Here Be Monsters

If you've been wondering why I haven't written about myself as much as usual, lately, it's because I can't stand my own company. My mood has been – to say the least – labile. I've managed to work reasonably steadily since Monday but more than once, I've had to resort to the crisis centre at my local hospital for help. The worst has been what the psychiatrists term 'rapid cycling'. Within just a few hours I can zig-zag from being acutely focussed and productive to frantic, self-destructive and unable to cope – then back again, wreaking havoc on everyone (and everything) around me. In between, I'm drained and exhausted.

Medication helps. So does sex. I suspect I do too little of either to sustain their benefits. If I'm not drawing or painting or dealing with the myriad details that clog the intersection of my art and business, I'm in bed. Asleep, I don't have to deal with a damn thing, especially my own damaged self.

He Has It Whipped

There are few Gen' X or younger art students anywhere who don't owe some small measure of their education or inspiration to books published by Benedikt Taschen.

From low-priced but good-looking paperback reference works on 20th century artists , art movements, architects and designers and obscure anthologies of European and American fetish photography, Danish gay porn' and fashion to monstrously sized – and priced – limited edition catalogues raisonnés of Benedikt's favorite artists and photographers, among them the late Helmut Newton, Peter Beard and Jeff Koons, Taschen's back-lists offer everything in the way of references or resources an enquiring creative mind might ever need.

Taschen, the imprint, started in a ratty comic-book store Benedikt ran in Cologne, Germany, in 1980. He began publishing original, somewhat raunchy comics but quickly cottoned onto the idea of designing picture books on artists who had been dead long enough for their rights to be in the public domain. He also figured out that what he lost in sales on so-called 'quality' subjects he could make up with risqué collections of pre-war porn' positioned as art.

Today, Taschen is a billion-dollar operation, one of the largest and most successful privately held publishing companies in the world. It's still committed to unusual books on art, design, photography, travel and popular culture – and, yes, sex, albeit much better packaged than before.

I've been a fan of Benedikt, now 48-years-old – and his partner-in-crime and ex-wife, Angelika – ever since I came across a portrait of them (above) in the now-defunct British bible of '80s style and pop culture, The Face when I was just a teenager. Photographed by David Lachapelle in the Taschen's flying-saucer-like John Lautner-designed house overlooking Sunset Boulevard (it featured in Brian De Palma's psychological thriller, Body Double, in 1984): Benedikt was on all fours, with the arse torn out of his business suit; Angelika stood nearby, masked but completely naked, a whip ready to flay his bared buttocks.

Twenty years on, I still can't imagine another billionaire publisher – certainly not Rupert Murdoch, Si Newhouse, nor Jann Wenner – being reckless enough to pose that way, just as I can't imagine another publisher who'd be reckless enough to produce a boxed, four-colour hardcover and DVD set on the career of porn star, Vanessa Del Rio, or a 738-page limited edition history of the couturier Valentino.

As Helmut Newton once observed, "There are very few like him. Or there are none like him. He is also, I might add, a madman." Maybe but it's good to know that in this increasingly hide-bound, unremarkable world, there are still some who subscribe to Oscar Wilde's dictum: "Nothing succeeds like excess."

Heart Like A Wheel

Uniquely, both the subject and sub-title of my latest Dangerous Career Babe – The Race Car Driver (Homage To Hellé Nice) – were suggested by the collector who commissioned it. I had always planned to paint a distaff interpretation of a modern, glam' 'boy racer', such as Lewis Hamilton, but the collector was adamant that his Babe's identity should be rooted in motor-racing's early years. It took just one look at the archival photographs of 1930s' cars and drivers he sent for me to be convinced.

To be honest, I was quite taken with the dashing, Italian-born motorcyclist-turned-driver, Tazio Nuvolari,who became know as Il Mantovano Volante – The Flying Mantuan – or Nivola even before winning the 1932 European Grand Prix championship. The founder of Porsche, Dr Ferdinand Porsche, once called him "The greatest driver of the past, the present, and the future."

Then the collector turned me on to a woman driver of the period. Hellé Nice tore up tracks in Bugattis and Alfa Romeos as well as well-appointed beds in dalliances with scores of aristocratic or wealthy (or, sometimes, just plain reprobate) men of her day.

“I don’t believe she ever thought about anything but sex and showing off," one on-track rival said about her, long after her death.

She started out as a dancer and trapeze artist – at the legendary Casino de Paris – and an enthusiastic nude model, before finally finding her true calling as an audacious race driver and an unlikely pioneer or feminism. She toured the world on an early circuit that took in Monte Carlo, Rio De Janeiro and Casablanca as well as famous races at Monza and Silverstone.

I guess it's the way of all fairy tales that such a fearless but profligate figure should die in obscurity, penniless. Her last address was the top floor of an attic apartment, looking out onto a seedy part of Nice. It's said she had lost her social acceptance thanks to an ill-founded accusation of an affair with a Nazi officer during the World Warr II occupation of France. But the truth was her reputation never recovered from a crash in which she killed six spectators, during the 1936 Grand Prix de Sao Paulo in Brazil.

Not Your Mother's Dress-Up Dolls

The production of the Dangerous Career Babes series accelerated when I set up a studio just to handle these large enamel paintings, late last year. It slowed only when I had to travel to Melbourne, three weeks ago, to be with my father, who has been diagnosed with cancer.

This week, I got back to work. I supervised the repair and re-finishing of three works in the series that were damaged because of carelessness in my old studio. I also began two completely new additions – The Race Car Driver (Homage To Hellé Nice) and The Card Hustler – both commissions.

The Race Car Driver was a particular challenge. It was devised for a collector who was a fan of the early years of car racing, from the the 1930s to '50s, when glamorous figures such as Tazio Nuvolari and later, Juan Manuel Fangio and Jack Brabham, dominated European tracks. A different breed from 21st century Formula One drivers, with their fire-proof underwear, reinforced Kevlar and carbon-fibre helmets, and body-hugging Nomex suits covered with team and sponsor logos, mid-20th century drivers valued style over safety. They wore stylishly cut street clothes with quilted cloth head-warmers – similar to the leather head-gear favoured by early aviators – as well as aviator goggles and occasionally, a silk scarf.

One of the hardest things when painting any Dangerous Career Babe is to keep it simple, to let the clothing and accessories speak and not distract from them with complicated, detailed backgrounds. I have always to remind myself that the series is, very genuinely, a conceptual work – it just happens to comprise twenty-four, 2.0m by 1.6m paintings.

As I wrote, last year:

As female children, we create an extension of ourselves by dressing up dolls. In a similar way, a lot of women still dress up to pretend roles as adults. This is different to actually being something – a real career babe. Rather, it's a form of play-acting. No skills are needed, and the career can change every day. Feminism made a broader range of female career characters believable. Post-feminism, we not only see imagery of women posing in various uniforms and career-outfits, we watch them enacted in mainstream films – Angelina Jolie as tomb-raider Lara Croft or a sexy assassin in Mr & Mrs Smith, Charlize Theron as Aeon Flux, or Salma Hayek as vampire Santanico Pandemonium in From Dusk Till Dawn.

When I drew the first Dangerous Career Babe, I intended the torso and legs to remain the same in each painting but to adapt the arms according to the props. Instead, I have been able to use exactly the same pose. The images are a lot stronger this way. I've realised that it's because it makes the figure seem more like a combination of an action figure and a Barbie doll. One hand is designed for holding, and props can be slid into it. The other is gestural, indicating some kind of communication or action that can be interpreted according to the qualities associated with each costume the figure wears. Mostly, the props are unnecessary. I just think it's fun to include them.

Just as in real life, the costumes are the key. The figure is a dress-up doll. The career the figure assumes in each painting is identifiable because of the clothes.

A Shard Of Memory

He’d changed his name to rhyme with gateaux, French for 'cakes'. He delighted in being fat. It was, he said, a political statement – a physical rejection of the mainstream ideal of 'thin'.

“Fat is the new punk,” he'd insist. I was sympathetic.

I'd agreed to design a tattoo for him but I never found the time to do it. He wanted an homage to A Clockwork Orange, except that in it, Alex had to be a girl. For years, he left space for it between his other tattoos. The word 'suffer', all in large, Gothic upper case, was inscribed on his back. I asked him why. "Because that way," he said, "It's always behind me."

Eye, Hand, Mind And Heart

I woke up early, showered and shaved my head to the scalp. I studied my reflection in the bathroom mirror. It took me aback. I saw an androgynous, angular and somewhat alien creature. Thin scars marred the pale smoothness of its skin and its eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep.

At least it wasn't crying.

I caught up with correspondence and arranged consignment of a handful of small works on paper to two clients in the USA. I negotiated the sale of a second of my Precious Blood enamel on board paintings to a collector in Melbourne. I planned what paintings I would try to finish at the enamel studio during the coming week. Finally, when I couldn't find another excuse to put it off anymore, I opened my sketch-book and began to draw.

It took nearly 12 hours, with only a few short breaks, for the eye, hand, mind – and, yes, heart – to reconnect enough for me to draw with confidence. For the first several hours, I had to stifle the urge to rip out the pages and retreat to my bed. I felt like an inept, talentless, unimaginative fraud.

Or I did until just before dawn. As the pale rim of a winter sun rose from the grey-blue ocean into a drear, watery sky, tentative, too-careful marks gave way to quick, confident lines. Slowly, the lines turned into a picture.

The End Of (Bad) Days

It's been a hell of a fortnight. I thought I was doing OK when I flew to Melbourne to be with my father, who had just been diagnosed as having cancer. I managed to hold it together right up until I left, even though my visit re-opened a lot of old family wounds.

I lost it two days after I got back. Despite a backlog of commissions and growing pressure to prepare for exhibitions next year, I couldn't face painting. I couldn't face anything. I took my phone off the hook and burrowed deep into my bed, where I sobbed myself to sleep. Every night.

Awake, I castigated my boyfriend – and anybody else foolhardy enough to enquire about my well-being – for not 'getting' my intricate, self-immolating catalogue of personal failures. My studio staff went into siege mode, cancelling appointments and putting off visits from possible buyers.

My boyfriend fled to another country but stayed in touch daily, by Skype. Mostly, he remained stoic as I launched into tirades about how everything I was going through was, somehow, his fault. This morning, I regained my sanity. I got out of bed and showered for the first time in a week. I tidied my house and my studio. As if on cue, my long-suffering boyfriend turned up on my doorstep.

I did whatever any girl who has acted like an irrational, ungrateful, self-flagellating harpie would do: I dragged him back to the bed in which I'd entombed myself for the past week and fucked him hard for hours until we'd wrung every ounce of anguish and doubt from our weary hearts and flesh.

Money, Money, Money

I was too depressed today to be anything other than fatalistic about tonight's auction at Menzies Art Brands. I had no plans to attend – I never do. Instead, I stayed at home, in bed, and wrapped myself in a goose down duvet and a miasma of self-negating depression.

The phone call from a contact at the auction house was brief. Bids had started at $A7,000 and quickly broken through the lower end of the pre-sale estimate of $A10,000 to $A15,000, to exceed the seller's reserve. The hammer fell at $A13,000 but once the so-called 'buyer's premium' of 22 per cent (plus 10 per cent sales tax) is added , the price paid will exceed the top end of the estimate by several hundred dollars.

I allowed myself to relax and take a long, deep breath. The work had ripped throught its estimate – an excellent result in the current market, especially when one considers that it represents an almost fifteen-fold return on the $A900 invested by whoever bought it at my first, self-produced exhibition, twelve years ago, in Brisbane.

I hope it ends up in a good home, somewhere it will be seen and enjoyed every day: that's worth a lot more to me – and real art lovers – than money.

