27.5 cm (w) x 37.5 cm (h), blue biro on cartridge paper.
Date produced: November 1980
This was drawn directly from the real objects inside my caravan just after lunch, and shows my set-up for painting “The Red Apple” (shown directly below this text). At the time, I was living in an on-site caravan in the Longford caravan park, near Launceston in northern Tasmania. Looking at the drawing now, and seeing the large plate with knife and fork on it, I wonder what I would have had for lunch, that required those things. Over the years, I have usually been very happy with just having bread and spreads for lunch, but obviously this day I had something different. Maybe I had something like warmed-up baked beans on toast?
Hopefully, in this drawing you can make out the apple on the scrunched-up paper bag, just to the right of the roll of toilet paper. The toilet paper was used for quickly cleaning my brushes. I was painting using acrylic paints, and they typically dry off very quickly, which can quickly glue-up and harden the delicate hairs of unwashed brushes. And once acrylic paint dries, it is no longer soluble. One has to keep those brushes clean!
The board that is propped up at an angle is the painting. To work on the painting, I would be seated on the other side of the caravan, the pillows giving extra support for my back during the long time seated.
The light pencil squares drawn over the drawing were intended to help copy this particular drawing onto a larger piece of paper, so that I could put more work into the objects on the table. In the end, I didn’t actually produce the copy of this drawing on the larger piece of paper, because I thought it would be better to use my available time and energy into actually getting the painting finished, before the apple decayed.
As it turned out, this painting needed 10 days of working on it, painting for about 10 hours on each day. I kept the curtains in the caravan closed during the times that I was painting, to keep the lighting inside the caravan as consistent as possible. This had an effect of closing down my world to just the apple and the paper bag inside my caravan. I was very tired at the end of this painting, and I was very keen to work on something different by that stage.
I remember that during the time that I was working on the painting, I had opened a set of curtains while I had lunch. That allowed me to get an idea of events happening on the sealed single lane road that looped through the caravan park. As I looked out, not really noticing anything in particular, I suddenly saw a small bird (like a sparrow) hopping along the road, and then it collapsed onto the road (falling forward and onto one side). I could see both of its thin legs sticking out parallel with its prone body. While I was noticing its thin legs, I could see that the leg that was on top was shaking a bit, and then it stopped and slowly sunk down to the leg that was lying on the ground. It all happened so quickly, I couldn't believe it. I got up and went outside. The bird lay there. It wasn't a dream. I felt the road. It did feel quite hot. Maybe it was just too much of a shock for that little bird. The bird had died. It didn't move at all any more. I couldn't see its lungs move at all. How extraordinary! I just happened to witness its last moments of life. The poor little bird! It looked like it had a heart attack, or something like that. I felt quite strange for a while after that event. It made me wonder about that poor little bird's life; had it experienced a long life, or was the bird quite young? Did the bird have any offspring that it was responsible for? It made me think about a number of aspects about the bird's possible situation, and then I started thinking about the fragility of life generally, and reflected on my own mortality.
A few weeks later, when I had time to ‘let go’ of the long time put in to complete the painting, I did feel proud of the results that I did achieve, in both the painting and this drawing.
The event that I witnessed of the death of the little bird has stayed with me through more than 40 years, and will probably stay with me for as long as I can remember things.
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