Daniel Small

TLDR; outsider.

Dissatisfied with the “wasp medium” and unrealised promises of Magick Craftsmanship, I scoured Mayer then Doerner for understanding — that was my 18th summer. I maintained a Sydney cemetery ledger and gained admission to the National Art School. In the former gaol, between police station and court, O-day speeches presaged the statistical probability of failure. Soon realised one ought found their own school. Art History discarded by State funded iconoclasts — progeny of the Deconstructionists had one task. And Painting was remote.

M had a pamphlet, another path. I spoke with Charlie Sheard the following summer. My rambling assemblage of trivia transmuted in that crucible and became intuition. Filberts and flats, a contrivance of 19th Century commerce, I learned the correct handling of brushes, that one could discern and speak unironically of Beauty. The continuum of Western Art History opened. I was mentored there in the enumerable responsibilities of the Painter.

Meanwhile, peers scorched their grocery allowance, tar coated fingers curled around the teat, chapped lips suckled, blushing, russet-red gum recession, all burning overbright. Labour bought tobacco and reproductions — although labour’s generous, it was after all a “bullshit job”, a faux statistic propping up the quarterly — up ‘n’ to the right. Lulled, I deferred — hedged. There’ve been inordinate lessons since then. We did not know it at the time, but all summers hence’d wish for the benevolence and ignorance of these.

Finery accumulated, minerals, manganese, lapis, agate burnishing wands, annotations… and yet the Great Work did not materialise, existing only in hoarded reproductions.

These, boxed between locations in the dim years of forgetting, prone beneath the Moloch¹, where pragmatism overruled inner imperative. Procession of days concretised in tearless contortion. Imperative, a thorn.

Late, though the secret’s obvious now — acuity of attention, and discipline over time. The verb is “see,” not “walk on”². We undermine ourselves. To see the “portions of eternity too great for the eye of man”³ contained in this instant passing. Quietly I resume this work so “my pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.”⁴

Born Sydney, 1988.