Perfomance Anxiety (Again)

I've been affected badly by my recent trip to Melbourne to be with my father. I was glad to be able to support him while the extent of his cancer was investigated. But so many long-suppressed tensions and resentments were resurrected between us that by the time I returned to Sydney, I was a wreck. Now I'm gripped by a deep, irresolvable depression, unable to think straight, unable to work with any constancy.

I'm also experiencing the usual, irritable anxiety I get just before a high-profile auction of my work. There are less than 18 hours before Lolita At 16 goes under the hammer at Menzies Art Brands. I have no financial stake in the outcome but I'm pragmatic enough to recognise that it is yet another test of my still-new standing as a 'bankable' artist. An executive at the auction house has told me the overall market climate is "difficult".

I'm keeping my fingers crossed. If demand for my work remains strong, collectors will continue to buy it – at auction and from me – despite the recession.

Getting A Break With Tradition

The first time I ever had contact with an auction house was three years ago, when Menzies Art Brands asked me for permission to reproduce an image of an early painting in a catalogue. I said, "Sure." I also emailed further information about the work, including a correction to the title attributed to it. This process was repeated the next few times my work was submitted for Menzies Art Brands sales. I began to develop a rapport with key senior staff.

This year, one of the paintings from my Lake Eyre On Acid series was submitted for auction just as I was celebrating the 500th post here by offering a free, limited edition, signed photographic study related to this series. I suggested to the auction house that they place a 120 of these studies (enclosed in a hand-made glassine envelope with a blurb about the work) on each seat on the evening of the auction.

The studies were intended as a gift, an expression of gratitude. They were also an attempt to introduce something new and different into an otherwise predictable process, a reminder that while art auctions are about money and investment, they're also about art.

I didn't expect Menzies Art Brands to agree. It was a far from conventional proposal. Nevertheless, they did and when I turned up an hour before the auction with the prints in hand, the staff were excited. These days, auction houses in Sydney, Melbourne and London – even the esteemed Christie's – deal with me regularly, just as they deal with gallerists, curators and private sellers, even though I have never sold any of my own work through them.

The latest 'hard copy' catalogue of the upcoming Deutscher-Menzies auction catalogue arrived in the post today. It includes an image of one of my earliest enamel paintings, Lolita At Sixteen, listed as Lot No. 10. A young woman is aiming a pistol but although her grip on it looks competent it is actually so wrong that it makes it difficult for her to squeeze the trigger – a metaphor for the often clumsy self-discovery of teenage sexuality.

Printed below the usual descriptive details about the work is a somewhat personal paragraph about the conception of the work. I'd emailed it to the auction house but hadn't asked for it to be included. It's the first time I've seen a contribution from an artist in an art auction catalogue. The text is usually written by critics, academics, or so-called 'art specialists'.

Like the gift of the photographic studies, it's another first: an example of the guerilla methods of an artist working outside the traditional art system in Australia merging with the well-established formula for a high-dollar auction sale. Let's hope it helps my works to sell in this very uneasy market.

Even Cowgirls Get The T-Shirt

One of the several things I did to promote my first exhibition of sexually explicit photography in Melbourne, last year, was to create t-shirts that had the one-word title of the show – PORNO – on the front and a reproduction of its widely distributed poster on the back. MARS gallery employees and catering contractors wore them on opening night and over the next week about 100 more were sold to collectors or 'fans'. Since then another 50 or so have been sold or given as gifts by my studio.

I'm always surprised when I see the limited edition t-shirts on the streets of Sydney or Melbourne. So you can imagine how thrilled I was to see a photo of a rare, signed one – posted by a fellow artist (Hazel Colditz, from Arizona) on Twitter – being worn in a café in, of all places, Missoula, Montana. I can't help wondering what the other patrons made of it.

National Art Hate Week

It was probably only a matter of time before "the artist sometimes known as Billy Childish" surfaced again to rail against the crumbling bricks-and-mortar of Britain's art establishment. One of the founders of an informal movement known as Stuckism – a name bestowed by Childish's former lover, Tracey Emin, who told him his art was "stuck. Stuck, stuck." – the 40-year-old Childish (real name Steven John Hamper) has since forged a grudging art world respect as a cultural provocateur through a series of eccentric identities and a relentless output of paintings and prints, self-published books, music CDs, as well as tours with a handful of cult bands (I'm a big fan of The Buff Medways) and the production of a range of neo-Victorian prison merchandise.

Now, in the guise of The British Art Resistance – in association with the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop and Private Ladies and Gentlemen’s Club for Art, Leisure and the Disruptive Betterment of Culture, a new art space in Clerkenwell, London, that features the works of British artists Harry Adams, James Cauty, Jamie Reid, Geraldine Swayne, A.S. Waghorne and of course, Childish – he is mounting National Art Hate Week.

As the B.A.R.'s brief manifesto explains: "National Art Hate Week has been instigated for the disruptive betterment of culture.

"It is a call for direct action against the mass acceptance of art, the grip of control over culture as a tool for mediated emotion, market lead, non-critical homogeny and boring popularism.

"National Art Hate Week presents a unified front of non-unified creative individuals against all that is despicable and loved by the people.

"We oppose the deliberate socio-economic strategy to make us all complicit in our own dumbness. We oppose the affront of state endorsed auto-cryptic balderdash made by the few.

"We oppose the chosen-few ruffians who have been polished up and elevated for our meagre consumption. All art is tainted. We oppose all art.

"National Art Hate Week takes the swastika hung on the gallows as its symbol of resistance. During National Art Hate Week the good citizens of Albion are encouraged to visit the art institutions of the land and silently seeth.

"If a child offers you a painting during National Art Hate Week you are to turn away in disgust."

What more can I say except that we should all enlist as propagandists. It begins July 13th. For further information, visit the Art Hate Week site.

Memento Mori

Today, I walked to Melbourne General Cemetery.

Throughout my life, cemeteries have been a place of refuge. Taking the phrase 'final resting place' to heart, I find peace and uninterrupted quiet in them.

I've studied the rituals of burial and commemoration of the dead in various cultures but I've rarely taken much notice of those in my own. And yet, here, among the old, weather-worn stone tombstones I noticed for the first time newer, more elaborate vault-like structures, some almost like Thai spirit houses, shaped from polished marble and granite. Their surfaces were polished smooth and engraved with gold-leafed lettering.

On some, statues of Christ, the Virgin Mary, lesser saints and cherubs, as well as plastic flowers, urns, and photographs of the deceased were padlocked behind leaded or steel-framed glass shutters. On others, open books carved in marble sat atop grave slabs, bookmarked with natural flowers in various stages of decay. On a few graves of children, there were less formal, makeshift shrines featuring stuffed teddy bears, small dolls , toys, even a lollipop.

We live in groups so maybe it's only to be expected that we're buried in groups when we're dead. But I can't help but think of tombs and vaults as prisons in which our earthly remains have to be sealed while our souls await salvation. (Never mind that our burial places will probably dug over first, in land reclamations engineered by future real estate developers.)

When I think of my own death, I rarely consider what will happen to my corpse. I think I'd like my ashes to be scattered randomly or buried. Having striven all my life for a sense of freedom, I'd want whatever's left of me after death to be uncontained.

Riding Ahead Of The Reaper

I haven't done any work since I flew to Melbourne on Saturday. Before I left, I spent the day at my studio, drawing and adjusting lines as well as confirming major areas of colours to be painted.

My days here have been spent visiting doctors and hospitals with my father, who has been diagnosed with bone cancer. We walk slowly to appointments, no matter how far away they are. It soothes his anxiety. And mine. There are injections to be had or coarse liquids to be drunk sometimes hours before tests. Every muscle in my body aches with fear and tension: I worry about how he must feel, especially with the extent of his disease still being mapped – and the prognosis uncertain.

My father took me to see the classic, custom-detailed Harley Davidson he ordered for himself a few weeks ago. It's street-elegant and loud. He rode bikes during his youth, leaning hard and fast around corners, making sparks fly as the metal exhaust pipe ground against the road. We make jokes about how awful it would be if he'd died before riding it. We share a dark sense of humour – what can either of us do right now but try to laugh as much as possible? – but I remind him that he's not dying yet.

The Harley shop is staffed by rough-looking stereotypes of bikers. My father knows them all and introduces me to them. TV screens drop from the ceiling, playing endless tapes of bike shows and strippers. Laminated photographs of the bikers are pinned to a cork-board next to a communal coffee machine. I am drawn to the ones with children riding pillion. I know the kids are very ill – the opportunity to ride has been created for them by the Make-A-Wish Foundation – but they look happy and grubby. Their faces, painted like skulls, are smeared with melted ice-cream.

I can't help thinking how fun it must be for them to be wild and unruly, to take risks and impersonate death while protected by a burly outlaw. It's how I used to feel, as a child, with my father. But right now, it's his turn to ride pillion as we navigate a way through this uncertain time.

In Transit

I flew to Melbourne at dusk. When I arrived, I felt cold – but not just from the chill evening air. I found a coffee shop in the terminal and ordered a 'flat white'. Then I sat, quietly, and tried to still my nerves before heading to the luggage carousel. By the time I got there, my bags were the only ones uncollected.

I haven't been back to Melbourne since the middle of last year, when I was here for my PORNO show. The city doesn't hold a lot of good memories for me. Given the circumstances, little about this visit is likely to change that.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Yesterday, I had a rare day off – not even a day, a few hours – in which I forgot about art and the long list of chores that accumulate like dust during the course of a month. I browsed the shelves at a second-hand bookshop, after an unhurried lunch with a close friend, and picked through racks of vintage clothes at one of the few local boutiques that have them. I bought magazines: Juxtapoz, iD, Vogue Italia and a couple of trashy gossip rags.

The phone call hit me like a sniper's bullet in the middle of the street. A member of my family had just been diagnosed with a serious illness. Suddenly, I couldn't breathe and the sunlight that only moments before had felt so cheerful and revitalising was now a predatory searchlight, too bright and hot on my skin. I sat down on a public bench on the sidewalk and cried. Then I rang the person dearest to me: "You have to go. Be with them. Now." he told me.

In the space of the next couple of hours, I rescheduled two weeks of painting with my assistants, packed my bags (including one containing a printer and scanner), cleaned up my house and booked an open return plane ticket to Melbourne. I withdrew a few hundred dollars in cash from my bank account. I rang other members of my family.

Now I am ready to leave. Art feels like an imposition, getting in the way of the awful randomness of real life.

You Can't Go Home Again, Part One

I returned to Brisbane on a long, sleepless flight from London. A few friends picked me up at the airport. On the drive back into the the city, all of us crammed into a rusting, old Japanese sub-compact, we sucked on plastic bongs and made calls to sleepy connections to hook up with harder drugs. Someone had a Regurgitator tape and it played it very loud on the car’s rattley sound system. Suddenly, intensely, I remembered why I'd made such an effort to leave the place.

The Valley was Brisbane's grimy, sub-cultural refuge then. Its main street was packed with every kind of night-crawling distraction a small Australian city had to offer.

Gurning ravers danced at The Beat, where they could lose themselves in drug-induced, pseudo-spiritual oneness with the smoke and green laser beams. Everyone in the room faced the DJ – or the front door, so they could check out the incoming drug dealers and each other. The acrid, chemical stench of drugs and sweat hung out above the dance floor. Drag queens performed at midnight: later, they’d wander down the street, bickering regally with each other, and offer unsolicited fashion tips to passers-by.

The Zoo was an old warehouse at the end of the block. I don’t remember much about it except that when I was there, I was always stoned, tripping on acid; it made me distracted and forgetful. There were always queues of people waiting to get in. Every hip, tattooed, pierced, natty dreadlocked or shaven-headed, ambisexual feral, punk or rock and roller went there to see a hot new band before it 'blew up'. I was no different.

