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Anita’s Latest News

September 8, 2019

When I write music, I often have a visual referent in my imagination, a motif or vignette that the music references.

My composing is very semiotic and pictorial.  I try to create a painting or photograph with musical notes.  My experience working in visual mediums really complements and informs my composing.  I find that when I’m not painting, I’m not as musically creative either.  So I do both both concurrently.  It’s the same with my poetry.

Some of my compositions, such as, “The Geisha and Butterfly”, are almost mimetic of life.

I find working in different mediums inspirational and complementary.  I realise that all my writing is indebted to visual art; and that the visual and aural are intrinsically connected.  In writing poetry, it is important to have a great visual awareness, to create the imagery of the poem.

Painting inspires my writing in all its forms.

August 19, 2019

Hymn to Winter

The burnished gold of winter leaves, like parched, faded manuscript; nature writes her poem eloquently,

her hymn of creation.

Russets, burgundy, yellow ochre and other hues all speak of nature’s multifariousness, her efflorescence, her song.

August 4, 2019

Rests

Sipping camomile tea, in between playing Enya on my acoustic grand piano, I become aware of the rests in music as moments of solace.

I am conscious of the crickets’ hymn to the night, and of the violet and rose fragrance I am wearing.  I feel a sense of peace and pause for a few moments, moments stolen from the rushing river of time, rests in the manuscript of life; fragments torn from the pages of my destiny, as if from a book of ancient poems by Sappho.

July 24, 2019

Lanterns

Outside my window, the glow of the afternoon sun illuminates the dry, winter grass, making it look like embossed gold, reminiscent of a Klimt painting.

The grass is lit, as if by candlelight, as though tiny lanterns coruscate in the undergrowth, emitting luminous, resonating light.

June 30, 2019

Odyssey

For me, the meaning of life lies in struggle – overcoming inertia and adversity, embracing challenge and transcending our physical and mental  limitations.  It lies in defying the pain of life to experience the elevation of joy.

I believe the ataraxia of life, or height of joy, is attained through the supersession  of limitation, in the pursuit of goals and dreams, which may or may not be fulfilled; but we are not determined or defined by the destination, only by the journey itself.  Life is an Odyssey, not a destination. Every moment, we are in a process of becoming; and are transformed by the process.

Eternity is an infinite moment.  In the finite, lies the path to the infinite.  In the moment, lies the beginning of eternity.  Seize the moment, and you shall seize eternity!

June 17, 2019

Master/Slave Morality

According to the German philosopher, Hegel, there is a passing phase in history when two consciousnesses struggle for dominion – one values life more than freedom and becomes a slave; the other values freedom more than life, subdues the first and subjects him to slavery.

However, the master does not attain moral transcendence.  His life is meaningless.  The slave, however, engages in meaningful activity and self transcending labour, indurating his body to pain and elevating his mind.  He eventually becomes stronger, overthrows the master and transcends his slavery.  History is, therefore, the story of the slave, not the master.

It seems to me that, in order for the slave to supersede his slavery, he must progress morally to a state of mental elevation, in which his spirit defies and conquers his adversity; he values freedom before life and is prepared to risk all to attain freedom.

This is the defining moment in history.  In this act of overcoming the human being is defined.

June 2, 2019

The Artist

The artist loses themselves in the moment of creation, in the locus of conception and revelation.  The concrete world disappears. Reality is suspended as the artist explores the alternative reality of their imagination.

The emotion and energy which manifests art is intense and elating.  For those moments, the artist exists in the realm of the empyreal, a euphoric Elysium.

May 5, 2019

Nietzsche and Hegel

For the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Apollo (the Greek god of light, poetry and music), represented order, rationality and logic; while Dionysus (god of ecstasy and drama), represented passion, desire and spontaneity.

Nietzsche believed that the Apollonian should govern the Dionysian passions, bringing order and harmony; much as the German philosopher, Hegel, believed that our rational natures should govern our carnal desires.

Hegel believed that we should all be self governed, rather than ruled by authority. He claimed that when we realise that our rationality is not in conflict with our true desires, all humanity will live harmoniously.

Both theorists obviously believed that we should channel and direct our energies and emotions; sublimating our desires.

In a Manichean dichotomy, the light must rule the dark; order must subdue chaos.

Hegel, of course, wrote during the Romantic period and was very optimistic about the moral progress of humanity, as, I think, a lot of Romantic writers were, particularly poets, such as Wordsworth.

