Seven Five O One O

I hardly remember the wooden railing around the holiday house being so weathered.

It is, like me, aging and beyond repair.

The black and white photograph in my hand fades from left to right.

Everyone is luminous, except me with my extremely dark, suntanned skin.

Nothing much has changed,

I am, as I was then,

secreted behind dark glasses,

not only to shade my eyes from bright sunlight,

but because I’ve only ever allowed a precious few to see my naked eyes.

Sometimes brown and sometimes green, I am told they are hazel.

The angelic child in the middle of the photograph

is looking down,

he almost disappears into the surface of the wooden structure.

The child to his left is looking at me, or past me, but I didn’t know that at the time.

I can name none of these children and remember them not.

The only person I distinctly recognize is Frau Burke, a Holocaust survivor.

That often strange expression she wore as she looked away.

The unidentifiable heart-shaped motif on her front, mirrors the shape of the lantern attached to the outside wall of the A-frame house.

I imagine that the spirit of the incandescent globe, closeted within the lantern’s frame has drifted slowly down and settled onto the exterior of her cream, wool jumper, bringing with it some unseen energy that permeates her body.

It has not entered mine, for I am in the dark

or just evil

or everything

they imagined I was.

On closer scrutiny I believe that the suffuse, but indistinct area I’ve described on her person is, in fact her hands clasped together in humble suppliance, or the blurred outline of her right hand with cigarette, moving from her pursed lips as she turns her head to exhale.

Her hand as faded as the purple black serial numbers tattooed onto the outside of her lower arm.

The SS only branded healthy men and women who could work.

A single needle marked their skin with the shade of crematory smoke stack vapor.

Either way, dead or alive, you were melanoid.

She must have had horrific stories, but never uttered a word, although sympathized with us children who had also been taken, disinfected and experimented upon.

Injection after injection, but never blue dye in the Iris.

The Aryan girl with blond hair cut in a bob, stands behind me in her geometric patterned top.

Her body obscured.

Her shrunken eyes, gaping holes like someone blind.

We all live with some kind of darkness.

As I look at myself,

the eldest and tallest of all the children,

number seven, five O one O

my left foot on the bottom rung and my elbows resting on the top,

I imagine that when the shutter release was clicked

at that particular time,

on that particular day,

nearly half a century ago,

that I was already aware of this future moment,

in which I write of the past

through a photograph.

Julie Clarke (2013)

See: Inquiry into abuse of children in state care and experimentation.

Another one

Decay. Julie Clarke 2012 - oil pastel on paper.

I was drawing for approximately four hours yesterday. Each of these drawings took a couple of hours (they are all the same size). It's rewarding using the very buttery substance of oil pastels. Easy to blend and be spontaneous. Colors are most accurate in the digital rephotographing. Bought some more Arches Aquaelle paper yesterday, so more drawings to come next week. The wreck of the Minah appears to have great impact on the content of the drawings and obviously represents some aspect of self. I will keep exploring this, though imagine that at some point the boat will disappear?

Drawing for today

Bleeding Sea. Julie Clarke 2012. Sennelier oil pastels on Arches Aquaelle  hot pressed 300 GSM paper size 29 x 35 cm.

75010 today

Minah. Julie Clarke 2012

Echo. Julie Clarke 2012

I drew both of these today using Sennelier oil pastels on Arches Aquaelle paper - hot pressed, 300 GSM, size 29 x 35 cm.

75010

Narcissus. Julie Clarke 2012 - acrylic paint on canvas board 8 x 16 inches.

Pink triangle surrounded by daffodils. Julie Clarke 2012. acrylic paint on canvas board 8 x 16 inches.

75010 Project - process

 

Wreck of the Minah at Rhyll by Barney Meyer

Gathering more information for my project. Looking at the location of the wreck off Rhyll (she lost her anchorage in a gale and grounded on a sand bank in 1950) I can't imagine that I could ever row that far, but I did.  Have a look at how far it is from shore on this satellite map.

I must admit that when researching ship wrecks at Philip Island I really wanted the wreck that I had rowed to, to be the Speke for the figure head was in the shape of woman, wearing a flowing dress with blue cuffs and collar and carrying a large bunch of daffodils, and although it wasn't the wreck I visited it is great imagery that I should be able to do something with. 

Lucian Freud made this Woman with a Daffodil in 1945. I could interpret the blue area at the bottom of the painting as water or the sea.

And here is Madonna of the Daffodils by Jan van Scorel (1535).

Although their botanic name is narcissus, daffodils are sometimes called jonquils. But I rather like the idea of Narcissus and Dali's interpretation of the figure of a man who metamorphoses into a flower and looks at his reflection in a pool of water.

So, after all of this I am still on theme. More to follow. May do a painting with these as inspiration, may do something else entirely.

This post links with (click here) and old photograph

75010 Project: Julie Clarke

Frau: Ghost from the past (from old photograph posted yesterday)

Tattoo on Holocaust survivor taken from the Internet

First thoughts about photograph

Tissue paper with number pasted to my arm

This is the beginning of the 75010 Project.Will add other texts and images when I've completed them.

Old photograph...

Yesterday I found this photograph (photographer unknown) of myself (far right) with others (children and two staff members) at a holiday house at Philip Island in 1966. I re-photographed it and had it printed out at Ted’s Cameras in Camberwell. When I came home I wrote about two hundred words in response to it and will use it as a jumping off point for some other creative prose writing. I imagine if I persist with the writing and am happy with it, that it will be the basis for my next little book. It was fortuitous finding it at this moment in time because it was only recently that I told the story of how I rowed a twelve foot wooden boat with six children under the age of twelve on board,  from Rhyll to the old wreck As I look at this photograph I realize how young and small the children really were and I can fully understand why I was in so much trouble for risking their and my own life in the rip of Port Philip Bay. I should add that I didn’t really need to be punished for I returned them all to shore quite safely and I was the one suffering from extreme sunburn and blisters on my hands. Still, the children were left in my charge and I should have been more responsible, but can you really expect that from someone like me who was (back then) most adventurous?