of the Manson murders, or unravelling her own personal grief.

Her ‘crystal ball’ is a notebook. Given her first by her mother as a girl, she was told to stop whining, to write it down, she explains in the documentary. The first story she wrote, at around five years-old, was of a woman freezing to death in the artic, who collapses and awakes, only to find herself dying of heat in the desert. And this from her child’s mind. Years continued, notebooks amassed, “see enough and write it down” became a method in itself. Then one day when she would sit down and have to write for work, on a day when the world seemed ‘bankrupt of wonder’, as she put it, she would have a notebook of observations that had ‘accumulated interest’. 

At this point I should warn you that continuing on means reading slabs of Didion’s own words, because each of these are pieces of the jigsaw that I take away from her writing. To talk extensively about her writing and not include it seems unjust, though including too much, when you could just go and read her work, seems wasteful — so be it.

In the 1960s Didion ended up working at Vogue. Another writer was meant to submit a piece titled ‘Self Respect: its source, its power’. But the other writer’s words didn’t come, so Didion’s did. She wrote an essay far grittier than Vogue was known for —but they published it anyway. 

What could have been a light pump-up piece on self-respect, instead leaves a reader examining the recesses of their mind. She begins,

 “…Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”

She frames self-respect as something that starts from a loss, then exposes behaviours that most commonly manifest in lieu of self-respect.

“The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one heaps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions.”

It’s a passage highlighting the inevitability that that which has, so persistently (if unconsciously), been buried, will be stumbled upon. 

Didion then tells us what it feels like, and from where in the void the choice to build it might be plucked.

“To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we post-pone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”

Self-respect now becomes not something one must earn, but something we can simply choose to possess, in spite of imperfection. Considering the fallible but fabulous Jordan Baker of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, she points out that, 

“…people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from wronged parties…in brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues.” She clarifies ‘character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life —is the source from which self-respect springs.’

By now, this elusive thing, self-respect, has taken on a kind of shape, and so too does the negative space around it, which makes up a forlorn sort of image that can only be what a lack of self-respect might look like.

“It was once suggested to me that as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag.”

With this inelegant picture in mind, Didion hints that the romance of sadness might be something that some of us find tempting. That during shitty times there’s a certain self-indulgence in imagining a soft flattering light upon tears, that one’s despair might, at least, be graceful.

Didion ends with a warning of sorts…

“It is the phenomenon sometimes called ‘alienation from self’. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one’s sanity becomes an object of speculation among one’s acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.”

I interpret this as a far more eloquent approach to articulating that virtue of occasionally being able to say to ourselves, ‘well… fuck it,’ and move on. But this is only my guess. Her article on self-respect does everything but tell you how to get some. This isn’t her business. As in any of her works I’ve read, she observes, questions assumptions, but never preaches. 

Didion died of Parkinson’s disease in December 2021. To write as powerfully she did she lived with a certain sternness. In ‘The center will not hold’ she recalled, at the height of the Woodstock era, getting a request to go to an apartment, someone she knew had something she had to see, and to write about. A small toddler sat on the floor of the room. A normal child, except for the white lipstick. It was on acid. Didion described it as ‘gold’, though her eyes upon recalling it, welling up, highlight that shock remains a key ingredient to stories that stick around in the mind. Rationalising the harsher side of journalism. But she did inflict this journalistic scrutiny on herself too.  

“You write your material, you used what you had” she says of writing about her contemplations of divorce while on holiday, an article edited in fact by her husband. 

Reading Didion’s work is like sitting down and having an honest and disarming conversation with someone about how things really are. Her words, like a renaissance marble sculptor, seem to chip away at the mass of an outer shell, revealing and leaving only what’s left at the core. 