Outside the strip clubs, bouncers ushered in the working girls ahead of the drunks, who would arrive soon after the surrounding pubs had closed. Hookers, pimps, and dime-bag dealers plied their trade, heroin addicts shot up and alcoholics loitered, impotently, in the dark lanes. The hookers straddled cocks in their johns' parked cars or ducked into doorways to blow wary, awkward-looking pedestrians.

So Money, Babe

After a frustrating day, yesterday, during which I drew and redrew elements of a new picture without actually moving the composition on from where I started, I slept badly. My scalped itched and burned and I lay awake, resisting the urge to scratch, for several hours. I crawled out of bed at dawn, pulling the duvet with me to defend against the gelid drafts of Sydney's coldest morning of the year. I cursed myself for having committed to meet with Max Markson, one of the city's best-known 'celebrity' public relations advisers: I wondered whether we would have anything to talk about, especially as I didn't see where I might fit in a client list that ranges from Queer Eye For The Straight Guy's Carson Kressley to Joe Bugner, onetime British heavyweight boxing champion. As it turned out, Max was charming and smart and after a couple of hours, we began to recognise that it might be fun to work together.

Maybe one reason why I was hesitant to schlepp up to Max's harbourside home in Sydney was because I still looked like a survivor of a napalm bombing. To alleviate this, I adopted a stereotypical all-black, Bohemian look, albeit with uptown flourishes: working around a pair of Mela Purdie leggings cut up and re-sewn as a head covering, I wore a black linen, buttoned shirt and linen drawstring pants, Italian-made J.P. Tod ankle boots, various African and Asian bracelets and necklaces, and a Bottega Veneta woven leather hobo bag.

I kept hearing Vince Vaughn delivering that line from Swingers – "You look so money, babe" – and somehow it made me feel better.

The Pitiful Price Of Vanity

I've not felt like writing or drawing much these past couple of days. For one thing, I've been depressed. For another, the attempt to dye my hair from black to platinum went horribly wrong: my scalp is sore and ulcerated from an allergic reaction to the chemicals used and I have had to shave off all my hair to relieve it. Now I look like I'm undergoing an aggressive cancer therapy or I've been exposed to radioactive isotopes – neo-Chernobyl chic, I'm calling it. No, it's not pretty.

Worse, I'm falling behind schedule. Again. I have three Dangerous Career Babes to be started at the enamel 'factory' and I am working on drawings for two more. I'd planned to have the latter done yesterday but I'll be bloody lucky if they're ready by the end of next weekend.

Pieces Of Myself

Not every interview I do ends up being published. About one in ten is 'spiked' by the editor and never used. At least half are heavily edited between my mouth and the final page (for which, very often, I'm grateful). Some are abbreviated or re-written beyond recognition.

While tidying up my digital archives, this weekend, I came across the transcripts of a handful of interviews I've done over the past year or so. I can't remember who conducted them or what magazines, e-zines or newspapers they were for but I thought I'd choose some of the questions and answers at random and reproduce them here:

A lot of your work is saturated with eroticism. Why?

I don't see my work as erotic, really. It just reflects an aspect of how young women in the developed world see themselves thanks to advertising, entertainment, even commercial pornography. For better or worse, sexuality is always an element of these heavily mediated choices of identity.

Do you think more and more contemporary art appears to be preoccupied with sex?

No. I think there's always been both sexuality and sensuality in art. It's as visible in the works of Michaelangelo as it is in those of Picasso or Modigliani. However, these days, we don't have the same social, religious or gender constraints. We're able to delve more deeply and frankly, creating art that is more explicit, darker and in my case, confessional and/or critical.

How do viewers react to seeing your work for the first time in a gallery?

Reaction is always, umm, unsettled. My works are as immediately accessible as advertising or entertainment but once a viewer spends some time with them, they realise that there's more going on than they'd thought, that what they're looking at is neither simple nor 'safe'.

A lot of my work exploits the seductive but dulling effect of highly repetitious imagery. One of the more interesting aspects of what I am doing in serial works like Precious Blood is show that this repetition is actually quite ancient. The Catholic Church has used it for nearly 2,000 years to convey notions of female purity and piousness. Look at how similar images of the Virgin Mary are, as well as images of popular saints. Their effect has been as carefully managed as any advertising campaign.

In PORNO you were both artist and performer. Why did you expose yourself and your reputation as an artist in such a way?

When I first started to experiment with depictions of what the tabloid critics liked to call 'graphic sex', a couple of years ago, I was responding to what I saw as consumer culture not just encouraging but actually empowering young women to exploit their sexuality – without any fear of public disapproval (quite the opposite!) – in exchange for a measure of celebrity.

I'd found some other female artists' experiments with elements of softcore porn' – from Sam Taylor-Wood's and Vanessa Beecroft's video performance pieces to Ghada Amer's needlework – just a little too prissy and detached to be interesting. So I became, for a brief while, producer, performer and consumer. In other words, I decided to involve myself completely.

After all, I'm an artist not an academic – I'm meant to be subjective.

Indulging The Diva Within – And Without

In an uncharacteristic and expensive indulgence of my physical vanity, I decided to spend large and have my hair cropped and dyed at a cooler-than-thou Sydney salon. My hair is normally jet black – with flecks of premature grey caused by the toxins in enamel paint – but I wanted to try turning it platinum. I was told to put aside the better part of a day for the process. So I loaded up a satchel with pens, sketchbook, diary, cell-phone, iPod and a non-fiction book (the last is just for show – I love skimming the salon's back issues of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar more than anything) and resigned myself to a day in which I would do absolutely nothing productive or creative. Bliss.

Postscript

If you read Italian (I don't), my GQ Italia interview is now online along with a gallery of selected works. Not all of the images selected are my favorites but hey, I'm thrilled.

The coverage is timely. I am just now getting to grips with trying to tie down dates and venues for exhibitions in Europe during the early summer and autumn, next year. Despite strong support for my work at two Christie's auctions in London, over the past couple of years, I want to devote an extended period of time and energy to raising awareness of it elsewhere in the northern hemisphere.

Lost In Translation

"Young artists grow with the passion of the sex," the headline reads. Only in Italy could you come across a sentence that managed to be at once so lurid and poetic – in the pages of an upmarket men's magazine.

Last month, I was interviewed by GQ Italia for one of their regular columns that focuses on what the writer described as "trends in sexuality". I'm used to answering questions about the sexual elements of my art but the half dozen emailed from the magazine were a little more, umm, frank than usual: "In the PORNO pictures, it's you, no?" and "You only represent women, alone or having sex... Is it related with your sexual orientation?" Giving GQ the benefit of the doubt, I put it down to awkward translation.

Anyway, I responded as honestly as I dared. Thankfully, not all of the questions and not all of my answers ended up in the short piece, which appears in this month's issue. Given some of my past experience with Italians – who have an unrivalled gift for poetic licence (read, 'hyperbole') – I expect that most of what I wrote in English has been 'amplified' for its testosterone-laden target audience.

Postcards To The Future

Over the past four years, in addition to scores of enamel paintings and mixed media works on paper, I've painted hundreds of small watercolours, some no more than a couple of square inches in size. The subject matter is mixed: coastal landscapes, voodoo vévé, fashion accessories, weapons, nudes, you name it.

I do them only for myself, to pass the time when I'm alone or travelling. Most I send to my lover – something from the heart, more meaningful than a postcard – while some I give as gifts to regular collectors. I used to throw them away but I'm learning to archive what I keep along with the rest of my works and papers, wrapping them in acid-free glassine and storing them in dated, annotated boxes.

I don't try to edit the output, to sort the wheat from the chaff, but I sometimes wonder what might be made of them a hundred years or so in the future – especially the sexually graphic ones. I have this idea that, by then, sex will be automated, remote, nothing more than a software solution – it's unlikely there'll even be a need for men – and my crudely forensic, 'wetware' depictions of it will be nothing more than anachronistic curiosities.

Venus Redux

Among several sketches I came across while my mother and I tidied the studio were the crude watercolour and ink experiments that culminated in my first exhibition of works on paper.

Appropriating recognisable elements of Sandro Botticelli's famous 15th century painting, The Birth Of Venus, these early pieces started out being illustrative and 'pretty' then quickly became violent, dark and stuffed with symbolism derived from voodoo and my own nightmares. Not surprisingly, the exhibition was titled Venus In Hell and in just fifteen mixed-media works, the rapid transition from pastel colours and empty, unpainted patches to dense smears of reds and blacks, like traces of blood dried atop the surface of the porous, cold-pressed paper was starkly visible.

I want to return to these intensely emotional works – and their underlying ideas – again. There's still so much within them that's unresolved, unrefined, and new interpretations haunt my imagination even as I labour on other, completely different paintings. I'm going to hide myself away soon, alone, to get to grips with them.

Lost And Found

The re-organisation of my store room is almost complete. I now know where everything is – or will be – and it's all labeled: watercolour paper, complete and partially finished sketches, tools, boxes of archived work and files. Maybe more importantly, it's easy to put everything away. With more people working at my home and studio, it's essential that everything has its 'proper place'. I can't afford the time I used to waste searching for things.

I've already found various things I thought I'd lost: a Polaroid camera, film, drawings from 10 years ago, a tripod, old exhibition invitations – the list continues to grow.

I've also found a small number of incomplete drawings and watercolours. I left them unfinished because I was stuck or thought I'd ruined them. Once, I would have torn them up or thrown them away but thankfully, my boyfriend talked me out of it. I feel very differently now that I'm no longer so emotionally wrought by a sense of frustration or failure. I'm actually excited to see them again and I'm already thinking about revisiting each – maybe finishing the works and developing the original idea fully.

I don't want to forget any of my artworks or ideas anymore. And I don't want to leave anything unfinished. It's vital – in every sense of the word – that I can refer to my past from time to time as well as find all the various tools I need.

Re-Mediated

As the readerships and revenues of traditional, 'hard copy' mass-market magazines continue to decline, more and more enterpreneurial young publishers are taking their chances online. The result: thousands of niche e-zines that better identify the enthusiasms of smaller but more responsive audiences.

The latest is My Style Australia, founded and edited by Brisbane-based former model, Jennifer Arndt . It's very new so its editorial direction has yet to crystalise but elements of Elle and maybe Nylon magazines are already apparent, especially in its mix of fashion and pop culture and its uncluttered art direction.

The first edition features an outline of my career to date and an interview with me. There's also an introduction to my Dangerous Career Babe series, with a 'click-thru' of the dozen works to date.

On Making Art And Money

The Unconventional Guide To Art + Money is an hybrid e-book combining a 55-page text and about 200 minutes of audio in three MP3 recordings (with transcripts). According to its creators, Chris Guillebeau and Zoë Westhof, it attempts "to break down the difference between successful and unsuccessful art marketing" and "offers a range of materials to help you supersize your career in the arts (if you want one) or begin earning money from your art". Mostly, it's an overview of ideas and perspectives on managing a working life from nine visual artists, more than half based in the U.S.A.

I was one of the three or four invited to offer a non-US perspective. I was also asked about how and why I chose to work outside the traditional gallery system and what it took to maintain an active presence online through a web site, blog and selected social networks. "I’ve noticed that some artists have a hard time talking about money. What’s up with that?" writes Chris Guillebeau – I wasn't one of them.

The Guide comes in two versions, the basic 'Starving Artist' at $US35 and the 'Picasso' at $US58. Neither is cheap. For further information or to order, visit Chris Guillebeau's heavily trafficked blog, The Art Of Non-Conformity. My audio interview can be found here, its transcript here.

Where Am I?

My Australia is a widely distributed free magazine, sponsored by Tourism Australia to promote travel within Australia. The debut issues, out this month, targets Gen-X and -Y Australians: "Experience it now – before your hair goes grey and responsibility sets in!"

