// TOWNES //

Volcom button-up; Midnight Rider Townes Van Zandt shirt via Bona Drag; rings from Spell and the Gypsy Collective, Southset, Rejoice the Hands and vintage/markets; hat from Camberwell markets.

I’m growing a couple of cacti in my front yard – where my dog can’t rip them out and chew them up, because that’s what she’s into – and I’m obsessed with them. I check them every day. One’s a Euphorbia Mammillaris Variegata that blushes pink and orange in the sun; and the other is a tiny Opuntia Santa Rita that is rapidly growing new pads and will eventually be like a purple prickly pear with yellow flowers.

So this obsession – teamed with recent thistle-harvesting and flower-pillaging activities – has me wondering: is my newfound fascination with plantlife a symptom of ageing? As you get older, do parts of your child mind return? Maybe being more aware of mortality restores your sense of wonder and fascination with the world.

I was really into plants and animals and mushrooms (in a non-druggy way) when I was a kid; and I would collect fungi and burrs and seedpods and flowers and leaves, but there was a whole bit there during adolescence where I wasn’t really interested. I was just into Dead Kennedys and drinking and angst and resistance and posters of Trent Reznor.

Also, I distinctly remember being a teenager who was really preoccupied with trying to make things happen a certain way. Eventually, in my early 20s, I read that DFW line about trying to engineer your fate, and now I kind of drift along and just try to make good decisions and work hard without trying to force anything. But I was also, at 19, right into drinking and smoking and putting on all those artistic-literary affectations. I later realised that drinking and smoking actually made me a worse artist, so I scaled that rightback too. Maybe getting rid of those compulsions and preoccupations freed up some time for me to start looking at and appreciating the natural world again.

Anyway, I’m thinking about this because I sometimes see qualities of my parents surfacing in me – which is in no way a bad thing – and I am just so looking forward to heading home to the farm at the end of this week. I’m looking forward to walking through the garden with my mum while she tells me about her different plants, whether they’re happy and what lives in them; and to seeing my dad walk into the big wooden kitchen at midday, with some delicate, beautiful insect or bird cupped in his broad oil-stained palms. I’m even looking forward to hearing those goddamn cicadas for a second.

Over the past few years, I think I’ve softened my resistance against life’s inertia, which is making things a little easier. There’s a difference between working hard and struggling against reality, although both are hard fights. But anyway, being psyched on a colour-changing cactus comes with way less complications and contingencies than some of the things I fretted over when I was younger. 

BONES // STOP MOTION

Here's how it all happens. Music by The Black Angels.

M R M O J O R I S I N '

Where's your will to be weird?

ZEISS IKON

My step-grandpa sent me his old Zeiss Ikon camera, complete with all the manual settings I never properly learnt to use and a screw-on case and cover that smells so leathery and sturdy.

I'm still getting the hang of setting aperture and manual focusing, and I almost wrecked the whole film by trying to take it out without reading the manual first... I ended up sitting on the bathroom floor at 4am -- trying for a makeshift darkroom -- taking the film out without rewinding it, and stashing it in a few envelopes, because I didn't use the rewind release button. Always something to learn. 

But anyway, these are the images that survived. 

And it's such a cool thing. Not knowing if you've actually captured that image right. Knowing that there's a finite shot, that you can't just shoot ten of the same thing and hope one is right (which is my default move with digital cameras). Having to quietly, steadily, think about what you're doing. It's really reminded me to concentrate, go steady, appreciate the practice of art. To be patient sometimes, and to -- at other times -- just go ahead hope for a lucky light-leak. 

CALIFORNIA DREAMING

California Dreaming print available here (limited edition of 10).

Spell and the Gypsy Collective California Dreaming lookbook.

Bright turquoise the colour of the walls in that house you want to live in – by the beach, with the half-collapsed bamboo fence; the surfboards on the front lawn, the fluttering prayer flags, the tequila-sunrise frangipani tree. 

Pale pink like your first love’s blush, like fairy-floss at dusk, like the first summer sunburn, like the last late winter rose.

Crisp white like sun-starched bed sheets, like smiles, like hot cement, like ice cubes clinking; like the underbelly of an osprey, the foam on messy breakers, the sharp white clouds against a high summer sky. 

And blue the colour that’s in everything; the sky, the sea, the songs; the sweetly laughing eyes.

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I love when Spell and the Gypsy Collective release a new lookbook (see the whole thing here, and shop it here), because it’s always full of the most beautiful moods and muses. It’s the best time to get out the sketchbook and draw away, absent-mindedly considering what I might do this summer….

Print available here. 

GREAT NORTHERN

Hey, if you're in LA, you should get down to Costa Mesa right now. Immediately.

This little piece of mine (only slightly different colours...) is hanging in Element's end-of-year art show/party/all things lovely and fun. More details here.

EVERYTHING'S A SECRET

Little experiments and Reno.

I've been working on so many projects that are -- at the moment -- being kept under wraps. I'm really stoked with how some of them have come out, and I can't wait to send them out into the world... but I do, actually, have to wait to send them out into the world. 

So for now, it's little hints and warm-ups, cast-offs and seconds, and the little pieces I make whenever I get a sliver of free time. 

SKETCHBOOK: ABOUT THISTLES

Rings from Southset, Spell and the Gypsy Collective and Rejoice the Hands. 
Necklace from Spell and the Gypsy Collective.

Every now and then I walk Humble along a creek at the bottom of our street, then up some stairs through a new estate, which is generically named 'Valley Lakes' and is attempting to pass off a water-filled quarry pit as a water feature. 

Just about every time I walk through Valley Lakes, another obese, boxy, concrete home has appeared, positively smothering the block its built on, and, at times -- so desperate for a bigger sprawl -- it shares an external wall with a neighbouring house. None of these houses have backyards, or if they do, they're the size of a hallway. The front gardens are pebbles and concrete, everything else is paved. 

I feel like, looking at these marching rows of bleak status-houses, these people have consciously decided they don't ever want to come in contact with the natural world again. That they have decided it might be best to drive to work along sealed roads, sit in a sterile office all day, and then return home to a house full of manmade surfaces, and just stay there. Or maybe, feeling bold, they might go to the allocated strip of green down the road, to the park. 

This all is, of course, not really a philosophy I can align myself with. 

But last time I walked through Valley Lakes, I spotted something I really could subscribe to. Giant, prehistoric-looking clumps of thistles were sprouting all over the vacant lots. The slabs of land soon to host the sad piles of rendered brick and fake marble were raising one last act of defiance -- futile as it was. 

I had a closer look at the thistles, because, like everything in the southern reaches of Australia, they seemed to be larger, wilder, more quintessentially Antipodean in their dinosaur proportions. And they were. Totally sculptural and violent, and larger than my fist. And realllllllly difficult to cut from the bush to take home as souvenirs. 

But I did really want these thistles blooms in my home, because they are a hint at -- or a warning of -- the fact that everything has a method of defence, a way of protecting itself, a path to recourse. And for those who are willing to look hard enough, it's a reminder that the natural world, if we continue to force her hand, will one day show us the myriad ways she intends to defend herself, against us. 

But unfortunately, I suspect no one in Valley Lakes is going to look too hard at those thistles. Or, if they do, they will see them simply as another nuisance, something to be uprooted and paved over before it rises up.