Author: Matt

So, Surfing The Deathline part 4 is now live and on sale, which ticks off one of the things I was going to do once I had relocated.

Other exciting things happening at the moment – this Friday I’m exhibiting a few small sculptures in an event happening down the coast a bit “Lamkin Lane Live”. So, there’s been a bit of work digging out a few old works, and getting them back into fresh and new condition.

After that’s done, I’m taking part in a talk on the theme of “animate”, talking about re-animating my artistic practice to lead to The Metaning.

It’s a really interesting dynamic about being out of the city – the people who are in arts-supporting positions really want to make things grow.

The end of another year, and I’m looking back at the past 16 months, since they mark a two major shifts in life. The first was mentioned here. The move to a warehouse turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes of my adult life. Once we’d moved in, it became apparent that the landlord’s version of what we were promised, was very different to what we believed it had been when we moved in. We spent months freezing through the tail end of winter, chasing leaks in the roof when it rained, then roasting through a brutal summer – desperately trying to block the sun from the windows and keep the heat out. Our neighbours, as far as we could tell, were putting human excrement on their garden, so every week or so there’d be a reek so pungent you couldn’t step outside. The suburb itself, may as well be a demilitarised zone. All night you’d hear the sounds of idiots in hotted up cars.

It’s a low socio-economic area, and frankly when you see the way people drive, you can see why. I watched someone overtake a car which was stopped at a red light with a pedestrian crossing, on the crest of a road bridge over a rail line. To do this, they crossed an unbroken centre line onto the wrong side of the road & ignored the red light. I saw someone else driving down the main road overtaking cars that were waiting to parallel park, by driving on the other side of planter boxes and pedestrian islands that separated the two lanes of traffic. My car insurance went from $800 for a $17k vehicle, to $1100 for a $14k vehicle, per year.

Two months after we moved in, we were flooded. Several inches of water throughout the building, sewer breathers underwater, so bathroom drains backing up, and that neighbour’s garden, which was uphill of us, flooded all of its contents in as well.  I lost a about a third of my college drawing work to the water. We were flooded again, to a much smaller extent, almost a year later. This time the water simply came in through the base of the walls, because the building’s dampcourse was too close to the ground.

The extra distance from the city did a large amount to kill off the social life I’d enjoyed previously. Night buses became enough of a pain point, that the non-taxi distance we were just made going out more effort than it was worth.

By early 2015, It was apparent that this wasn’t going to work, so I started working on an escape plan.

Artistically, the year saw a number of major things happen. My sculpture out at UWS was destroyed in a wind gust (at least that what they said happened), or rather, it was destroyed as a result of being left in a damaged state for 2 days before I was contacted. So I brought it back home in pieces, and then scrapped it – something I’d never done for a large work. I managed to finish off all the drawing for Surfing The Deathline, and I finally got to the top of the panoramic photography mountain I’ve been climbing for 15 or so years, by getting a hardware and software workflow that produces super-accurate and predictable results.

My biggest artistic achievement of the year was the exhibition of The Metaning – as far as I know, a first within Australian comics. The exhibition had some hiccups – most regrettably, there was no video recording of the opening speeches, but overall was a success.

With the exhibition out of the way, I was able to prepare for the most significant event of the last year – leaving Sydney.

For 40 years I’ve lived in the one city, half of that in the same small enclave of the inner-west. However, Sydney has become an insane city, ruled over by the avarice of property developers, and a police force drunk with power. Every bit of life is being squeezed from the town. My year away from the inner west saw many of the things I loved about it disappear, and as rents inexorably climb, I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t afford to live anywhere in which I’d actually want to live.

So, I left. I moved 700 miles north, into the sub-tropics of the Sunshine Coast, in Queensland. It’s a very different life up here. For the first time, I don’t feel a constant pressure, a constant stress of anxiety and fear. Granted, part of this is because I’m staying with family (but still paying market rents). Most of it, however, is an absence of a part of the experience of Sydney if you’re renting – constant fear of the whims of landlords. Will they raise rents in retaliation for asking for necessary repairs? Will they be so heavily geared, they’ll go bust and the bank will sell out from under you, will they put the place back on the rental market, because they know they can get a higher rent, just by getting a new tenant in?