I guess they figure I'm recognisable to some of the target demographic because I'm featured as a 'personality' in two sections. In the first, well-known Australian 'creatives' talk about the places in Australia that have inspired their work. Besides me, there are Richard Flanagan, screenwriter for Baz Luhrman's over-blown epic, Australia, playwright David Williamson, Rob Hirst (former drummer with Australian band, Midnight Oils) and award-winning novelist, Tim Winton. In the second, which is themed around the natural elements of Australia – Earth, Air, Ice and Fire – I'm quoted briefly on Earth.

The magazine is included as a supplement with magazines such as the Australian editions of Marie Claire, Men's Health, Cosmopolitan as well as others.

A Working Mother

My mother is staying with the me at the moment. She arrived a few days ago to help get my studio organised.

Its mess is not as bad as Francis Bacon's but in another month or two, it might have given Bacon's a run for its money. Every shelf is over-burdened and I've been stacking paper, books, and everything else on the floor. Even the tops of my filing cabinets are piled high with folders, waiting to be sorted. I lose immeasurable amounts of time, every day, rifling through the mess to find old drawings, image discs, correspondence, and even misplaced cheques from collectors.

The effect of my mother's presence has been rather like a whirlwind's. She drove my van across town to Ikea several times to buy new shelves, a work table, storage boxes, a mirror for drawing/video work, lamps and countless smaller item. My personal assistant helped her to load and unload the van, clear space, move boxes, and transfer delicate stacks of paper and art materials to my bedroom so they wouldn't be damaged.

Right now, it's after midnight and my mother is still in the storeroom, which she has emptied out. She's assembling shelves that reach to the ceiling and line the longest wall. Framed artworks will be lean against stacks of heavy boxes of books. After that, boxes piled in other rooms will be sorted, repacked and shelved. Then my mother will drive to my storage facility and transfer boxes of archives, materials for installations, and my own collection of artworks from there back to the studio. After unloading and organising those, she'll sort through rolls of negatives, stacks of photographs and artwork then wrap them in glassine paper and archive them.

As one area is tidied, the chaos of another becomes more obvious. Photocopied scraps of reference images, collages and business paperwork still need to be reviewed and filed. I thought it'd take a couple of days to sort through but it will be probably be more than a week.

My work has to go on regardless. After all, there are the rent, salaries and a stack of bills to pay. When I surface for lunch, seeing each newly re-organised space makes my mind feel less cluttered, my spirit less overwhelmed.

I'm 30 years old. It's chastening to think that, sometimes, even a big girl really needs her mum.

Revaluing A Gun-Slinging Lolita

Lolita At Sixteen dates from my very first exhibition, which I produced and promoted myself in Brisbane in 1997, when I was just 18.

The work marked the beginning of my preoccupation with the influence of media and advertising on contemporary female identity. I expressed this by making paintings that aped the size and proportions of roadside billboards. It was stamped (rather than signed) HAZED – later works are stamped DOONEY – because I was also exploring ideas inspired by Andy Warhol about the commodification of art. My aim then was to create a corporate-style brand for my work, to promote it as product rather than unique artefacts. Doing away with the centuries-old tradition of the artist's signature was the first step.

Painted in high gloss enamel on a 1.45m x 3.00m canvas, Lolita At Sixteen was my first conscious declaration of my very big ambitions as an artist.

The painting is to go under the hammer at Menzies Art Brands, in Sydney, on June 24th. The auction house's estimate of $A10,000 to $A15,000 is cautious – a more recent, smaller work sold for twice that amount at auction in London, in December – but these are difficult, unpredictable times.

Craft Work

“If you want to be an artist, I’ll help you pay for your first lot of materials,” my father said, "but it’s up to you to make it work.” He gave me a room to use as a studio in his house. He made it clear that if I didn't work hard, I was out.

A carpenter, a friend of my father’s, made a free-standing easel, three metres wide and two high. Two or more canvases could be positioned on either side of it at the same time. He also crafted a dozen frames on which to stretch canvas. I did that myself, using a canvas stretcher – really just a clamp – and a staple gun. Overly anxious, trying too hard, I sometimes stretched the canvas too tight so, despite their hardwood frames and metal brackets, the frames warped. I'd have to pry out the staples and started again.

I finally got the hang of it after I called the Queensland Art Gallery and spoke to someone in their conservation department. They explained the best way to prepare the canvas to take enamel paint. Soon my small space was filled with a number of large paintings being worked on simultaneously. As I waited for a coat to dry on one, I moved to the next.

So much has changed in the decade since then. I have two large studios, assistants, and a lovely cottage overlooking the ocean. In a bad month, my income is five figures. And yet very little has changed: every day, there's the same precarious balance of artisanal skills, persistence, inspiration and intellect needed to transform a raw canvas or timber surface into 'art'.

See-Through Surfaces

I want to paint a series of portraits. Nobody you know – just friends, acquaintances, and one or two people I've slept with (less than friends, certainly not lovers).

I've wanted to before but I've been put off by artists like Elizabeth Peyton, Stella Vine, and countless other near-contemporaries of mine (actually, they're much older). They all focus on easy-to-recognise faces and fey, conventional poses. Some images are copied straight from magazine pages – a publicist's dream. High-priced photographers like Annie Leibowitz or David LaChapelle create 'artistic' publicity party-pieces that are simply a heavily contrived expression of the individual sitter's heavily mediated brand. There's no elemental truth to be found in any of them. Daniel Edwards' mash-up of celebrities and public figures in classical, traditional or cheesecake poses – for example, his bust of Hillary Clinton or Britney Spears giving birth on a bearskin rug – are different only in that they have brought the artist a modicum of celebrity, too.

Despite a plethora of conceptual explanations, I've yet to see any of these works "hold a mirror to our times" or "subvert popular culture", as their fawning gallerists claim. There's no real insight into the sitter – and zero intimacy. Even the sitter's celebrity is left untested, unexplored, uninterrogated. The portraits are just another form of viral marketing for the sitter's 'brand promise' – replicating and distributing a constructed persona (actually a carefully refined product) masquerading as art.

I prefer portraits of non-celebrities: real people not product. Their unmediated, imperfect personalities, marred by shyness (or lack of it), imperfect appearance, unpracticed personalities and eccentric tics are infinitely more interesting. I love observing people's unconscious, natural expressions. One reason I've made pictures of people having sex or masturbating is that it's hard for them to mask their faces of their raw responses, even when those responses are boredom, pretense, discomfort, or vulnerability. Not even professional porn actors manage it. We are all somehow 'unmasked' by sexual acts and our real selves seep to the surface like artesian waters.

I don't pretend that my own portraits will delve deeply into their subjects. My interaction with my sitters will be fleeting. However, I am unlikely to let them hide behind their assumed personae. I am also unlikely to let them remain dressed. If nothing else, the results should be unsettling and certainly less 'safe' than the glib, trite, formulaic portraits-as-press-photos that elicit egregious critical praise before they're absorbed into the over-stuffed image bank of consumerist pop culture.

Any volunteers?

The Objects Are The Exercise

I make my art available in three ways. The first is simple: I assemble a series of works around a theme or concept and I exhibit them. The second is less simple: I work out a concept for a series of works, then describe it in detail for a handful of collectors who might commission the first pieces, sight unseen; the rest of the series is then offered (at a higher price) for commission by those who want to view examples before they buy. For the record, I never make art to anyone else's specifications – which is to say, I don't do requests.

The third way is rare: I make 'one-offs' – usually mixed-media paintings or small sculptures – as gifts for friends or collectors; these are usually done with no reference to the rest of my body of work and are often simply decorative: art lite as one of my assistants calls it.

Among my new collectors are a husband and wife who have been waiting patiently for me to finish Dangerous Career Babe: The Stylist. Yesterday was her birthday and with some input from him, I devised a painting that depicted a few items that any woman of her age (or mine) might desire as gifts or distractions. Included among the objects I came up with were items that she had already acquired.

I was quite taken with the finished work. Although it's relatively unrefined, visually and intellectually, the idea of using twenty disparate objects to describe a specific personality is compelling enough to inspire me to do a couple more, similar pieces. Besides satisfying a restless compulsion to serialise my ideas, who knows what might emerge from this attempt to 'objectify' (so to speak) individuals – especially those I know?

A Floating Life

I feel her soft breath on my shoulder, then the light, spider-like spread of her fingertips on my breast. Waking, I see her face close to mine: pale skin and dark eyes, half closed, framed by long strands of black hair. She is lying on her side. I reach out to draw her closer. She bows from the waist to rest her head on my shoulder.

I can just make out his shadowy frame behind her, his hand like a gentle talon around the back of her slender neck. Her breath catches: she tries to stifle a low, guttural sigh. I extend my arm over her boney hip to touch where he is moving within her. She presses her swollen lips against my mouth to suppress a low moan.

I've lost count of the nights that she has found her way to us. It's never planned, never announced. She slips in through an open terrace door, always after midnight, and makes her way by touch to our bedroom at the end of the hall. She undresses by the window in sight of the sea. Sometimes we watch her. She doesn't always join us in bed but rather, lies naked across its foot to gaze at the shimmering reflections of the moon and stars on the dark water. She leaves, often without waking us, in the half-light of dawn.

The first time we met, she wouldn't tell us her name. Reed-thin, quite tall, with olive skin, she looked Chinese or sometimes even Mexican rather than Japanese. She asked if she could sit with us at a small table outside a coffee shop in Darlinghurst, in Sydney. There were empty tables nearby. She said, "You look as if you don't match. I think that's interesting". We spent the aftenoon together. She didn't look as if she matched either.

I've given up trying to figure out when – or why – she might visit. I don't have her phone number nor her mine. Maybe once a month, she drops by the studio during the day. She sits, cross-legged, on the day-bed. As she sips herbal tea and chats distractedly about her life back in Tokyo, I sketch her subtler details. Once, she brought an old, Selmer alto saxophone from which she coaxed a looping, breathy Stan Getz ballad. She's always dressed in long, '60s-style velvet dresses and long, paisley-patterned shirts, always barefoot.

"It isn't about the sex," she told me, suddenly, as we sat together on the studio terrace, a month or so ago. I hadn't asked. "It's about having somewhere to lose myself, somewhere that isn't the me I used to be. Does that make sense?"

Paper Work

I've spent the day working on a large, 'one off' watercolour for a collector in Melbourne, an unusual work derived from a ten-year-old series of enamels, Accoutrements Of Desire. I did have a clear idea of what I wanted to achieve in it. However, because I'm tired, I'm over-working the image – fussing over unnecessary details, painting too much and too carefully – so it's turning out a little differently than I'd first imagined.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. In any case, it's relaxing to be working on a much smaller work (just 40cm by 60cm), on paper rather than heavy timber board, in a more forgiving and less sick-making medium than enamel. As evening draws near, I'm beginning even to have (gulp) fun.

Over The Limit

Sometimes the relentless pace I maintain takes its toll. My immune system becomes vulnerable to every bug that's floating around. I'm often irritable and quick to anger. When I'm utterly exhausted, my mental stability wobbles and I end up on an unpredictable roller-coaster ride from jittery, anxious highs to depressive, energy-sapping lows, often within a few hours. It's impossible to concentrate for very long on anything. I take a Valium and try to sleep. Or I go for a long drive. If it gets really bad, I'll succumb to slight but perceptible, uncontrollable shakes and end up on my knees in a toilet, throwing up. It can take me a week or more to settle my jangled nerves.

But I'll keep on doing it to myself. I haven't mastered the idea, let alone the discipline, of a balanced working life. Or a balance between my working and my personal life. There is none. Or, rather, there is none of the latter. For better or worse, it's a choice I made when I was very young: to succeed as an artist on my own terms and not to rest or allow myself to be too distracted until I had. Which means I'm not much fun to be around when I'm busy – and I'm busy all the time. It explains also why my closest friends are either those whom I employ or my collectors.

