antidote

Antid Oto (The End)

Here is a bumper pack of antidote drawings I didn’t manage to post before the year ended. I made one for the first day of the new year, and it’ll be the last one. They’ve served me well, now it’s time for something else.

This was during the terrible slog of trying to produce the draft for a big illustrated story about my trip to interior Sarawak. I went through several more months of stopping, stalling and restarting before finally completing it, just as 2015 came to a close.

Mini-PSB’s name is hard to explain. I shall try: We had a dear cat called Penyu, who we lost a couple of years ago. There was a similar-looking cat – all white with an elegant face – around the neighbourhood, so we called her Penyu’s Sister. Then a tom cat starting hanging around Penyu’s Sister, so we called him Penyu’s Sister’s Boyfriend, i.e PSB. He was the blackest cat we had ever seen, and he had a furry stump for a tail. Later, Penyu’s Sister disappeared, but PSB started romancing another cat (Chicken’s Sister – another story, I won’t get into it) who came to us for food once in awhile. They had kittens, and the only one who survived was the one who looked exactly like PSB, so we called her Mini-PSB. True story!

Around this time I started getting chronic eye strain, which sounds like the lamest thing, but in my line of work, turns out to be debilitating.

I took a long trip to KL, and when I came home to Port Dickson, Mini-PSB was gone. I did a page of these drawings as a way to be sad (some of them made it into this story about Bersih 4), not really expecting her to come back. The next day she showed up, angry and demanding to be fed.

Happy new year! I bought boxing gloves and took up boxing again.

More on feeling the animal, and more on the internet wanting all your time.

Antid Oto – italian for antidote – was one of Leon Trotsky‘s earliest pen names. I also love the Malay word for it: penawar. A few months ago, I started taking regular walks and making drawings afterwards as a way to deal with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction.

Antid Oto #19: Flame of the forest

Deadlines

No time no time no time no time. Late late late late late. Falling behind. Not keeping up. Stuck.

What if you just let it take the time it takes? Where would it go if you let it go where it needed?

Antid Oto #18: TPPA, hands off our medicine

I drew this after the May Day rally in Kuala Lumpur, where I met Edward Low from MTAAG+. Now is a good time to post it because it was announced on 5 Oct 2015 that agreement has been reached on the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement or TPPA.

The TPPA is controversial because it’s being negotiated in top secret by the governments of 12 member countries on behalf of their citizens. The countries involved are: Malaysia, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and the United States, which is seen to be leading negotiations. If signed, the TPPA will be the largest trade agreement in the world.

I just spent 20 minutes reading about this thing I’ve been seeing in the news, but don’t actually know much about. Here are good, concise links from a variety of sources that give the basic picture:

What the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement means for Malaysia at Poskod.my, 6 Oct 2015

11 things Malaysians should know about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations at Business Circle (Malaysian marketplace web portal associated with the government-backed Economic Transformation Programme), 27 May 2014

Brief on the TPP by the Malaysian Ministry of International Trade and Industriy (MITI)

Leaked TPP Documents on Wikileaks

By the way, I deactivated my Facebook account. So if you’re in that Venn diagram overlap of people who 1) read this blog, 2) follow me on Facebook and 3) wonder where the fuck I am, well, now you know. I don’t know if I’ll go back. Probably I will after I deal with the current bunch of deadlines. It’s been… difficult. But now I’m not on Facebook, and it’s already getting better!

Oh, ‘I trust my hand’ is scribbled in the margins because at the time I did this drawing, I hated my drawing.

Antid Oto #17: The chair repels my ass

I am supposed to write something. I’ve been avoiding it. I ate a hand-full of nuts, then a hand-full of raisins, then went back for more nuts. Soon there will be no more nuts, or raisins. I walked in circles around my house. I picked 5 fleas off the cat’s belly. I have fallen into a hundred little holes on the internet, or just one big one that’s incredibly deep, and crawled back up – eyes itching, shoulders aching, mind twitching. The chair repels my ass. I want to do everything, anything, all things… except this thing.

The only antidote to the slow doom of not writing, is writing. I don’t know the cause of that doom, but it goes with the writing like my shadow accompanies my self.

They came together, and they go together.

Antid Oto #16: The gap and the edge

I spent the last six weeks making paintings that will be shown in a museum in Australia. Ten years ago, getting into that exhibition and that museum was the height of my ambition. I think about that when I look at these drawings on notebook paper, and puzzle over the gap between my professional artist life and the life that produces drawings like the one above. I remember that all the while I was making it, I hated my drawing – the lack of skill, the amateurism, the banality of what I’d chosen to draw… everything. For 20 minutes or so I walked the very edge of balling the paper up, tossing it into the trash and never drawing again.

That edge thrills and terrifies me. I want to go back there again and again, to trace it in time and space – my imperfect hand making those imperfect lines, not knowing where to go, not knowing how to finish, or why. Doing it anyway.

Antid Oto #15: Non-dominant

Once again, this page was inspired by Lynda Barry‘s work. I have endless gratitude to her for showing me an approach to drawing that has less to do with skill, and more to do with the relationship between the eye, the brain and what she calls the ‘original digital devices’, the hands.

This is a fascinating study that asked artists and non-artists to draw with the same picture with both hands – their non-dominant hand, and the one they used everyday. The results are unexpected!

I tried it myself just now on a sheet of paper, and it’s kind of mind-blowing. I think the line quality (even though shaky) and proportion I achieve with my left, non-dominant hand is… wow. Also, I don’t have that moment’s hesitation right before I start drawing with my normal hand. I’m going to try this more, and might post the results later on.

Antid Oto #14: Yellow things

I’ve been chasing deadlines the last few weeks, or been chased by them – hence the sporadic posting. I’m not going to apologize, although the words every person who’s owned a blog has typed at least a few times are right there at my fingertips, begging to be let out in groveling apology to… who? The internet? My imagined readers? The cyborg gaze of some mysterious bot passing over this part of the web?

‘Sorry I haven’t posted in awhile.’

I’ve been busy with ‘real work’, but what’s that? Work that I get money and/or recognition for. With social media feeds taking over the internet, these drawings and this website have come to feel like making music in my own bedroom – it gets me no money and no recognition. But it’s still work. It’s the first to slip when ‘real work’ takes over, but like the base rhythm to a song, I always come back to it. This kind of unpaid and unrecognized work is the foundation, the spring that never runs dry. Without the sweeping of the porch, and the sudden noticing and ordering of yellow things, nothing else comes easy.

Hold fast to the great thought
and all the world will come to you,
harmless, peaceable, serene.

Walking around, we stop
for music, for food.
But if you taste the Way,
it’s flat, insipid.
It looks like nothing much,
it tastes like nothing much.
And yet you can’t get enough of it.

From Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (the version by Ursula Le Guin)

Antid Oto #13: Pokok Kertas Tisu

I remember the day I drew this tree, a bunch of them were in full bloom in the park. A child stood under one, arranging a posy from fallen blooms carpeting the ground. Tree and child were outlined against the evening light. She was laughing. Adults took pictures with their smartphones.

The all-knowing Internet just told me this cherry blossom of the tropics is the Tecoma tree, tabebuia rosea. I love the Bahasa name for it: pokok kertas tisu, or tissue paper tree.

I have a perfect childhood memory of making flowers out of pink and white tissue paper, secured with wire in the middle. Not the special craft tissue paper that people do Pinterest tutorials with these days, just ordinary blow-your-nose stuff.

I never knew about this tree until a couple of years ago, but every time I see them I feel intensely happy and nostalgic. Yes, they are beautiful, but I think that memory of tissue paper craft flowers also has something to do with it.