Here, things are different (for now). It’s a short walk to some nice bars, with a view over the river, everywhere has separated bicycle paths, so I bought a bike, my car insurance is down to ~$600 / year, and I’m getting significant work completed on Surfing The Deathline – the end is in sight for a project that has been a constant in my life for the past 12 years.

One that’s done, I need to look at the next stage artistically. I’ll try to look for what the options will be in terms of new things. I’ve already attended my first local comics convention as an exhibitor, and the first week of the year is scheduled to be concluded delivering a workshop to children on Manga and comics design. Getting my sculpture practice back up & running is going to be a bit of a challenge, but I’m going to get much more heavily into photography, until then. The other change I decided to make, is to get a Lynda subscription, and teach myself to program software. With Apple launching a new language that looks like it’s going to be a pretty big deal, and the little bits I taught myself to do for the EPUB comics I released, I think this’ll be a good use of my time between finishing Surfing The Deathline, and having  a workshop again.

Longrunning doesn’t really seem to do justice to how long, how painfully long, the development of Surfing The Deathline has been. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and all going well, it’s not an oncoming train.

As we draw to the end of 2015, the main environmental lighting and toning is complete for part 4, and I’m getting back into something I haven’t really touched in a couple of years – the covers for 4, and now 5.

All this time, I had a holding image in place – a rough that was to form the basis of the final art, and a very specific idea of how the cover would look colour-wise. Once I got down to it, however, I just wasn’t happy with the direction it was headed – plus, I had a second book to contend with. Trying to keep all the different images in my head, so I could work out the flow of the whole series, was proving unwieldy, until I discovered something I hadn’t realised I could do previously – embed one InDesign document inside another.

Now, the process works quite smoothly – page art is in Photoshop, and any updates made flow through to the master InDesign document where the whole book is assembled. That document is then embedded in a large composite document, pictured here, which racks up the front and inside front covers, frontispiece art, inside back, and back covers.

Getting that big picture made it far easier to do a number of things related to which book would get which cover image, and which set of intro words. The last two books flow like a single long book in many ways – much like 1 & 2, it was originally written as a single book, before being split and extended in the middle.

The upshot is that all the questions I had about this are settled. The final theme colours for the issues are green, red, blue, black, and white, respectively. It was a moment of grooving out to Nick Cave that cracked the problem of part 4’s cover art, furnishing me with an image that both matches the events of the book, and the red spot colour theme that carries through the series. Having a black theme colour against a black background is difficult, but workable and appropriate given what happens in that part.

Back in the late 1990s I worked in tech support for OzEmail, a company owned & managed to varying degrees by the man who is now Prime Minister of Australia.

Back in those days, Internet access was dialup, and sold based on time connected. Every time you connected to the internet, you also incurred a local phone call with Telstra, who were the dominant local telephony provider, as a part of the process.

So eventually, the economics arrived at a point where we could offer a product that provided for unlimited time dialup – an “always on” internet, provided you could dedicate a phone line to it. The name of this product (from memory) was OzMegaSaver.

Well, there was a problem with OzMegaSaver that soon became apparent – dropouts. People were having huge numbers of disconnections, even after we went through optimising their modem’s initialisation strings, and running up huge phone bills in the process. Thirty cents a call adds up when you’re having multiple disconnects every day. We were instructed, by higher levels of management, to tell customers that at the end of the day, the problem was that their modems were letting go of the connection because their phone line couldn’t sustain the high speed connection.

We certainly didn’t tell them what was common knowledge within the support department – that it was OUR Bay Networks dialup equipment that was disconnecting the customers, and that the problem was so endemic, that Bay Networks had sent staff out from America to try and make the gear they’d sold us work correctly.

You can imagine the outcry, if all those customers knew their massive phone bills were a result of their ISP dumping their connection.

It’s just one anecdote, and Turnbull’s involvement in the company may have been completely incidental to the problems, and subsequent coverup. However, let’s say that when people argued Turnbull’s “experience” in telecommunications counted positively towards his plans for the NBN, that just sounded like a tsunami of fail and farce.