CrumpArt » 2007

I need a hug.

March 31st, 2007 by Crumpet

This week is hard.

Why does this week have to be hard?

It’s not even hard because of any big stuff, just constant little struggles. I think it’s the constant that’s getting to me.

And I can’t even go to the Steinbeck’s gig tomorrow because I have to work. But I am looking forward to my friend’s show opening tomorrow night. Yay!

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So, I’ve been walking around for the past three months with a gaping hole in the side of my mouth. A filling came out back in December when I ate some liquorice, at which point I started obsessively flossing, and flossed out another old metal filling. I couldn’t get to the dentist straight away, being the busiest time of the year at work and all, and as time passed I got more paranoid that something awful was going on with my teeth* and it was going to cost me a small fortune (and several teeth) to fix.

I finally decided last week that I’d take the millions from my impending tax return and go to the dentist. Except then I did my tax return, and after the accountant’s fee, I’ll be getting a cheque for approximately $2.54. It turns out one of my employers only charged me 10% tax, instead of 30%. Fuckers. But I realised that I had to go to the dentist anyway. So yesterday I booked in an appointment, and this morning I went in for what I thought was going to be a check-up and discussion of what needed to be done. And before I knew it there was a needle in my gum and I was freaking out. Not about the drilling — I’ve never been afraid of going to the dentist — but about how I was going to pay the bill with my complete lack of funds. Thankfully, even though I’m completely broke, I do have private health insurance, so all my checkups at this particular dentist cost me nothing, and I also pay way less out of pocket for fillings… and they were okay with me coming back to pay the bill tomorrow (I phrased it as “didn’t think to transfer money before the appointment as I wasn’t expecting the fillings today” instead of “I need to borrow money from my partner to pay for this, because I have none of my own”) and I even got some free printouts of my mouth x-rays to use in some lithographs (I don’t think the dentist had ever had that request before). And the three-month old gaping mouth hole is gone. Good stuff.

*This is not the first time I’ve had gaping holes in that area of my mouth. In fact, it was the third time in the past year and a half. My theory is that my wisdom tooth** growing moved all the other teeth slightly and loosened all the old crappy fillings just enough for them to be pulled out by sticky chewing gum and liquorice. I’ve given up the gum, but the liquorice stays.

**I still have all four wisdom teeth. I’m very proud. They’ll be staying too.

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one more robot learns to be so much more than a machine

March 28th, 2007 by Crumpet

Yoshimi. Broadway. OMG.

Thanks Kris.

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100 things about me.

March 27th, 2007 by Crumpet

Shamelessly copied from gadgetgirl.

