It's a discovery from a great purge of old yellow paper that I've spent afternoons of my summer holidays eradicating. I scan what has value to what I'm doing now or anything that has a genuine documentary value. Some of it is too old and decayed for recycling and must break down in landfill. But before I handle it responsibly, I examine it for value and either set it aside to be scanned and binned or just binned.
This picture is from an old foolscap size page from an exercise pad. It's a sketch taken from a photo I took of the girl. Erring on the side of caution, I'll refer to her as Rosanna.
This has nothing to do with the repellent 80s hit by Toto but it is musically inspired. Years before I drew this a band called Sebastian Hardie released an instrumental called Rosanna. It had a simple and beautiful guitar riff which surfaced from swells of flavourless major key jazz rock. I can not only remember the riff but easily play it on any keyboard to this day, having only heard it about ten times on the radio. The band made no further impression on me but this was enough. The riff has such a cinematic ache to it that it zapped straight into my thirteen year old's central nervous system and struck me as the exact sound of longing, of love forever and devastatingly ripped from the grasp.
This sketch is more than nostalgia to me, though. It has a direct bearing on the story. First, the girl is not the model for Gail. No one is. Unlike the other three of the central quartet, Gail is pretty much all invention. Nor is this girl Meg, the spooked out relationship casualty who comes in in the third chapter. In fact this girl doesn't make any kind of appearence in the story. The relevance has to do with the character based on me, Marty.
That scrawl surrounding the visage of Rosanna is the draft of a poem I wrote in memory of her very soon after the most embarrassingly misfired declaration of love I have ever committed. New Year's Eve, 79/80. I'll get into that if I have to but first, Marty.
Martin Amis said that when he writes a character he identifies an aspect of himself and makes the character all that. What would then happen quite naturally is that the character, in having to act in some way, would need to pick up traits, knowledge and skills needed to get through the story. Marty is basically me but with some art direction, cleaner lines and a lot of motivation I didn't recognise in myself at the time.
Marty's key is failure. He tries a lot of things but has to stop trying because he's either no good at them or finds them too much like work. He sticks at two things, writing and photography. He's not particularly good at either but finds solace in both. That's the aspect of me that he is. At least that's his starting point.
I was doing ok at the time and stealing more than my share of fun. But I was and remain a poor poet. At the time I was enthusiastic about photography as well but my efforts were powerfully mediocre. The thing is that I considered myself the artist in the crew. I don't mean anything like a painter. Attempting oil on canvas was a humiliating embarrassment to me by the end of school. I got a superb and expensive set of Romney oils and paraphernalia for my birthday that year, tried a few big canvases with it which made me ashamed to be human and put the lot of it away (hoping that one of my more visually adept siblings would discover them with delight -- I think it was Mum who found them and binned them).
No, by artist I mean more that I wanted to be the one who had insights and formed quotable opinions. The type who knew how to wear a beret and drink a Manhattan while smoking something French through a long thin holder. Ok, I was thinking more beatnik but you get the idea, I meant myself to be the one who really took an experience in to save for a masterwork down the track. That, seriously, was how I perceived myself. I wouldn't have whispered a syllable of it even to an intimate but when I shaved, that's what I saw looking back.
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| Quick one on the Cintiq. Needed a pic |
I just read that back and feel impelled to add some context. Scroll down and remind yourself of those university parties my sister and brother used to take me to. Those people I met there were genuinely stylish, had real wit that was both spontaneous and funny. They were plugged in to politics and everything new. Their conversations were constructed from feed lines and expert ripostes. They quoted each other and staged biting satires which sold real tickets. Among them I was a cute dunce. But among my schoolie fellows I was Oscar Bloody Wilde. Well, that's Marty ... except he does a lot of failing.
So, if he plans a great photographic expose of life among teens in North Queensland or makes notes towards a novel intended to bring down governments you know how far he's going to get. And if he has a longing for a girl called Rosanna Marsden that he intends to pronounce as love on New Years Eve....
Of course he gets tested about this in a way that not even his prodigious imagination could envisage.
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