I had a bad couple of days this weekend. I gave up fighting it on Sunday and took to my bed to wallow in self-pity and weep a little. Today, I am back in the enamel 'factory', finishing three large pieces and a couple of smaller ones. I might come across to my assistants as a little impatient or crotchety but I learnt some time ago to keep my fragility to myself.

A Life In The Day

I got to bed at 3am, after a long evening spent re-working sketches for a new painting. An hour and a half later, I was up again. I wanted to beat the hell-ish crosstown commuter traffic on the long drive to my enamel studio in the 'far west' of Sydney.

A two-man team from a specialist shipping company arrived at the studio at 9.30am to wrap and take away a two-metre high Dangerous Career Babe bound for Melbourne. I put in four solid hours drawing in the outline for another large work on a freshly gessoed timber frame, then approved the colours to be applied to two large areas of the composition.

My cell-phone interrupted me half a dozen times: enquiries from collectors in the UK, USA and closer to home, most of whom found my prices daunting even before I told them how much specific works were.

The new owners of The Surfer, the most recently completed Dangerous Career Babe, dropped by after lunch to inspect the finished painting and to organise its delivery to its new home in one of Sydney's more fashionable beachside suburbs. The couple loved the work so much, they wanted to throw a party to celebrate its arrival. It struck me, suddenly (and a little sadly), that the work had ceased to belong to me and rather like a mother whose child has grown up, I had to let it go.

I made it home again long after sunset. I stripped, showered and fell into bed to eat a light meal while I watched an old Stewart Granger movie on cable.

I fell hard asleep before it ended.

Art Business. Business Art.

I've been drawing and painting at a frustratingly slow pace these past couple of days. Because of that and indecision over a choice of colours for The Wrestler (El Luchador) – one of the first Dangerous Career Babes to be completed, I decided to rework it a little before delivering it to its very patient Melbourne-based buyer – I'm now running a couple of days behind on the detailed work schedule I devised at the end of last week.

Still, I'm regaining a degree of order to my practice. After an horrendous series of mishaps that all but ruined a dozen near-completed works, last year, my re-organised studios are now highly disciplined and productive. The quality of what I like to think of as their artisanship has radically improved too.

The administration of my sales and marketing is slicker. Collectors, dealers, curators and suppliers are managed with a lot more care and receive clearer, more regular communication, even when I'm not around to supervise.

I can't claim sole responsibility for this. I've had the counsel of a couple of much older, much wiser heads. I'm given no quarter when my head is stuck either deep in the sand or far up my own ass.

Pre-Socratic And Pissed

Several years ago, I came across an interview with the then Dean of Smith College, Jill Ker Conway. Born and raised in rural Australia, Ms. Conway described Australians as "pre-Socratic... they don't like to think."

It took me a while to recognise that I didn't like to, either. Or rather, I did but over the years, I'd become lazy about it.

I used to pride myself both on my intelligence and on my fluency in communicating ideas. However, neither were attributes encouraged in teenage girls where I grew up and by the time I was in my twenties I'd turn silent, sullen and dull-headed from the drugs and alcohol I used to ameliorate my frequent bouts of depression. The best drug of all was to avoid thinking and I soon became addicted to it, even in my art, where I settled for effect – substance overwhelmed by high concept, a simulacrum of 'smart'.

I still find it hard to look at some of the paintings I produced between late 1999 and early 2001 and not wince. Even in the best of them, I recognise missed opportunities to improve them with a little more consideration about what – or maybe why – I was actually trying to paint.

Sometimes, I wonder if it's not so much an Australian as a female thing. We abandon thought to focus on appearance as a way to cope with anxiety, especially when it's related to our self-esteem. We go window-shopping, get our hair done, have plastic surgery. (Maybe men resort to empty action, like sport or driving too fast or wrestling with their mates).

Whatever the reason, I've been fighting hard to overcome it, along with all the other limitations I've imposed on myself through stubborness, indolence and worst, a persistent but pointless desire to be liked.

Late Night, Reworking

I was up until 3 a.m., last night, refining a drawing for an early Dangerous Career Babe. I'd decided some time ago to repaint The Wrestler. I was unhappy with the way the large silver skull had turned out – the silver paint lacked the hard, pristine surface of the surrounding colours. I also wanted something more in the composition – but just what exactly took me a year or so to figure out.

As I worked, I exchanged emails with a researcher in the art department of GQ Italia. The men's fashion magazine is publishing a brief interview with me about the sexual politics of my art – can you imagine an Australian fashion magazine even considering the subject? – and the art director wanted to feature one of the more provocative in my series of watercolours, Kelly, The First Time.

"Is that you in the picture?" the researcher asked.

The interviewer, a woman, had asked me whether the reason the figures in my work were almost always female was because of my "sexual orientation". I'd had to stifle a giggle.

Sunday At Home

Most weekends, I work. It's what I love so why would I do anything else? My work is divided between a studio in my house and a so-called 'enamel factory' but today, I just wanted to stay home and do nothing. I slept in, then lay in bed for a while watching the surface patterns of the ocean.

Later, between loads of washing and drying, I cooked the sort of food my mother used to prepare for me (lentils with mustards seeds, sauteed vegetables and herbs), and listened to music:

Blondie (Remastered) and The Essential Collection by Blondie
It's Not Just Sentimental by Otis Redding
Clandestino by Manu Chao
The Seville Concert From The Royal Alcázar Palace and Echoes Of Spain by John Williams
Bach: Morimur by Christoph Poppen and the Hilliard Ensemble
Homogenic by Björk

I've played these albums hundreds, if not thousands of times. Each has grown from something I appreciate to an aural reminiscence of specific experiences and moods. In repetition, they've mingled with moments of my life to become intensely personal.

Repetition, again: because of it, we form associations and imbue things – and people, places, sensations – with meaning.

Fragments Of Myself In A Box

I've plumbed a whole new level of tiredness this week: to bed after midnight and awake well before dawn for five days straight. Every hour in between has been consumed with work, other than a few minutes grabbed here and there for a coffee or a sandwich as I log into email (and, yes, Twitter), or make essential phone calls to collectors, suppliers and the young assistant grinding through a weekend shift at my other studio. The poor kid is re-organising what I refer to, a little grandly, as my 'archives' – lots of battered foolscap file boxes filled with sketches, photographic negatives, catalogues, press cuttings and keepsakes – annotating and dating the printed materials and wrapping the artwork in acid-free paper and reboxing it by year. There' a hell of a lot more of it all than I'd imagined, twelve years of output on paper, fabric, VHS tape, 35mm negatives and Polaroid SX70 and 600 prints, as well as a few dolls and small, fragile sculptures.

There's not much that's personal, such as letters or family snapshots. They were always the first things I got rid of when I was moving from one place to another, even as a child. I regret it now. It's too easy to forget who you were once, when and where. Now I'm much stricter about keeping track. I even allow sentimentality to seep into the choice of pictures I pin on the cork-board in my office or tape to the edge of one of the bookshelves in my bedroom.

The black and white photograph (above) is one I found today. I was a teenager, tall and gangly. No tattoos but already some scar tissue.

Dead Head

When I'm gripped by ennui, my blog entries get longer. So does the time it takes to write them.

I fight off boredom by focussing on the practical. I have several large paintings at various stages of completion. I want to deliver half of them by the end of next week. This means I'll spend five or six hours a day in my car, driving to and from the enamel 'factory' on the other side of town, and about as long (I'm too allergic to the fumes to cope with any more) working alongside my assistant on the paintings themselves. This leaves no time at all for navel-gazing so, with luck, I'll stave off the depression that lurks in the shadows of my low tolerance for tedium.

Don't ask me why I feel like this. I suspect it's just another segment of a fairly conventional creative cycle – that, or a psychological trick I play on myself to upset the dull predictability of my current routine and, maybe, compel myself to act on, rather than file away, the next good idea I have.

Repeating Myself

I'm sometimes criticised for the obsessive repetition of characters, compositions, colours and dimensions within my paintings. The most obvious examples are the Dangerous Career Babes, in which each Babe is posed exactly the same within a 2.0m x 1.6m high-gloss colour frame. It's also apparent in series as different as The Lin Triptych (watercolour, pencil, acrylic on cold-pressed paper), Lake Eyre (enamel on custom-made board) and Precious Blood (enamel on custom-made board): in each, individual paintings look like random frames excerpted from the same film sequence.

They're intended to reflect the insistent repetitiveness we encounter in advertising, just as their flawless, shiny surfaces are intended to be as seductive as any high-end consumer product.

Such repetition is rooted in religious iconography. Indeed, the Precious Blood series suggests that it's an ancient propaganda device. For nearly 2,000 years, the Catholic Church has used it to reinforce, among other things, notions of purity and piousness. Look how consistently similar and accessible images of the Virgin Mary and popular saints have been over centuries, our impressions of them (as well as our understanding) as carefully managed as any product advertising campaign.

I readily embraced the power of repetition in my work even if, when I was younger, it unsettled me a little. Maybe I suspected it undermined the originality of individual works. However, as I grow older – and as I begin to think of myself less as a painter and more as a conceptual artist – repetition makes more and more sense. It communicates the intellectual intent of my work and tracks the relentless, serial productisation of what we used to think of as 'high culture' – another thing Andy Warhol (himself a good Catholic boy) 'got' way ahead of the rest of us.

Six Things You Don't Know About Me

The trouble with updating an expanding online presence regularly is that I'm left wondering, sometimes, just what the hell readers don't know about me. Answer: probably not much. Here are six things about me that I haven't told anyone:

My first big crush was Ming The Merciless in the comic-book version of Flash Gordon.

I was 18 when I first kissed a girl. And I was 27 when I first gave a guy head willingly. Until then, I had to be pushed into it. Literally. One guy finally turned me on enough to want to.

I love old black and white movies, especially Pandora's Box, a silent melodrama starring Louise Brooks, one of my eternal crushes.

If I wasn't an artist, I'd want to be a ballet dancer – Sylvie Guillem is another crush – or (on my few pious days) a medic for Médicins Sans Frontieres.

I've worn Chanel Cristalle perfume since I was 16. I chose it after sniffing every fragrance in a department store. It smells like summer – and where I live, it's like summer all year round.

I used to hate hot pink. I began using it in my art during late teens after deliberately experimenting with all the colours I disliked. Now hot pink is almost synonymous with my paintings. And my panties. Yes, I do wear hot pink panties.

So tell me what I don't know about you.

Sanctify Myself

Although I was raised by agnostic parents, I've always been fascinated by religious rites.

I used to exercise – or do I mean 'exorcise'? – this by making altars. They were an early, uninformed experiment in syncretism, melding a variety of disparate belief systems and their symbols: Catholic rosary beads and scapulars wound between stone Buddhas and Santeria-like snake skeletons; a plastic Virgin Mary and a scalloped finger bowl for holy water watched over wooden, hand-painted skeletons, souvenirs of Mexico's Day of the Dead, in small, hand-carved coffins; there were offerings of dried flowers, a bottle of Brazilian cachaça, partly melted red and black candles and plastic Mardi Gras beads from New Orleans, some moulded to look like skulls.

The fascination with crude altar-making inspired a curiosity about the strange amalgam of Latin American Catholicism and West African Yoruban beliefs found in Vodou, Santeria, Obeah and Candomblé. My first watercolours, exhibited in 2006 as Venus In Hell, were torrid depictions of Vodoun tales and rituals, incorporating various signs (or vévés) and spirit figures (loas), such Erzulie Freda and Baron Samedi. The works also explored symbols derived from my own spiritual nightmares : snake skeletons, bleeding crows, subdued or tethered young women at the mercy of a corpulent, visibly aroused houngan.

