Living in a fucked country

Part of the motivation to start another website in my life was the acceptance that the country I live in, Australia, is irredeemably ruined and there’s nothing I can really do about it. (and I tried).

At a certain point, political activism becomes exhausting. You look at the effort you put in, what you achieved, the amount of time you think you might have left on this planet, and figure it’s no longer worth the trouble. Time to try something else. Just because the place you are living in is screwed, doesn’t mean your life has to be crap and unfulfilled. Friends have left over the years, and I’ve had thoughts of moving. But the grass is not always greener on the other side, so they say. And starting again from scratch is hard.

In a sense I’m going back to my roots. I never gave up visual arts as an activity, but did realise it wasn’t a viable career option without whoring myself out to the government-grants system (in effect making you an addict to government money), or by doing corporate commercial work that I hated. I decided after art school (uni) to seek a professional income in a completely different industry and continue the art quietly at home without anyone telling me how to do it. That different industry turned out, after some journeying through other gigs like bartending and sales, to be electronics repair. I still do it today and it’s pretty satisfying.

Great decision actually. I spent years quietly developing my visual art craft and I can say im getting pretty happy with the results. Every painting is better than the last, the drawings also look great. It took a long time to get to the point where I am satisfied with my work. And most importantly, I’m not enslaved to someone else’s critical opinion. I am only accountable to myself.

I’ve always wanted my work to find more of a public audience, mainly so it doesn’t end up in the skip bin when the removalist's clear out my place when I die. At the very least it gets an afterlife online for a while or in an op-shop. It’s also been put to me that I can try to share a bit of what i know and learned. I’m gonna do that here in this blog too. Now that a universal vibe-shift has happened, it seems the time is right.

The neon-etch-a-sketch of oblivion presents an apocalyptic vision for all living inhabitants of this well-meaning but politically cursed land. It’s also the Year of The Snake for Vietnam as well as some other people.