April 21, 2019

Showing

Recently, there was a showing by international artists from the Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, at our local gallery.

I was excited to see so many ‘post-colonial’ works, speaking metaphorically and metonymically about the struggles and concerns of colonised peoples around the world.  I studied “Post-Colonial Drama” at university, and had seen live theatre of this genre, but not a lot of other art.

My favourite piece, in the showing, was a visually, beautiful film of a Maori woman wearing a very patrician, Victorian gown; which was rigidly structured, with boning and a hoop skirt.  Obviously, this was an example of the syncreticity of cultures, classes and ethnicities; and quite mimetic and parodic.  She was performing a traditional Maori dance. The contrast between the structuration and rigidity of her costume and the fluidity of her movements was very striking.

I felt that this contrast spoke figuratively of the context of the Maori woman’s oppression in Imperial society’s structuralist hegemony. Her dance seemed a form of protest against this oppression and repression; an act of emancipation, and a transgression and subversion of the interdictions and prohibitions of that society.

April 7, 2019

The Artist

The artist works in the genre of fantasy, creating a space to dream, dwelling in the imagination as if it were another reality.

The artist does not present the literal or concrete, but the symbolic, the interpretive; discovering and uncovering layer upon layer of additional signification and meaning.

Creating the perception of an elusive, alternative, magical reality, the artisan evokes the illusory and mythical, transmutating the ordinary into the fantastic.

March 31, 2019

Moths

In the garden, tiny, grey moths rise from the ground and flutter about in a swirling motion.

It’s ironic that moths are attracted to flames, as if rushing to a tragic, preordained destiny.  Do they have a sense of deterministic, fatalism?

March 24, 2019

Butterflies

The butterfly is ethereal, delicate, fragile and ironically free.  Butterflies express something about the nature of empowerment and its elusiveness; something about the brevity of freedom; for their freedom flight is relatively brief; their joy curtailed.  They are a trope for the transience of happiness as, I suppose, most ephemera are.

March 11, 2019

Sensory Perceptions

A haunting melody in a minor key; a pomelo scented candle; golden bougainvillea blossoms reminding me of Chinese lanterns; water on my skin; brittle grass beneath my feet; the scent of a dry tea bag, like fresh alfalfa hay; my own breathing; wistful bird calls; the phantom whisper of the wind in the trees;  I became aware of these empirical perceptions when I stilled my mind today and listened to my senses.

February 26, 2019

Fundamental change means subverting the ideological discourses of our lives; but if ideologies function on an unconscious level, how is this possible?

We can consciously change the paradigms or patterns of our behaviour, and our internal monologues; but how do we change the subtexts that exist in our unconscious?

How do we find a new Edenic beginning, a new place of origin?

I realise that I have had conscious ideologies that were a syncreticity and hybridity of my own values, ideals and beliefs and the negative, disempowering values and beliefs of another person, who unfortunately was influential in my life.  I have been conflicted and at war with myself, because I have had dichotomously opposed ideations and values.

I need to abrogate those negative, self defeating discourses and re – appropriate my life.  Fortunately, this is something I can consciously endeavour to do.

February 3, 2019

During the time I was a photographer, sometimes in the morning I would be half awake and half asleep and I would see beautiful, ethereal images in my mind.  When I woke up, I would try to recreate those images on film, which were really ‘dream images’, or expressions of what I now know to be my ‘feminine imaginary’.  For me, my photography reflected my vision of the world and how I saw the world through the lens.  It also reflected my idea of what is beautiful and also innocent and vulnerable.

I took photographs with a sense of the fragility of beauty.  I wanted to capture and still moments of innocent happiness.

I think this is the same for many film-makers.  Their cinematography reflects their vision of the world.

When I was a photographer, I also aspired to be a film-maker.  I am inspired by directors such as, Joe Wright, Jane Campion, Sophia Coppola, Baz Luhrmann and Tim Burton.

I love films that are visually beautiful and sometimes a little strange and anomalous; in other words, original and edgy.

January 7, 2019

In our garden, a carpet of frangipani blossoms steeps the air in fragrance.  I pick one up from the dewed ground. Its scent is sweet and mellifluous.

This moment, like so many other moments, is collected in my memory, like a photograph.  A scent can be recollected when a memory is evoked by a familiar stimulus.

All the moments of life are photographs, stored in albums, recalled and sorted, in different exposures – light and dark.  Some memories are indelible.