I created an altar for the exhibition with offerings and small fetish dolls hand-made from cloth and clay strewn across the floor around it.

I've flirted only superficially with spirituality in my enamel works and even then, only in a couple of my early works and more for humour than anything else. However, despite having been immersed in the ironic superficiality of the Dangerous Career Babes for a year or so, the complex, animistic multi-theism of Caribbean religions and the more baroque, set-piece rituals of Roman Catholicism have continued to percolate in my imagination, prompting fleeting obsessions first with Mary Magdalene then with various virgin or martyred female saints.

More and more, I found myself revisiting the religious folk portraits of female saints – typically chaste, showing only veiled head and shoulders – that had inspired Frida Kahlo. Through rough sketches based on a series of Polaroid self-portraits I'd shot in 2000, I began re-imagining these images with me in the tense but faintly erotic grip of an ecstatic holiness.

I have now painted two of a planned series of six enamels, titled Precious Blood, each on hand-crafted 1.0m x 1.5m timber boards, each with the same figure – somewhat flat in perspective, in the manner of the 15th century painter, Piero Della Francesca – on the same pale pink background, black rosary beads entwined in her fingers, a suggestive smear of blood (like cum) at the edge of her pale lips. The repetition reinforces a cinematic impression while also reflecting the convention of early religious painting in which the portrayal of a particular saint were often very similar – if not exactly the same – even from artist to artist.

My Art, Not At All As Advertised

I was in my late teens when I became an artist.

I was already hyper-sensitive to the influence of advertising on my generation of young women. We couldn't help but get suckered punched by the constant bombardment of contradictory messages about how we should look and act and feel. For a while, we fought hard against the worst of the bullshit but in the end, most of us were ground down by it.

After I outgrew teenage awkwardness and turned into the sort of woman society considered attractive, I was, like many of my peers, objectified and harassed. At art school, my looks were more often commented upon than the art I made or the ideas I raised – not just by males but by heterosexual female lecturers.

For a brief time, I modeled. It was an angry response to my experience; if people were going to stare at me and treat me as an object no matter what I did, I might as well get paid for it. But endorsing products and values I didn't believe in got to me. I quickly gave it up. But not before I'd gained some insight into how entertainment and advertising media really worked. My first inspiration as a young artist was to find way to subvert it.

I had been looking at feminist and alternative art since I was a kid. However, most of it addressed a marginal audience: for instance, how many of us remember – let alone care about – the artist Judy Chicago? I always wanted to be at the white-hot core of popular culture rather than at the edge of it. I wanted art to exert the sort of influence that rock music then movies once did.

From the outset, I began creating images and objects that were seductive on a base level, that mimicked mass media's serial imagery in a format, sheen and flawlessness that was at once accessible and seductive. I inserted myself into them, objectifying myself, to redress the powerlessness I felt at being objectified – in other words, I turned myself into part of my 'product', something I could develop and control, even as I was evolving a more critical, ironic commentary on a culture in which such a self-obsessed concept of 'the brand of me' was gaining traction.

I went further, making large, glossy enamel paintings with surfaces as flawless as television screens. With their broad, bright patches of pretty, palatable colour, they were meant to be as easily consumed as candy – but ultimately just as corrosive. I wanted them to work the same way as good advertising, to incite some kind of impulsive desire.

The paintings (and figures in them) are supposed to be approachable and un-threatening, so that the viewer is suggestible, more open to their hidden meaning – a strategy commonly used in propaganda. Their effect emerges later, maybe after they've been looked at uncritically multiple times. Like advertising. Except that their message is deeply connected to my experience as their creator, as well as being subversive, disruptive – the very stuff of good art.

My commitment to the idea of these work being deeply connected to mass media was absolute. The proportions of their frames mimic those of roadsde billboards, A4 pages, or computer screens. The female character they portray (most of them versions of me) ape the subliminal body language of print- advertising or in the case of newer works, such as the Dangerous Career Babes, the expressionless, stiff-limbed, functional poses of Barbie dolls. I apply several coats of enamel paint to create a shiney, completely opaque veneer that reflects a shadowy image of the viewer onto the pseudo-perfect character on the painting's surface.

Of course, it has taken critics and institutional curators a while to 'get' it. Many still cling to an idea that art is less valid, less intellectually rigorous, because its 'pretty' or accessible. Their prejudice is derived, in part, from Conceptual Art, which became a major movement in the 60's and 70's. As Sol Lewitt defined it, more than 40 years ago, "In conceptual art, the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."

Intriguingly, the planning and decisions for my enamel paintings are also made before the rigorous, hand-made but unemotional process of their execution. However, their execution is anything but perfunctory. They are the result of a deal of old-fashioned, painterly craft (a far cry from the industrial 'art fabricators' utilised by big-name, contemporary 'objective' conceptualists such as Hirst, Koons and Kapoor).

As mentioned, the characters in my enamel works are mostly cartoon-like, unrealistically refined versions of myself. The traditional role for women in art is as a muses. In my own work, I am both and I don't hesitate to idealize myself in the same way that a male artist might. Bumps, knuckles, and all other bodily 'imperfections' are adjusted; skin flaws are airbrushed into an impenetrable, untextured gloss. In short, I make myself better than real – but still real enough to be desired, real enough to be used as the basis of other women's comparisons. The refined shape of myself as product, as artifice, also becomes an ideal for myself as consumer.

In my art, the personal is conceptual. Unfortunately, this has its traps. If I looked like Beth Ditto, my methods (and models) would be different. But I don't. I'm a tall, lean, angular female who has worked as a fashion model. No matter how much I dress down or how closely I shave my head or how much weight I gain (deliberately increasing my body weight by a quarter, not so long ago), my physicality is still one that can be easily objectified by the mainstream media. It'd be ridiculous for me to conceive critical, conceptual art that didn't acknowledge this.

An art dealer once noted of the hyper-real women in my paintings that men wanted to fuck them and women wanted to be them, to openly envy the 'perfection' they found within them. It had always been my intention to provoke these initial responses but after repeated viewing, I also wanted there to be a sense that the viewers had been taken in, causing them to re-examine their initial responses. Of course, some never do – but that's ok. They're still left in thrall of the art's surface properties, its unarguable allure.

This allure is where my art dissects and disposes of the influence of mass media advertising. Unlike advertising, it offers no product – other than itself – to sate the discomforting desire it provokes and this reaction without possibility of fulfillment is part of its power. The real meaning of my art is revealed not within what it is but what it is not. Its power is its independence of any need for pseudo-intellectual or critical 'context'.

Alt. Thinking

When I first started to experiment with depictions of what the tabloid critics liked to call 'graphic sex' in my paintings, drawings and photographs, a couple of years ago, it was assumed that I'd jumped on the 'sex positive' bandwagon. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was responding to what I saw as an increasingly wayward consumer culture not just encouraging but actually empowering young women to exploit their sexuality – without any fear of public disapproval (quite the opposite!) – in exchange for a measure of celebrity. As for those who were already celebrities, Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, and Kim Kardashian demonstrated that a little homespun porn could help rather than hinder a girl's career. You could even profit from it.

As I wrote at the time, "Porn's creepy sensibility has insinuated itself into every aspect of popular culture, from the fashion photographs of Terry Richardson to the pop star, Rihanna's robotic S&M stage persona. Hardcore porn has achieved legitimacy and through the internet, has found its way into the hands of millions of middle-class suburbanites who might never have risked a foray into an actual 'adult store' to buy it over the counter. With the proliferation of more sophisticated home media and easy-to-use applications, many have experimented with producing it themselves."

As Paris might have said, "Porn is, like, so hot right now." And at this junction of advertising, consumerism and a media-fueled preoccupation with celebrity, millions are already beginning to think of that once most private aspect of our lives as potential product. This sort of 'commercialised' sex intrudes in ways we might never have imagined.

Nowadays, we have a pretty good idea of how Paris, Kim and Pamela fuck – we've seen them, up close and in high def' colour – so we can't help but wonder if we 'do it' better. For many of these new-generation, media-fearless girls, sex is just another way of extending the promise of their brands and despite most of us averting our eyes (after a quick, appraising glance) from the dull brown tendrils fringing Brittany's up-skirt vage pics or Ice-T's missus, Coco's crevasse-like camel-toe, there are plenty of girls who want to emulate the various expressions of Samantha Ronson's hip, young lesbian brand or Amy Winehouse's poletarian metro-omnisexuality (perfect cred' for a louche, urban-Euro label). It's almost like another form of merchandise: never mind the t-shirt, try the sexual preference on for size.

My work has always limned not so much the junction but the collision of identity and sexuality with advertising and entertainment media. It used to be preoccupied with artifice, the facade. Big, colourful, glossy but brittle and ironic paintings have been the backbone of my output for a decade. Cinematic or billboard-like, depending on the subject, their emphasis has shifted in recent years from individual works to series, like my recent Dangerous Career Babes, that are supposed to be experienced as a single conceptual piece, like an advertising campaign. However, I began delving into porn because I saw it as a way of mapping some of media-shaped internal topography, specifically the psychological, emotional and spiritual rifts that had opened up within women of my age and younger as a result of our exposure to the relentless 'message/massage' of multiple media – media in which we have all now been reduced to the status of 'users'.

I opted not to do it at arm's length. After all, I'm an artist not an academic – I'm meant to be subjective. But I'd also found some of my sister artists' dalliances with it – from Sam Taylor-Wood's and Vanessa Beecroft's video performance pieces to Ghada Amer's needlework – just a little too prissy and purse-lipped to be interesting. So I let myself surrender to the 'Hollywood hypnenate' roles of producer, performer and consumer. And as I experimented with ways of transforming my vernacular experience of porn into art (not always succesfully) – subverting the polite conventions of watercolour painting to convey the oiled fleshy rutting of a low res' video shoot or reconceiving the garish saturation of a hardcore print spread as pallid, soft contrast, black and white photographs – I found myself re-thinking what I've been doing in all of my work.

I can't yet articulate the details. But one thing's for sure, I'm not yet done with this idea of 'artist as product, product as art'. Or with 'sex as product, product as sex', for that matter. Even if it isn't explored in broad surfaces of hard, smooth enamel paint.

Just Watch Me

After procrastinating for a couple of years, I've finally gotten around to uploading a little of the several hours of video I have lying around the studio to a new Dooney TV channel on YouTube.

I don't make claims for any of it as art. A lot is just experimental stuff I shot in my late teens and early twenties, during my brief dalliance with art school and the idea that I might work in film rather than painting. However, there are also glimpses of me in Lake Eyre, posing for study photographs that would later become a series of enamel paintings and chatting with other, much better known Australian artists, including David Larwill, Tim Storrier, and John Olsen. Over the next few months, I'll upload more recent material, including footage shot at both my Sydney studios and on my recent travels, as well as interviews and the occasional video artwork.

I'm not sure what it will all amount to but like everything else I do online, it's an attempt to figure out just how to interweave Web 2.0 with the rest of my work as an artist and access a broader audience outside the 'bricks-and-mortar' of the old-school gallery system.

Looking Naked, Part One

The life study has long been an important element in the classical training of artists.

At art schools, large and small, a respect almost verging on reverence surrounds the simple exercise of observing and recording the naked human form. Models are arranged in angular but emphatically unsexy poses. Artists stand awkwardly behind rows of easels and try to reproduce what they see as accurately as possible. It's a purely technical task, devoid of any intellectual or emotional engagement. The figure before them might just as well be a vase of flowers or a bowl of fruit.

Much has been made by feminists about the importance of drawing the face: their argument is that this identifies every human body and discourages us from any inclination to depersonalise it. And yet the enduring tenet of every life study is just this depersonalisation: the body, male or female, is reduced to a malleable sack of meat and bone, mere anatomy to be subjected to the same sort of detached forensic examination that corpses receive from student doctors.

