Goldcoast sunrise

GOLDCOAST SUNRISE From the Mouth of the Lunatic Who Made It

I started it at two in the morning, which is the only honest time to start anything.

The plaster went down first. thick, obscene amounts of it, slapped right out of a bucket and pushed around with my hands because brushes are a kind of lying, and I was not in the mood for lying. I wanted the surface to mean something before I'd even decided what it meant. The pink came on like a fever. I didn't choose pink; pink chose the situation, the way the Gold Coast chooses you, whether you're prepared for it or not. 

The texture rose up on its own logic. I'd push a ridge of plaster in one direction, and it would curl back on itself like a wave refusing to break, like the beach itself arguing with me. Good. I wanted the argument. I wanted the canvas to have opinions. A surface that agrees with everything you do is a dead surface and dead surfaces produce dead paintings and I have seen enough dead things to know I don't want to make more of them.

I put the palm trees in at dawn. Teal. Deliberate. Three strokes each, more or less, that specific skeletal Gold Coast palm that looks like it survived something and isn't entirely sure it's glad it did. I scattered them the way they actually exist here, randomly, insistently, surviving in the margins of everything. They're everywhere in this place and nowhere you actually need shade.

The symbols came next and I won't pretend I planned them. The lightning. The eye of God, that eye in the centre of the lower half, surfacing out of all that pink flesh like something that has been watching the whole proceedings from underneath and is finally bored enough to make itself known. Letters that aren't words. Or aren't yet words. Or were words in some previous version of the painting that burned off in the heat of everything else that happened on top of it.

Here's what nobody tells you about making work that comes from a real place: it's not cathartic. It's not healing. You don't feel better afterward. You feel accurate, which is a completely different thing and in some ways worse, because accuracy doesn't comfort you; it just confirms the diagnosis.

Goldcoast Sunrise is the diagnosis.

It's the morning after every night this place has ever produced. It's the light that comes in over the water and hits the high-rises and turns everything temporarily, unbearably beautiful before the heat collapses the whole hallucination into just another Tuesday. It's the bodies, implied, suggested, buried under layers of medium and gesture, present the way memory is present, which is to say inescapably and mostly against your will.

I was on the floor by the end of it. Not dramatically. Just tired in the specific way that only comes from having argued with a piece of ply, plaster and spray paints for nine hours and arrived at something like a mutual understanding. The painting wasn't finished, it never is, nothing ever completely is. But it had reached the point where it could defend itself without me, which is all you can really ask.

The Gold Coast doesn't give you sunrises. It gives you evidence that a sunrise occurred while you were otherwise occupied. This painting is that evidence.