December 30, 2018

When I was in Brisbane recently, I went to the Queensland art gallery, and was very happy to discover that they had a showing of indigenous art, and a significant body of the work was by women artists.

There were paintings, as well as weaving and pottery.  The latter was by women of the Solomon islands, which I learned, are matriarchal societies. The craft work was done to create wealth for these women, and thereby, autonomy.

One painting I particularly loved had a recurring pattern and represented an aerial view of the Australian landscape.  It was the work of an Aboriginal woman.

I’ve been reading a book called, “The Empire Writes Back”, which is about post – colonial societies.  Apparently the Australian Aborigines regarded the landscape as a text to be studied and interpreted, as a narrative or poem. They incorporated nature into their values and mythology.  Like most oral cultures, their society was more mythical than historical, more magical than empirical.

They created a poetics and mythopoeia of orature, a language of the landscape.   It seems to me that they perceived nature’s rhythms and cycles as propitious and mysterious and even miraculous and wondrous.

(Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 2002)

December 16, 2018

I read a lot of philosophy.  The following thoughts were written after reading Hegel and Elizabeth Grosz.

As humans, we are in a constant process of becoming, renewal and transmutation.  Our essence is indefinable.  We are never identical to ourselves spatiotemporally.  We do not know the limits of what our minds and bodies can achieve.

Each day we struggle to transcend the limitations of the day before.  We struggle with our materiality and the materiality of the concrete world we inhabit; which is never identical to itself spatiotemporally.  Everything is mutable.

We must learn to endure, conquer and transcend pain loss and inertia.

We dream of the infinite and sublime; that illusive phantasm which we aspire to attain and long to capture; but which always alludes us and makes us strive interminably for perfection and infinite beauty, which disappears even as we touch it, like a dewdrop on a thistle.

October 16, 2018

Like many people, I frequent coffee shops. I sip my cappuccino or mocha and think of Simone de Beauvoir and her rendezvous with Jean-Paul Sartre; conversations and coffee, an existential love affair; and of Helene Cixous and the joy and pain of writing, of writing as a metaphor for becoming, the body as text and the language of longing.

September 24, 2018

Listening to “Red Paper Roses”, means taking a moment to pause and reflect. The spaces, rests, lacunae and caesuras in the music of life are times to observe and muse; times to reconcile absence with presence, as we write on time’s manuscript.

Is absence a metonym for solace and solitude, or isolation and exile?

Space to breathe, space to dream, space to mourn; when we pause, do we have a sense of loneliness and lack or a sense of peace and calm, restfulness amid the hurried pace of life?

September 12, 2018

“The bauhinias are coming out in bloom, and the crepe myrtles too,” said my mother. “Soon there will be carpets of jacaranda blossoms”.

The trees are flowering, but winter’s colours still paint the sylvan landscape. Winter’s voice speaks eloquently in texture and hue, giving the countryside a muted, arid beauty, like a rustic painting.

August 22, 2018

It is winter, and outside the sunset lights up the faded and parched leaves of the jacaranda to a lustrous, burnished gold. It makes me think of my grandmother and the antiquated, gilt-edged poetry books she has left us (Milton, Tennyson, Barrett Browning and Wordsworth); or “The Woman in Gold” by Gustav Klimt.

Wordsworth was my grandmother’s favourite poet, and the book is a fragment of her history; much like the book, “If not Winter: Fragments of Sappho”, by the poetess Sappho, who lived on the island of Lesbos in the 6th Century BC. Only one of her poems remains in its entirety.

Poetry books can be a sacred reliquary, a homage or eulogy to those past, a treasury of lyricism and wisdom.

March 12, 2018

Butterflies seem ubiquitous to me. They flit through my garden, my imagination, my poems and my music. Diminutive, delicate, ephemeral and fragile, they are the universal symbol of rebirth and renascence.

Though they are transient and each one has but a fleeting moment to live, they have an essence which suggests an eternal truth.

March 4, 2018

I was playing Enya’s piece, “Watermark”, on my piano. It has a wistful, pensive and even haunting melody. I started to think about what the piece means to me; and I began to write a poem called, “Watermark”, which became a poem about lost love and how love can indelibly imprint the heart like a watermark on paper.

I then thought about some of the other pieces from that compilation, such as, “Exile”, and “Miss Clare Remembers”, which I have always imagined as a composition about an elderly woman remembering her lost ‘true love’. Even the piece, “On Your Shore”, suggests to me the theme of ‘lost love’ and remembrance. I wonder how other people interpret these compositions.