It's a bloodless ritual meant only to enhance technique. Any connection to the persona of the model is discouraged. Nothing is revealed other than the body. The closed, silent rooms in which models pose suppress any stimuli that might provoke a an unwanted physical response from them.

Recently, I read an article online titled The Nude Figure And Christianity. The emphasis of the piece is on drawing the nude in a clinical context, and only as a way to master observation and technique. Curiously, this puritan reasoning is almost the same as in the most experimental art school, or drawing class: "If you can accurately and expressively draw or paint or sculpt the human form you can draw anything."

In talking about the supposed problems and flaws associated with drawing the nude, the piece actually locates the real issues that should be explored within the drawing: ".. we are required, to a degree, to suffer through overly-sexualized, unrealistically-modified advertising on a ludicrous and unhealthy scale — a fact which distorts our perception of reality and can subsequently wreak havoc in almost all areas of our lives."

Drawing the nude in a sterile setting is not really an attempt to dehumanise the body, to strip it of physical and personal identity. It's an experiment in denial, a conditioning exercise that forces the artist to disregard their own aesthetic, sexual predilection, social prejudice and preconceptions – most of which are forged, these days, by exposure to the codified, largely fictive, popular narrative that unites multiple tiers of media-driven, consumer-oriented culture.

Which leaves us with this to think about: The remote, almost clinical way in which a persona-less body is offered up during a life study not only strips it of humanity but negates students' inclinations to use the real stuff of a contemporary imagination. They might learn to draw beautifully but they'll still be a long way being artists.

A Life In The Day

Every morning for eleven years, from Monday to Friday, Andy Warhol phoned his secretary (and unofficial Factory biographer) Pat Hackett to download to her in a gossipy narrative everything he had done the day before. The ritual began because the artist wanted a formal record to justify his income tax deductions, which, every year, were audited by the Internal Revenue Service. Hackett was an attentive listener. Over time, she encouraged Warhol to expand the detail of each day and even dish the dirt on his celebrity pals. By the time he died, the transcribed diary ran to over 20,000 pages. A large-format hardback version published in 1989 ran to a more modest 807 pages.

I originally began uploading brief (limit 140 characters) updates to Twitter to keep my collectors informed about commissioned work moving through my studio, upcoming exhibitions and auctions, as well as relevant press coverage. Within just a couple of weeks, it has evolved into my own version of Warhol's morning phone call: in 10 to 20 short sentences each day, I describe not only work-in-progress but my moods, reading references, meetings – even the odd masturbatory fantasy. And instead of Pat Hackett, I have over a thousand online 'followers' and fellow Tweet-addicts.

Lost Thoughts

Days like this, art fails me.

I can’t help thinking,
“What if yesterday was
the last of my imagination?
What if i never have
another idea?”

Days like this, I’m happy.

I don’t have to care
for what’s in my head.
And I can turn my back on
having to pretend
I am a god.

Coming To The Fat Man

The fat man first appeared in my work in early 2006, just as I was finishing the dozen or so watercolours on paper I exhibited under the title Venus In Hell at MARS Gallery in Melbourne, the same year.

He was originally conceived as a houngan, a Voodoo priest, but in works done after the exhibition, he evolved into an impish, priapic Buddha. I loved drawing him in all his forms. He was completely different to the lithe, leggy female figures that populate much of my work. Broad but squat, his large, round belly hung over his waist like an over-stuffed life-jacket. His head was also round and completely bald, his legs short, with thighs that were thick and soft. Between them nestled a long, circumcised cock. His age was indeterminate.

The fat man was probably inspired by a passage I came across, a couple of years before, in a short story by a writer whose name I can't now remember. I copied a paragraph onto a page of one of my sketchbooks.

It read:
I studied myself naked in a full-length mirror behind the bedroom door – a brief physical audit of nearly forty-nine years of self-indulgence and neglect. I was morbidly obese. My skin was still elastic, even where it hung in a fold over my hips, but pale and discoloured with age. My cock was receding into a fattening pubis; I could no longer see it over my stomach, except when it was erect. My ankles and knees were swollen and there were striations of cellulite beneath my buttocks. My hands were misshapen with arthritis. My hair was cropped close to my skull but it had become so grey and patchy that it resembled the mottled flesh of a corpse. The rest of my body was overtaken with hair and benign growths. My teeth were yellowing and there was an after-taste of decay beneath my tongue. My eyes were bloodshot, a combination of tiredness and high blood-pressure, and my sight was failing. I had to wear glasses to read anything smaller than 14-point.

The fat man wasn't a central figure in my pictures. Mostly, he was consigned to the margins, from where he was either a curious observer or a kind of ethically ambivalent conscience with an apparent but undefined connection to whatever was happening. In My Houngan, he's a passive, jade-green gnome whose cock is entwined with a rosary bead. In The Descent he's fucking an ecstatic African woman as he stares from darkened sockets straight at the viewer. In Kelly, The First Time, No. 1, he is an indistinct smear in the upper left-hand corner of the composition, a shadowy observer or maybe just a ghost.

The fat man has re-appeared in a recent batch of small, watercolour sketches. He's older, frailer, more obese and running to seed. No longer a spiritual or demonic figure, he has fallen to earth and into the arms of louche, media-enabled, modern young women for whom he becomes a passive play-thing. I feel for him, so in all my sketches he's mostly prone, a dying whale stranded on a barren beach.

When I was younger, I loved the pale, soft, ample women of Titian and Rubens and their blotchy, corpulent, 20th century sisters depicted by Lucien Freud. But beyond Freud, whose nudes ruthlessly examine the morbidly obese or dessicated flesh of both sexes (rendering even Kate Moss as a pretty but still ropey-looking middle-aged woman), there are few other painters for whom fat aging males are a compelling subject matter.

I'm still not entirely sure why they are for me. I suspect it's because I can better express elements of my own truths within the motley but expansive topography of the fat man's body than that of someone younger, buffer but less lived-in. It's round, swollen contours have, too, something in common with a woman's body – curved in places yet firm, not as soft as a woman's – and I feel the same comfortable flow from eye to my brush or pencil as I draw them.

Oddly, maybe, I also find them just as sensual.

Inventing Our Selves

When I'm asked what my art's about – which is every time I'm interviewed or talking to patrons at one of my openings – I talk about how a contemporary woman's identity (including her sexuality) is defined by advertising, entertainment, and commercial pornography.

My take on it is dystopic: we surrender ourselves to cookie-cutter personae concocted by producers, programmers and marketers and blithely follow the scripts they pen for us. We become actors in a curious reality show they direct in our heads. It makes us more amenable to a relentless, ambient commercial feed. We become more malleable as consumers.

I'm no different – which is why fictive, media-inspired versions of me turn up in nearly all my work. My recent big enamel paintings are produced in series (just like TV shows and ad campaigns) because I'm trying to replicate the experience of mass media.

Let's face it, it's getting hard to tell art (and artist) from product – something both Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst understood.

Open And Shut Case

As some of you have noticed, I've shut down the Dooney Studio 'catablog'.

It was very short-lived. Online for just a couple of weeks, its limitations as a medium for keeping potential collectors updated about the many, disparate, smaller works currently available from my stock room were almost immediately apparent.

These works, mostly on paper, created as illustrations for this blog or as preliminary sketches for other larger woks in other media, will never be exhibited. Still, they're keenly sought after, both by serious collectors, who like to have examples of my looser drawings and watercolours to round out what they already own of my oeuvre, and by younger buyers who can't yet afford my larger works on paper (such as the Venus In Hell series) nor my PORNO photographs, let alone my enamel paintings.

If you are interested in acquiring one of these smaller works, which are all priced below $A1,000, and want to see what's available, please email my personal assistant, Priya. She will email you images along with measurements and a description of the media used. She can also tell you what catalogs of past exhibitions and auctions, exhibition merchandise, and books are in stock.

Painting Over The Cracks

“I think we should be together,” she said, suddenly. “You know, have a relationship.”

I kept moving the wide paint brush up and down on the canvas, squinting at the surface to make sure the enamel was covering it evenly. I didn't want to talk. I was still having trouble blocking out the pain of my recent past with her.

After a couple of awkward minutes, I said, “Let's just be friends. I don’t think I can be with anyone right now.”

When she and I were together, we never fucked. I wasn't ready, I kept telling her. It got complicated, then it ended. I careened from one man to another in a tangled string of brief, unfulfilling relationships.

I made us both some jasmine tea. Her lips pursed slightly as she sipped the hot liquid. I remembered what it was like to kiss them lightly.

“What are you going to do now?," she asked.

“Make art,” I answered. It was still the only thing I could trust myself to do well.

Who Am I?

For a third consecutive year, I've been included in the Who's Who Of Australian Women, published today by Crown Content.

This year's edition explores the theme, Lessons We Learn. As the publisher explains, "More than 6,000 notable women from all fields of endeavour reflect on their formal educations and the wisdom they have garnered from their unique life experiences." It's been so long since I was approached to contribute a paragraph or two that I can't really remember what I wrote. I'm pretty sure it had nothing to do with the benefits of formal education – I've had little – and I'm still bloody short on wisdom.

Crazy, When I Was Young

“Wanna try on the wig?” the DJ asked me, holding out a mirror.

It was a tired joke between us. A year ago, I had snorted cocaine for the first time. After the first hit, a bunch of us tried to flag a cab to a party. We were laughing, smiling, sucking on cigarettes, chewing gum and swilling water. I was wearing a black Cleopatra-style wig. Weaving down the main street of a petit bourgeois suburb, between customers sitting at sidewalk tables outside cafés and restaurants, I'd declared, loudly, ”I love this wig.” I remember breathing in and feeling a heady rush of pure pleasure. It emanated from my heart to the tingling nerve-endings at the tips of my fingers and toes. I thought, “I feel so good and confident and sexy. Wearing this wig makes me feel alright about everything.” But all I was was high.

Like ecstasy, coke only ever felt really good the first time. I tried a lot of other drugs afterwards to recapture that careless, fleeting, seductive feeling – and never did. I don't do any of them anymore.

Self-Portrait

The fat, old man lay on his back in the middle of the bed. The folds of his large, pale belly spilled over his hips like blancmange. His eyes were closed and he breathed so lightly that for a moment, I wondered if he might be dead.

A small Asian girl, a third of his age, knelt on the bed next to him, her head slightly bowed as if in prayer over his body, her long black hair just touching his chest. One of her hands rested lightly on his thigh, the long, thin fingers spread apart and slightly arched like a bird's claw.

"Keep your fingers away from his cock," I told her. It lay, flaccid, in a patch of thinning pubic hair, just a couple of centimetres from the tip of one of her black-varnished fingernails. She slid her hand back from it cautiously as I framed another shot. The fat man didn't stir.

Twenty or thirty Polaroid prints were scattered around the polished timber floor where I stood. I hadn't bothered to look at any of them. I was absorbed by the scene I was creating, through a series of expressive grunts and hand waves and the occasional, curt command, as I peered through the viewfinder of a plastic Polaroid 600 camera. I moved around the bed slowly, taking a pace or two forward or back as I reframed an image.

My index finger depressed the shutter release and with a loud click and whirr, another self-processing print was ejected from the front of the camera.We had been working together like this, the three of us, for a couple of hours. Bright natural light filled the room and was reflected by the white-painted walls and plain white linen on the bed.

Later, I would shoot half a dozen rolls of black and white 35mm film, over-exposing each frame by a stop to lighten the fat man's skin tones and make him look like even more corpse-like. In contrast, the Asian girl, her faced masked by a fall of straight black hair, turned into a dark but still somehow benign demon come to claim his soul.