HABITUS LIVING ONLINE: LIVING BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT

HABITUS LIVING ONLINE: LIVING IN A KALEIDOSCOPE OF LIGHT

HABITUS LIVING ONLINE: DESIGNING LA DOLCE VITA THROUGH ART

ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI’S WOMEN

Beheading of Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi

My mother gifted me a coffee table book, ‘Great Women Artists’. Each page a key work alongside a snippet about an artist’s life and oeuvre. A gory image of two women bracing themselves over a man they held down on a bed. One seemed to come over the top of him, pinning him down at the torso, while the other, eyebrows furrowed perhaps in both rage and concentration, was beheading the man with a large sword. The image is expressive and forceful, the painting precise. This is Judith (with her maid servant) beheading Holofernes. The artist was Artemisia Gentileschi. 

Gentileschi (1593 – circa 1662) was an Italian Baroque painter. Her style, in its tenebrism, was influenced by Caravaggio, though her depictions are thought to exceed his in their naturalistic quality. She had a 40-year career at a time when female artists were scarce, and those taking on the ‘important’ subjects, like biblical and historical scenes, even more so. Yet Gentileschi, having trained with her father, had not only the skill to compete with her male counterparts, but in her depictions of women, she uniquely painted with insight, gusto and authenticity. Of her 57 well-known and attributed works, 49 feature a strong female protagonist, often in a moment of tension, hesitation or decision.

When she was 17 her father hired an artist, Agostini Tassi, to teach her drawing and perspective. Tassi came with a reputation of sexual aggressiveness and violence, so it’s odd that a father would invite him into his daughter’s life. Though Tassi’s potentially profitable connections such as Pope Paul V might explain Ozario Gentileschi’s incentive. Tassi raped Gentileschi. Seventeenth century law considered rape a matter that centred on whether virginity had been taken away. Even then, the seriousness of the crime was less about concern for the woman as it was for the depreciated monetary value she would be worth when being married off. So, Gentileschi’s father took Tassi to court and Gentileschi was tortured with thumbscrews when giving her testimony to discern truthfulness. She maintained her graphic version of events which have been preserved in the trial records that were exhibited at the National Gallery in London in 2020. This wasn’t the only trial she endured, she also lost two of her son’s during her life and her father and brothers are said to have been harsh with her. Gentileschi herself was also said to be violent. For instance, when a servant asked for payment, she and her husband beat him severely.   

Whether or not her life’s challenges influenced her work is debated, especially in reference to her violent depiction Judith Beheading Holofernes. Holofernes was a general known for sexual violence, so some consider that she took revenge on Tassi through this work. As Siri Hustvedt notes in her essay A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, ‘How can art come from anything but life? The dead don’t make it.’ I’m not sure that Gentileschi used her art purely as a vessel for this rage, but rather as a resilient woman, perhaps she intended to depict women with a will of their own - women of the biblical stories as deliberate, calculating and determined in their actions with courage. Not the nonchalant puppets to a higher power that previously had been depicted. In Judith Beheading Holofernes the maid is participating, unique to Gentileschi’s interpretation, the women work in a kind of solidarity. Their sleeves are rolled up exposing strong arms and the process of beheading is labourious. The lines of the limbs draw the eye into the centre of the deed. 

Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, Artemisia Gentileshi

While women are often naked in Baroque and Renaissance works, Gentileschi reveals more about her protagonists in the way she has covered them. Works like Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy and Lucretia, pierce a window into the mind of the subject. In Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy the eroticism comes through in her tensed posture, contorted neck as her head throws back, the consumed facial expression. Her top may be about to slip from her shoulder, but it’s not required to convey a pool of electric bliss. Lucretia, a Roman heroine who was married, then captured and raped, kills herself to save her family from dishonour. Gentileschi’s version shows the moment as Lucretia is deciding whether or not to go through with it. Lucretia’s form is strong, she clutches her breast deliberately with one hand, a knife in the other. Her leg and decolletage only are revealed. With a severe expression she gazes above. It seems as though the questions of dishonour, power and will over oneself and body are more important to Gentileschi as the cause of the moment, than the act of suicide - the consequence. 