Enya’s music is my favourite to play on my piano, because it always takes me on an emotional journey.

February 22, 2018

Memories are often sensual. They evoke scents, sights, sounds, feelings, etc. One of my happiest memories is of travelling on the train to my painting lessons. Even though the passing scenery wasn’t very picturesque, I still enjoyed the journey, because I would listen to Enya on my iPod on
the way.

There is something almost pictorial about Enya’s music, which creates a visual image in the mind. I often listened to “Amarantine”; and if I hear the pieces, “If I Could be Where You Are”, or “Water Shows the Hidden Heart”, or “Drifting”, this awakens treasured memories.

Of course, I really enjoyed the classes too, so listening to Enya in happy anticipation of my painting lesson was such a joy.

February 12, 2018

One of the reasons I admire Gabrielle Chanel so much, is that when my grandmother was young she was a bit like Coco. She was a dress designer. She had a business with her sister; who did most of the hand sewing, while Nanna made the patterns and did the machine work. They even put on a runway, fashion show once.

I love everything Chanel, the fragrances, the clothes, the makeup, etc. I’m very often wearing little, black dresses and pearls. It’s such a ladylike, timeless and iconic look. I also love Audrey Hepburn and her elegant, classic look. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is my favourite Audrey Hepburn film; although I think the clothes Audrey wore in that film were designed by Givenchy, not Chanel.

I wonder who else out there is a huge Audrey fan, and Chanel aficionado?

February 6, 2018

I’ve just finished writing two new poems about Monet and the way I feel when viewing his water lily paintings. It was hard for me to express this in words, but I think I have managed to make my emotions somewhat tangible in language.

Arguably, Monet’s water lily paintings were his magnum opus, the zenith of his achievement; but Monet was more than just an artist. His art had a revolutionary ethos. He changed our perception of art and even, for some of us, the way we viewed the world; just as Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel changed the way women perceived themselves. She was more than just a fashion designer. She was a role model for many women, and had an emancipatory influence.

I can’t wait to try the new Chanel fragrance “Gabrielle”; and yes, I love Kristen Stewart, who is, of course, the face of “Gabrielle”. I think she embodies Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel’s rebellious, autonomous spirit and androgyny. The film, advertising the fragrance, and starring Kristen, is so luminous and captures that sense of liberation and empowerment which is so intrinsic to the Chanel ethos, and is really true to who Gabrielle was and what she represented.

There’s something so whimsical, poetic and arty about Enya. I am particularly loving playing pieces from her “Watermark” compilation, on my grand piano. Favourites are the title track, “Watermark”, and “Exile” and “Evening Falls”. Of course, Enya’s lyrics are written by Roma Ryan, which I think we sometimes forget. It is a wonderful, creative relationship.

I couldn’t have produced this CD without my wonderful pianist, Denise Steele, and her sensitive interpretation of my compositions. Many thanks, Denise.

ABOUT THE CD “Red Paper Roses”

THE TRACKS

“Cherry Blossoms Falling” and “The Geisha” express my obsession with Geishas and Japanese art. I particularly love the paintings which depict the ‘floating world’ of the Edo period.

“Elysia” is dedicated to one of my nieces whose name is derived from the word “Elysium”, which means “eternal bliss’. The piece itself is light and delicate because she is a little fairy-like creature in person.

“Peony” is inspired by the hauntingly beautiful and tragic novel, “Peony in love”, by the Chinese writer Lisa See.

“The Peony Awakes” evokes the blossoming of the Peony flower, which is the national flower of China.

“Violet Rose” also has a slightly Asian sound, but it actually alludes to a fragrance I have with roses and violets.

I love scent and find it highly emotive. “The Scent of Frangipani Blossoms in the Night Air” was written because one evening when I was feeling sad and numb, I went outside into the cool air and smelt the Frangipani blossoms. I felt sensual and happy again.

The composition, “Monet”, begins with an illustration of the dark times of financial hardship and critical censure in Monet’s life. It goes on to reflect the period of happiness and success at Giverny. It ends with a dark note on Monet’s failing eyesight and then a joyous finale, as Monet overcomes his impairment and paints regardless.

All the remaining pieces were inspired by Monet, essentially his garden at Giverny and water lily paintings. Monet was fascinated by changing light conditions and the mutable effect this had on the subject he was painting. He was obsessed with capturing the evanescent ‘impressions’, and painted one subject, such as water lilies, over and over again as the light changed, frustrated that he could not paint faster.