1. I like to think I measure up at 170cm, but really it’s probably about 168cm. Or 167.
2. I have three brothers and two sisters. My family goes girl, boy, girl, boy, girl, boy — I’m number five.
3. I grew up in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, the birthplace of true democracy in Australia. The Eureka flag has a special place in my heart.
4. As a child, I used to go with my parents to the polling booths. I was so excited to vote. I didn’t understand that this was considered odd until our politics classes in high school, when I was the only one who understood the basics of how voting and legislation worked.
5. Indian is my favourite food. Especially dhal.
6. My first pet was a purebred corgi that followed my oldest sister home one day and stayed. His name was Smurf.
7. My first bird was a yellow budgie named Tweety. Later birds included Jake and Perry, both blue budgies. I taught them to speak.
8. I moved out of home the week I turned 18 to go to university.
9. I wrote a note to my grade 2 and 3 teacher telling her how much I liked her. She wrote me a really sweet thank you note back, which I put in my photo album. In high school I went through a phase of thinking that was dorky, but I still kept it. She would have been in her mid-thirties when she died of breast cancer in my second year of uni. I’m so thankful that I told her how much I appreciated her, and that I kept the note.
10. My favourite artist is Brett Whiteley. And obvious choice, I know, but I can’t help it.
11. My favourite high school teacher was Mr Griffin. He taught religion to me in year 9, and art in year 11 and 12. He instilled a good blend of common sense and morals in the R.E. class, and the aforementioned love of Brett Whiteley and Australian artists in the art classes. I’m a printmaker because of him. I sent him a print last year to say thank you.
12. I have trouble choosing a favourite colour. I love them all, but hate wearing black and white.
13. I have to dress head to toe in black for work.
14. I have an addiction to French bedlinen.
15. My favourite pattern is paisley.
16. I’m a late person. I try very hard not to be, which usually makes me later. I’m convinced it’s genetic.
17. I was two weeks overdue, and my nails were so long when I was born that I had to wear mittens to stop self-inflicted injuries.
18. Out of the six aforementioned children, I was the only one of my siblings to get the blue eyes. I love my blue eyes.
19. I’m of Irish/English/Cornish descent.
20. My mum’s side of the family came to Australia on the Second Fleet of convicts. One of my ancestors borrowed a horse, was arrested for stealing it and was on the boat to Australia before they realised they’d made a mistake. He was pardoned when he got here.
21. I’ve never travelled overseas.
22. I have travelled a lot around Australia.
23. If I had to pick a favourite film of all time, I’d have to pick Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Which is technically cheating, I know.
24. I like making books.
25. My favourite tool is a bone folder. I carry it almost everywhere I go. Not strictly vegetarian, I know, but the plastic ones are shit.
26. I’m vegetarian, with a few tiny exceptions like the bone folder, silk and pearls.
27. I’m a procrastinator. I should be doing homework right now.
28. I like to wear at least one thing every day that I’ve made myself.
29. I have a Ashford Traditional spinning wheel named Fred, after the character from Angel.
30. If I could meet five famous people, I’d choose Joss Whedon, Wayne Coyne, Simon Pegg, Ani DiFranco and Neil Gaiman.
31. My favourite Australian film is Looking for Alibrandi, and it’s actually just a favourite film in general. I could watch this film every week and never get bored. I feel the same way about The Iron Giant and Shaun of the Dead.
32. My iPod is a pink first generation Mini named Amos. It’s nickname is The Pink Robot (I’ve never actually told anyone that before).
33. My computer is named Garfunkel, because it has Art on it.
34. If I was trapped on a desert island and left with only one album, I’d choose Bridge over troubled water by Simon and Garfunkel.
35. But it’d be hard not to choose Meet the Happies, by The Happies.
36. I cried during my first ever Ani DiFranco concert when she sang You Had Time.
37. My favourite book as a teenager was The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.
38. I was raised Catholic, but don’t follow the religion thing anymore. I do enjoy co-opting various religious holidays for the food and presents though.
39. I love getting presents. You will never see “Your presence is the only present required” on any of my invitations. At the same time, I never expect presents. But I love them.
40. I love giving presents.
41. I love dress-up parties. Some of my favourite costumes: the time I wore not much and painted myself gold for a 007 party (I won a Nintendo 64 for my efforts that time); the time I dressed up as Ripley a la Alien 3 for a movie party; the time I went to a Halloween party as Tippi Hedren from The Birds, complete with sherbet green skirt suit, blonde wig and origami birds in my hair.
42. I like pie.
43. I once made a cookbook called Ï€ that had 3.14 recipes for pie in it.
44. I’m a little bit geeky. And a little bit obsessive.
45. I only recently started noticing a lot of my geeky, obsessive, odd characteristics. I noticed some OCD in other people recently, went on my merry way, then proceeded to trip right over my own quirks.
46. My latest art show, 28 is named so because I turned 28 in February. And it has 28 paintings in it. All painted in February, the month that has 28 days.
47. We had to buy an external hard drive for my Hybrid Media animation class last year. Mine’s named Elliot, after Adam Elliot who won an Oscar for Harvie Krumpet.
48. Sometimes I compose Oscar acceptance speeches in my head. Don’t laugh. I bet you do too.
49. My favourite letter of the alphabet is e. I don’t really know why. It’s just always been that way.
50. As I cast on for my first pair of socks since last year yesterday, I actually felt myself exhale. I didn’t realise how much I missed knitting socks. I love my DPNs.

Tune in tomorrow for the next 50.

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Puppy love.

March 25th, 2007 by Crumpet

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What we need more of is science.

March 25th, 2007 by Crumpet

I became obsessed with Physics over the summer holidays. I started out searching for books on stellar myths, and ended up with about twenty science books. I never studied Physics at school… I never even knew what it was about, really. My idea of Physics was that it was a science about maths. I didn’t realise it was so absolutely fascinating.

Somebody in one of the books I read quoted this, which R.H. Davis wrote in The Skeptical Inquirer in 1995:
“Einstein’s fundamental insights of space/matter relations came out of philosophical musings about the nature of the universe, not from rational analysis of observational data — the logical analysis, prediction and testing coming only after the formation of the creative hypotheses.”
It’s such a simple truth, and the one thing about science that I never quite grasped in high school. Maths and science were always about practical things. Adding, subtracting, memorising charts of chemical compounds. They don’t tell you that science can also be about dreaming, and then finding the proof to back up your ideas.

Anyway, that little picture up the top of this post is a snippet of what I did last night. Mr Crumpet went off to a party, and I decided not to go because I really needed to get this work done. First, I spent a good hour and then some cleaning up my studio, then I set up the relevant computer hardware and scanned in a bunch of photocopies taken from a whole variety of books. They cover different belief systems about the universe through time. For this project, I’m interested in how different ideas of the universe and creation (science, religion, myth and so on) coexist and overlap, and why people believe the things that they do.

I was originally planning on using layers of lithography for my prints, but after looking at my research and thinking about all the different ideas that appear, it makes much more sense for each printed layer to be a different technique. So there’ll be lithography, linocuts, woodcuts, etching, embossing, collographs, monoprints and more, all on top of one another.

It might be awful, but I’m hoping for a beautiful mess.

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