Lucretia, Artemisia Gentileschi

Her talent was recognised and she was the first woman invited to the Academia del Disegno. This meant she could buy her own supplies and sign her own contracts without the permission of her husband. It meant independence. She was also awarded a commission to paint an altar which was symbolic of her reaching the pinnacle of a male-dominated mountain. Painting an altar meant she was considered a great artist worthy of painting for the most important and impressionable audience – the public.

Gentileschi did something different with her art, she conveyed women as they really were, not in the idealised form they were meant to aspire to. Her works didn’t simply depict an action from a historical scene – rather her talent captured emotion, thought and the complexities of women.

Despite being a woman in a man’s world, Gentileschi’s storytelling held her in high esteem in her day. Then we forgot about her for 300 years. This is thought to be because many art history scholars were men, writing about men, for men. Gentileschi came back into the public eye around 1970 as feminism heightened. Just like reading a newspaper, looking at art requires keeping in mind whose lens one is looking through. Just as we interpret art individually, so does each artist interpret life. 

Gentileschi painted heroines of the bible and of history. She retold their stories with a new focus on the strength their actions would have required. Her works, rife with empathy, rage and power at a time when these women were often depicted tranquilly adorned with vacant expressions, as though posing - their courage act a pretence. Gentileschi made her protagonists actions real and their own, something new and visceral for the women of her day. 

Her works have been described as a kind of feminist rebellion. Maybe, but I think she also did something more powerful - she corrected. She took a red pen to the work that came before her, margin notes explaining that this is what a real woman looks like, how she thinks, how she feels and how powerful she can be. Her legacy then is perhaps not depicting a new kind of woman at that time, even if it was new for the art world, but showing honestly the way women had always been. 

In a documented letter from 1649 to a regular patron, Don Antonio Ruffo, she writes ‘With me your lordship you will not lose and you will find the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman…I’ll show you what a woman can do’ 

Though she apparently wrote these lines to justify her professional skill, each of her works seems to attest to her point - to show what a woman can do. Just as she was inspired by courageous historical heroines, perhaps she’s become one of them for the twenty-first century. 

Then again, this is just speculation, 

through a lens,

all of my own. 

HABITUS LIVING ONLINE: REDEFINED LINES AND LIVING WITH DOOD STUDIO

The Garden of Earthly Delights: A portrait of human avarice

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymous Bosch Panel 3 excerpt

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymous Bosch, Panel 3 excerpt

Five hundred years ago Hieronymous Bosch painted The Garden of Earthly Delights. A triptych with two exterior panels depicting the third day of creation (when The Garden of Eden came to be, according to the bible). The exterior panels are grey, grim and lifeless juxtaposing what lies inside. At a glance the three interior panels are playful and decorative like a child’s wistful fable of make believe. Upon closer inspection the gore of Bosch’s figures is unsettling. 

Sometimes human, sometimes animal, sometimes hybrid. Gnarly, gothic figures spear, decapitate, eat and pleasure each other. The shameful deterioration from paradise to hell is generally considered a religious warning to resist temptation. Dignity being the most precious thing that a human can lose. The first panel shows the angelic allure of desire, the middle a mystical orgy before the third gets simply hellish. Although the creatures are physically disturbing, most frightening (though unsurprising as Bosch is considered a precursor to the Surrealists) is the sense that this twisted imagery could be plucked from the psyche of today’s anxious nightmares.

A sense of infinite human folly is illustrated through compositional layering, not only across the triptych but also in the rolling hills fore to background, and in the prolific spattering of humans taking part. 

Christ looks directly at the viewer including them in the mayhem - you did this. 

Beyond a religious and sexual context, Bosch highlights the rippling butterfly effect of temptation and its subsequent destruction. Humans follow one after the other wreaking havoc. 

Because to err is the most human thing of all.

Bosch reveals the pitfalls of blindly following others, of wanting what they have and propelling a collective greed. This chaos of individualistic indulgence acts a mirror – as modern news outlets frequently remind us that we humans consume everything in our path. 

