The sky makes creases and it heaves and plops down its wetness in random outbursts of nostalgia. A realisation slowly creeps in that there has not been much thinking going on, and that is the moment where one suddenly wakes up feeling like a pregnant sky, heaving and puffing and full.

I head to work with golden flakes of paint on my elbow, forgetting to scrub it, thinking this is happening too often, and that i must somehow manage to make order out of it all, and the unlikeliness of that happening.

The process of producing paintings in chain, like a one woman factory, (initially for the pleasure of watching the colours extract new microcosms from my head, but now mainly to pay the rent) is beginning to grow tight, to make the limbs tired and the heart weary.

I had written this some time ago:

Cocoon part I
She makes a curve at the top of the kitchen table, her round head, her round shoulders, her round presence. skin stretches on her cheekbones like soft leather, her eyes kind of twinkle under the folds when I make her laugh. She picks up a red texta and draws a tomato on the blank page. She had never drawn before, when he was still alive. Now she does, and she begins every one like this: her name, maiden name first, first name second, on the bottom left corner. And then lines, tables and chairs, houses and puppets, stick figures dancing and copious quantities of small unspecified fruits and tomatoes from her husband’s withering vegie patch. Hair puffed like a cloud.

(his presence is felt in the empty suitcases in the dusty attic, leftovers from migratory journeys to germany. Broken dolls, wood chips and old bed frames, drawers and drawers full of their memories, a leather case, with inside a 50 year old swiss knife)

and then, upon visiting her again, decided to make a flickr site for all the pictures she had produced. Here are the works of my grandmother, her dotted abstractions.

I will sit and watch her draw, this peaceful potato of a woman, and envy the simplicity of that process. I will kiss her roundness and print her soft crackling laugh in my memory card.