04.04
ALMOST LOST TREASURE.
It is over 2 years since the 2013 Bundaberg flood that washed through my home. I am still sorting out storage boxes, and finding personal treasures that I thought were lost in the flood.
This cartoon/illustration “Roy,” of my father, was on a CD I found today. The original has still not turned up – and might have been thrown out with other water-logged, mud soaked artworks of mine.
No big deal, really.
Being an avid cartoonist since I was maybe 7 years old (copying Mickey Mouse & Donald Duck comics), and later becoming published in various local and national magazines/newspapers – to me, the copy is really the original, if that makes sense. In other words, the thrill to me was always seeing my work reduced in size (from “one and a half-up” original size), and printed in a publication. The published work was the final, completed step. The art work.
It was never the original I showed to my friends or family. The copy – published in the mag – was the finished artwork, not the original piece. Now, it seems, that my Art Blog serves the same purpose as the hardcopy publication of the past. Simulacrum/simulacra has become the art, as French philosopher Jean Baudrillard harped on about. Sorry, but echoes of my PhD Uni-speak still haunt me at times. However, he is worth mentioning, as in my case at least, Baudrillard was maybe right. In a lot of my art, Simulacra is King (or Queen?). This Art Blog is but one testament to that.
So happy. That I found this cartoon/illustration of my dear Dad (now no longer with us, alas). I drew this from a photo I took of him in the act of fishing for shrimps in 1991, on the River Dee, England (near Parkgate, Wirral – my birth, and childhood town). It was my first and last trip out on his boat, before I returned to Australia after a month holiday. My Dad had been a shrimp fisherman all his life, as was his father before him . . . you know the old cliché. Such is life. And shrimps.