Consumers of the world rather than citizens,

Bosch insists that there is a cost,

Because nothing comes for free, 

Especially in paradise. 

HABITUS LIVING ONLINE: THE THIRD BY DALECKI DESIGN

HABITUS LIVING ONLINE: HOUSE JAMES BY BERRESFORD ARCHITECTURE

Zagara: A wistful scent on the cusp of jubilation

‘A garden for the blind.’ This is how Don Fabrizio Corbera, the Prince of Salina, describes his backyard. The Prince is the protagonist in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel, The Leopard. In this moment the Prince is surrounded by roses, magnolias, lemon myrtle, mint, and orange blossom wafts from a grove somewhere in the distance. The Prince’s stroll is a ruminative one, weighed down by overwhelming aromas and memories. Citrus notes remind him of having witnessed a fatally-wounded soldier use his last breaths to crawl into a lemon grove. Because in all its Sicilian beauty, The Leopard is set during a time of civil war and revolution. The nineteenth century, where the aristocracy will come to be replaced by new money. As the Prince brushes past Elysian scents, he is already nostalgic for that which has not, quite yet, been taken away.

I read this scene after spending an afternoon sniffing scents in a little shop-front. I came out with Santa Maria Novella’s Zagara Cologne. Opened in 1612, Santa Maria Novella is an Italian apothecary pharmacy specialising in complex fusions steeped in ancient remedies. Zagara is a Chypre-type fragrance where addictive floral citrus, jasmine, bergamot and blossom notes float in a fresh sweetness bound by woody oakmoss. The Prince’s Sicilian garden bottled in all its glory, complete with an ephemeral veil of melancholia.

HABITUS LIVING MAGAZINE #51: A PLACE TO CONGREGATE

About Time

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali

We lose it, manage it, save it, waste it, then wish we had more of it. Time has become a kind of slippery, anxiety inducing method of measuring life, constantly grappled with. Way back when, time passing was marked by natural cycles. The sun rose and set on a see-saw with the moon gently, informing wake and relax. Today, unless one is orbiting a blackhole or hanging out with Elon on Mars, the need to closely eye the time like a sad day-trader monitoring their stocks comes from an unhealthy and misguided impulse that something important will be missed. The opposite is true. Second by second, rung by rung, the day-to-day becomes a hamster wheel, incessantly running to the tune of iCalendar alerts. Although most of the world rely upon them, schedules are little prisons for impromptu opportunities.

In Netflix’s Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, Bill’s assistant remarks that despite his wealth and intellect, time is the one thing that Bill can’t accumulate more of. It’s the one thing that he must use as wisely as the rest of we plebs. Some say time is money – but this thought triggers a dubious little whisper, warning that a life led as such is a constant blackmailing of oneself. Although not monetary, time is a kind of currency for life and it’s inevitable that it will be spent. 

What is left after time? Memories. By examining memories one can measure the return on investment of a certain way of life. And value won’t be weighed according to one’s aptitude for time-management or efficiency. Unlike time, memories can be accumulated and if observed, the good ones inform how time should be invested in future. And when we die, it’s the warm memories created bit by bit with others that morph time past into tangible treasures that live on in others.

Albert Einstein said, ‘Time and space are modes by which we think, not conditions in which we live.’

Getting caught in the web of plans, routines and expectations is a choice, not something dictated by time itself. Time moulds to the parameters placed on it. 

A watch is aptly named for literally observing time pass by. Surely, there are better ways to own it. Better ways to fill a treasure chest.

MARION BORGELT - SILENT SYMPHONY

 SILENT SYMPHONY

At a time of quotidian angst, this suite of work offers escape and lends perspective. Silent Symphony alludes to nature's exquisite designs by referencing fundamental archetypal patterns and forms. The artist’s selection of different materials considers how their innate properties are best elevated to result in expressions of orbital motions about time and change.

Scale becomes enigmatic in the works; they may be viewed as though through a microscope’s lens upon the minute, yet are simultaneously suggestive of vast eternal rhythms and infinite symmetries trapped in a volution. These works give prominence to the meticulously engineered natural world and reveal its omnipresent melodies that generally escape the naked eye. By intersecting the realms of physics, mathematics, design and rhythm inherent in nature, this exhibition underlines the elementary connections of all things. 

Artist Statement by Caitlin Leishman. See more of Marion Borgelt’s work via her website.

The Nose: Nikoli Gogol

In his short story The Nose, Nikoli Gogol wrote that, ‘The world is full of the most outrageous nonsense.’ And it opens with nothing less than that. A barber is having breakfast with his nagging wife. The options are an onion, a bread roll or coffee. He is allowed to have some but not all, his wife insists, so he forgoes the coffee. As he slices into the roll, he realises a nose has been baked into it and recognises it as that of his esteemed client ‘The Major’. 

The Major is a ladder-climbing narcissist who, upon finding nothing but a flat fleshy plateau in the centre of his face that morning, instantly began to fear for his social status and potential loss of charm with married ladies. He darts around the city in a bid to locate his nose. When the Major finds his nose, Gogol narrates that ‘Even joy begins to fade after only a minute,’ as it dawns on the Major that he has no way to reattach his nose. A doctor explains that sticking it on is his only option – and it would look awful. The doctor insists he’s better off without it, life would be ok and he’d get used to it. But the Major’s ego can’t bear the thought, after all he has high hopes of growing his importance in his wealthy circles. 

Throughout his mission to return his nose to its rightful place, the Major’s misogyny becomes apparent. He passes beggarwomen that he usually laughs at due to their dress that only leaves their eyes visible. But he doesn’t laugh as he runs by them also covering up with a handkerchief to his face. At the City Security Department where he hopes to place an ad for his missing nose, the Major notices one by a 19-year-old girl who has laundry experience and is willing to do ‘other’ work. Later, in despair, he accuses Alexandra Podtochin (a statesman’s wife as he often repeats) of witchcraft as he believes she is taking revenge for him not marrying her daughter. The Major is also disrespectful to those he views as lower class, such as his threadbare barber who he insults constantly for being dirty with ‘stinky hands’. An aspiring statesman and wealthy governmental-like figure that acts with prejudice, insolence and idiocy, the Major seems to satirically shed light on Gogol’s views of an incompetent government leaving many of its people behind.  

The Nose develops its own personality and becomes even more stately than the Major himself. For that day, the Major is out-ranked by his own nose and a taste of what life could be like for those less fortunate. But any self-reflection the Major may have is fleeting – particularly once both his luck and nose are magically returned to him. 

In children’s film, Mary Poppins, Mr Banks is oblivious to his children and pre-occupied with only his own career. Mary Poppins explains to the children that ‘Sometimes a person we love, through no fault of his own, can’t see past the end of his nose.’ Gogol seems to have almost pondered this phrase literally (though in 1836 well before Mary Poppins) by taking the nose off the face of an ignorant being and extending the distance between a him and the end of his nose, thereby allowing more of the world to broaden his narrow view of it. This doesn’t work for the Major, maybe it was only meant for the reader…

This could also be a ridiculous link to make. After all, Gogol writes at the end of the story, in a conversation between reader and narrator, that such fantasies are useless and serve no one. Yet, he then doubles back a little, suggesting that there’s an absurd side to most things. 

Some might be tempted to contain absurd fantasy to the realm of children’s tales…but The Nose hints that a self-obsessed view of the world doesn’t discriminate. For adults, the absurd can open our eyes to the reality around us, that we also are missing.  

You'll have to speak up for Owen

Walking back to the car I came across an elderly man laying books on a blanket on the corner of Brunswick St. A few creative types hovered. The man would pick a book from his wheelie walker, consider it carefully categorising it in his mind, then take an age to shuffle to the right spot on the mat and crank his rickety knees down to position it just so. This strained choreography continued agonisingly. His efforts seemed risky with the air thick and rain threatening. Each book, one at a time.

As I closed in a musty scent reached me, old books. The man was thin and a tattered suit hung from him. His pants were loose around his disintegrating waist, belted to the extent that the fabric buckled, overlapping the way it does when men lose strength, muscle and beer belly. Pants reminiscent of a livelier self. His fly wasn’t done up, though I’m not sure that this was a wardrobe malfunction, rather I just don’t think these pants did that anymore. 

The skin on his face seemed a little alive; lumps and ravines morphing to their own agenda. His chin, forehead and nose thick as an elephant’s hide, yet only a veil of translucent skin held in his cheekbones. 

He wasn’t talking to anyone, just going about his cataloguing.

He pulled out a range of books and genres one by one. Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry, Brecht’s philosophy, Albert Camus in French, Calavino in Italian, were woven in amongst Shakespeare, Murakami, Orhan Pamuk, Primo Levi, Daphne De Maurier and physics guides. Cantilevering myself over the mat I surveyed this mini library of his mind. 

I picked up a book almost guiltily as I knew he’d have to find just the right substitute for the gap I’d left. Albert Camus – time revive my French. There wasn’t a lot of chatter and it was hard to navigate his purchasing system. I asked whether the books were for sale. Nothing. He just kept walking. I tried a woman nearby sitting on a bench flicking through a guide to Da Vinci’s art confidently. She responded matter-of-factly,

‘Yep, prices on the inside of the cover - but Owen is deaf – you’ll need to speak up!’

 I took Camus back to Owen and positioned myself squarely in his path; between wheelie walker and mat. 

I showed him the five dollars of coinage I’d scraped from the bottom of my bag and pointed to the grey lead $5 in the cover, offering to buy it. His brow gathered at its centre. 

‘It’s in French!’ he was quick to point out. I explained with exaggerated nods of my head that I was aware and keen to practice. He flicked his head to the side unconvinced, but took my dollars. 

After our odd transaction I hung about a little longer. I had a burning question. These books, all laid out, owned by this man who didn’t converse much, painted some kind of intimate portrait of who he might have been before he became too thin for his pants – so why was he offloading them?

Did he need money? Evidently. Or was he simply happy to cull some of his collection and share some knowledge? Maybe…Or was his health deteriorating like his attire? 

When one isn’t properly educated across languages, conversing with someone who is hearing impaired means doing so loudly, insensitively.

It wasn’t a question I could bring myself to ask in the middle of a busy Brunswick St. 

As I walked away, I flicked through the Camus I’d purchased and noticed penned English in a neat scrawl sporadically above obscure French. But the translations only lasted a few pages. Maybe Owen didn’t think I’d conquer Camus either.

HABITUS LIVING MAGAZINE #50: FINDING BALANCE

Etta: An antidote to anger

THE FIRE

Etta James’ voice leaves me breathless. But not in the usual way. Hers isn’t a voice that lifts you above the fray, into the clouds on honeyed lyrics. No.

Etta dives straight into the gut and stokes the embers that one has been trying to keep at bay. Embers that have been slowly burning away, distracting one’s capacity for joy. The crackling embers of rage. 

ETTA KNOWS

Etta was born Jamesetta Hawkins in 1938, her mother pregnant at fourteen. Etta never knew her father, he was a figure of rumours. She was raised by adored adoptive parents before her mother returned for her when Etta was 12. Her mother may have come back for her, but an only minimally present mother — sweeping in and out on the glamourous scent of midnight cologne — she perhaps left the lingering weight of abandonment, perhaps later, an understanding. A largely self-parented teenager, Etta navigated a music career, substance abuse and adulthood early. 

A mugshot might mark Etta’s arrests for drugs and bad cheques, yet a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame proves that celebrated glittery talent can exist hand-in-hand with long and twisted roots. Etta’s telling of life reiterates that we are more than one thing. The soul behind her indelible voice comes from lived experiences - both of fame and felony. 

I’d Rather Go Blind is a song about a woman who can’t bear to watch her lover leave her for someone else. It’s nostalgic and heart-breaking with a haunting veil of envy. She sings it with the desperate fury of someone familiar with the injustice of loving and having loved ones leave. Singing live at Montreux in 1975, as a 37-year-old, her face contorts, sweat ripples down her neck as she forcefully ejects the words with a possessed jerkiness, as though she’s a vessel for many angry voices. She plays to the audience. Bends down to them from the stage, meets their eyes, drawing them into a trance. She brings her microphone down to her hip, letting the power of her raw, unamplified voice directly meet its audience. In parts, she is a gravelly, Hendrix guitar vocalised. She will stop and start, using silence, letting her audience catch up to the meaning in her words. She pulls her collar up to ‘blind’ herself, because one can still be playful in anger. Thirty years on, she sings I’d Rather Go Blind again, backed by the band The Roots. She wears a red sparkly jumper. This time she doesn’t lean into the audience or energetically cross back and forth as she sings, rather she is seated on stage. Although age is physically catching up with her, her mind doesn’t appear at all weary. She scats lyrics with wit. The fire is still there in the light reflecting off her sparkly jumper, in the sweat glistening on her brow and in the tears in her eyes. 

Although I’d Rather Go Blind is a story of agony, she also sang with just as much heart about hope. When she sings At Last it’s as though an older couple is dancing in public. Their audience grows. The backing music stops and her voice alone moves them. They circle, roll out to their arm’s length, to the brink of separation, before they roll back into each other. The scene is like the aftermath of a drama, a lifetime together, when a marriage finds that in fact it could climb down off the rocks. 

Etta sings,

Oh and then the spell was cast

And here we are in Heaven

For you are mine

At last....

Her rendition of At Last suggests that enduring love isn’t always blissful with sun rays, but rather those are the ephemeral moments in between anger, forgiveness and mundane life. Which is ok, Etta seems to hint, because sometimes love also needs to be endured. 

Etta passed away in 2012 from leukaemia. A six-decade career that inspired the sound of other musicians we know, alongside a lifetime of battles with lovers, friends, the authorities, dementia and herself. Only someone who knows rage like this, the never-ending rolling hills of it, detailed in her autobiography Rage to Survive, can deliver music raw enough to make one recognise one’s own. During her life she was shamed for her rage, her outbursts — but in a way her anger could be considered a source of her music’s power, its visceral effect.

THE PURGE

Etta makes fury sound beautiful, enough that it fuels that angry fire in the belly, until the maelstrom of waves simply has to boil over. She forces this necessary emotional purge. In John Le Carré’s novel, The Tailor of Panama, a female character describes her own temperamental fury as ‘the tantrums that ran through me like conflicting impulses of hereditary electricity.’ It’s this kind of caged fury, reverberating around nerves, that Etta relieves by poking holes in dignity, so that these currents of energy might ride on the backs of tears out of the body. 

She sings,

Something deep down in my soul said “Cry girl”

Cry Cry

A PHOENIX

In my mind Tell Mama, a soulful album she recorded in the 1960s, transports me to a kitchen table, cupped hands prop up my head, a stiff drink nudges a resting elbow. Someone I trust listens to my grievances, taking a little of their weight. Etta’s songs hug the body like this, an angry hug that squeezes the last self-pitying thought out, provoking a kind of gentle exorcism– it’s this quality of her music that renders one breathless. 

At the end of Etta’s songs there’s a stillness left behind, after the anger has gone, like she’s gifted a pocket of silence that one can rest in for a moment, building resilience. 

When a melancholia won’t shift, the French call it ‘la vague à l’âme’ (my soul is in the waves). No therapy will replace this deep-rooted rage with strength, the way Etta can. 

This is a reflection on Etta James’ music, and how it reaches beyond the ears. Regarding her own life experiences and sentiments, I refer to candid recollections from her autobiography, Rage to Survive, 1995.