I had already done a series of small, fast sketches of details: the girl's fingers and the sinewy contours of her neck, the fat man's gnarled, shrunken cock and the globular folds of flesh around his waist and under his arms. I observed closely and recorded with the clinical detachment of a crime scene investigator or a curious pathologist.

The mismatched couple didn't say a word. They simply did as I asked. They were strangers to each other – and to me – but as the day went on, they became increasingly complicit in the slow, almost prayer-like unwrapping of my ideas. Towards the end of the afternoon, the Asian girl took the fat man's cock in her hand and held it, still, in her open palm. I photographed quickly as it lengthened and hardened, my lens less than half a metre from the head.

That night, I pinned the Polaroids and the sketches at eye level around the walls of my studio. I studied each one closely trying to recall what had caught my eye in that moment. I scribbled notes about colours or additional details on the sketches, to give them context in the picture I was beginning to create in my head. I was still studying the images when the first, reddish sliver of sunrise penetrated the closed curtains of the studio.

I didn't feel like sleep. I wanted to keep on working. I opened the curtains and the large glass doors of my studio. A crisp, saline ocean breeze caused the pinned-up photographs and papers to rustle like Tibetan prayer flags.

I pulled a double-framed, full-length mirror to the centre of the studio floor. I stripped off all my clothes and stood in front of it to examine my own body, stifling a self-negating shudder as I identified where I had stored a little more fat or lost some youthful suppleness. I was, still am, young but these glimpses of inevitable aging and decay were unsettling.

They were also inspiring. I documented them with Polaroids as I angled my limbs and contorted my body to re-trace patterns I had sketched roughly the night before. I imagined myself as a multi-armed Hindu goddess, a delirious rave dancer and a ninja assassin in mortal hand-to-hand combat. I imagined myself as a stoned street whore entangled with a john in an alley. And as I imagined, I photographed, until I was too tired to do anything more.

The eventual works flowed as easily as the expensive English watercolours I used. Fragmented impressions arranged themselves in a coherent, narrative structure as their shapes and colours seeped into the fibre of the paper. In places, I reinforced strong sensations in pen and ink and alternately scribbled and erased passages from my diary or from short poems – scribbled in hard pencil or acryclic paint applied with a fine brush to form a further layer of both texture and back-story. I inserted symbols drawn from childhood (a dead bird, a snake skeleton) and Carribean voodoo vévés as clues to the weird magic that, I believed, haunted each picture.

When they were done, I hid them away for several weeks. I wanted noone to know of them but me. There would be a time when they would belong to others, when I might not see them ever again. But right now, they were mine. Only mine.

Remembering How I Came To Be, Final Part

I dressed in a pale blue top with a plunging, ruche neckline, a dark pencil skirt, and shoes with a soft, spongy platform heel. The rubber was a swirl of ice-cream colours: chocolate, caramel and banana. I painted my lips a dark, Pulp Fiction red, and made them shiny with gloss.

My mother showed me press for the exhibition. A widely distributed street paper had reprinted the press release I'd sent them, along with a small image. The image was also featured in the What’s On section of the art pages in Brisbane's main newspaper, The Courier Mail.

I had an hour and a half until the show opened. I sat for a moment thinking about everything that had brought me to this point. Until a few day's ago, I'd intended to move to Sydney and work as a fashion model. I didn't really think I could be an artist. I'd only sold one painting and that was to make some extra money to travel to Sydney.

Now everything had changed.

“I’ll see you up there, OK?” I told my mother. “I'll make my own way.” She kissed me on the cheek and smiled. I walked slowly out of the house and up the sloping street towards the hall.

Remembering How I Came To Be, Part Two

I rented a small room in the centre of my brother's house as a studio. The room was so narrow, I could paint only one large work at a time in it.

My brother, a house-painter, tried to show me how to use enamel. As usual I was impatient and only half-listened. I wrecked the first few canvases by not letting each coat dry properly. The heavy paint slid like mud down the surface, trailing gelatinous, lumpy streaks. As it dried, it puckered into deep wrinkles. I called the paint manufacturer's technical department. They gave me the same advice my brother had.

When the work was finished, there was no space to step back and look at it properly, let alone photograph it.

I bought an instant camera and filled every frame of 35mm colour negative film with close-ups. I pressed myself against the wall opposite the painting then, beginning at the top left-hand corner, I photographed it in sections. Snapping a shot, taking a step right, snapping a shot again, shuffling left and starting again, crouching a little lower – I repeated this process until I reached the bottom left-hand corner of the three-metre wide frame.

The next morning, I picked up the 6” x 4” prints from a local two-hour processing kiosk. Sitting in a café, I arranged the disparate prints, overlapping and skewing each like a glossy piece of a mosaic, in order to assemble a coherent image. Using Sellotape, I stuck the pieces together as best I could. It looked terrible but at least it showed the painting in full.

I took the picture to the owner of the hall in which I wanted to hang my first exhibition. He grimaced and sighed as I entered the space and strode up to his desk. I laid the taped-together photographs on the table before he could refuse to look at them.

So he looked – and he smiled.

Remembering How I Came To Be, Part One

Sprawled across a chaise longue in my mother's house, I reached for the 'phone and dialed the model agency in Sydney.

“How're you going with those last two kilos?” the woman who ran the agency asked me. She didn't even bother with 'hello'.

“I’m not coming,” I said. There was silence. Then, before she could complain about all the time and money the agency had invested in me, I told her, “I’m going to be an artist.”

“That’s not a living,” she said.

“That's not the point,” I replied. I apologised for wasting her time.

I called my boyfriend who was waiting for me in Sydney and told him almost exactly the same thing. “But your first show hasn't even opened yet,” he said.

“I know. I’m sorry,” I told him. “I wish I’d figured it out sooner.”

Wear Me Out

Last year, I curated an exhibition of my own and other photographers' intense, graphically sexual images at Melbourne Art Rooms in Melbourne. Titled PORNO, it was one of my best-attended and most controversial shows.

On opening night, all the gallery staff wore white PORNO t-shirts – the name of the show on the front, my name, web site URL and a butch, Avedon-like portrait of me on the back. They were also available for attendees to buy. I still have a couple of dozen left in medium, large and extra large, all of them signed. I am making them available for $A30, plus delivery.

I Won't Be Your Give Man No More

More and more galleries are developing websites. So-called virtual galleries are popping up everywhere online.

Some of the dealers behind these efforts are writing about their reasons for getting out of bricks and mortar. They're not exactly a mystery: gallery profits are falling and the sway they used to hold over artists has been undermined by a younger generation of artists (and musicians and film-makers) savvy enough to use the web to manage and promote their own careers.

A gallerist recently wrote on Art News Blog, "Why shouldn't the internet be profitable for both artists and galleries?" Well, for one thing, the whole point of the web is that it disintermediates – in other words, it makes life tough on the middleman.The gallerist tried to argue that collectors discover artists through visiting galleries – so galleries have a right to any and all sales of artists' works: "A collector walks through our doors, falls in love with the artist, goes home and Googles the artist and then commissions directly from the artist." The implication is that it's the gallery that attracts the collector. What nonsense! Collectors seek out a gallery which represents a particular artist in whom they are interested. The gallery then tries to leverage that specific interest to 'introduce' the work of the other artists they represent.

That any artist owes a gallery for the development of their career is also a nonsense. The artist has usually worked hard his or her entire life to achieve recognition – and more often than not, their relationship with a gallery represents just a small percentage of that life. Besides, very few are the galleries or gallerists that have the high-level skills required to develop and manage even a moderately successful career, let alone a stellar one – many are nothing more than self-regarding poseurs lacking the business sense of second-rate shopkeepers.

In 2005, I was represented by one of the best-known gallerists in Australia. Not long after I signed with him, he complained bitterly to me about another female artist who had recently left his stable. He ranted angrily about her, claiming that he had "made her career" and that she was "bloody ungrateful". He was particularly irked because she had left just as her prices were beginning to rise dramatically.

And yet it was obvious from her output and career arc that she'd worked incredibly hard and had earned every part of her success herself. She had always sold well, even before she was represented by this gallery, but the gallerist had also made plenty of money from her over the years. He had also retained a reputation for being hip and contemporary solely through the publicity he gained because of her work.

I suspect that he had refused to increase the price of her work (as he had also refused to increase mine) not just because he was a lazy salesperson but because he just didn't like the idea of an artist "getting above themselves". Her prices increased not as a result of his efforts but because she gained interstate representation and entered more high profile competitions, which drew more attention to her work. Nonetheless, he felt entitled to a percentage of whatever she earned, forever.

The concept that artists owe these people to whom they're often compelled to pay up to 50 per cent of their earnings (oh, plus gallery expenses) is exploitative and debasing. Let's face it, galleries don't do any artist a favour. They take on those who are most likely to be successful or who have already achieved some level of success. The art business is, after all, a business not a charity and it has fuck-all relevance to culture, despite its pretensions.

Artists are traded between galleries like football players between teams – or, worse, like whores between bordellos. I once schlepped my work and myself seven hours by plane (at my own cost) to exhibit at a gallery interstate. It was sold to me by my gallerist at the time as a 'good strategic move' to build my career. As it turned out, my gallerist just wanted shared some of the success he'd had with me with a business ally. After the gallery's commissions and my travel and accommodation were paid, I was left deeply in debt. Of course, I dumped the gallerist, who was not only peeved but tried to demand a percentage of all my future sales.

The art business is all about petty power plays. Artists, gallerists, institutional and corporate curators, art magazine editors, and critics are all complicit in them. Art magazines rely on advertising from galleries to fund their publications and in Australia, at least, there is little or no art critique that is independent of the traditional gallery system. It's ironic, really, that so many apparently creative minds are trapped within a system that only works if everyone plays the same sleazy, corrosive game – to rules made up to benefit everyone but the artist.

A younger, more independent-minded generation of artists, of which I am unarguably one of the first, is less inclined to bother with the game at all. We like to think of it as beneath us – along with all the other fakers and percentage-takers that persist in playing it. We're too busy connecting and working with each other and our audience, taking responsibility for our own careers. reclaiming a measure of self-reliance and maybe even a little dignity. Being under someone else's control, being told that you owe them half your income plus expense, being passed around their so-called friends, is demeaning and ultimately unproductive.

A number of years ago, I asked an art dealer who managed a well-known artist why he didn't create a web site for the artist. He laughed and told me the web wouldn't make a difference. I thought he was stupid. But I suspect he may have been better at his own game than I'd realised. Creating a website would have, inevitably, empowered the artist and diluted the influence of the art dealer.

But the power of new media, combined with the accelerating decline of traditional galleries, especially in a drastically deteriorating global economy, is such that even the most persistent and grasping middlemen will lose their grip in the near future. While artists will flourish on the net, only a very few galleries are likely to adapt to it, let alone be able transfer offline success online.

As any geek – or record company – can tell you, the web works against any effort to exert control within it.

Mediating Myself

Despite the five-figure prices for my recent, large enamel paintings and the four-figure price tags on my smaller works, I've created many even smaller pieces – not all of them art – that can be had for a lot less than $A1,000. Scattered around my studio and stored in my stock room are chapbooks of poetry and small drawings, Polaroids, digital and hand-printed enlargements from 35mm negatives, limited edition etchings, clay dolls, and small works in various media on paper, as well as signed postcards, posters, and limited edition t-shirts. I've decided to offer some of these things for sale at a new 'catablog', Dooney Studio, to be managed by my studio assistants.

Of course, my personal writings here will continue and my web site will remain the definitive reference resource for my work. And if all that's not enough, you can get bite-sized bits of me through each day at Twitter.

Limited Edition Print Update

The first 100 of the limited edition of 500 small photographic prints that I've offered free to those who send me their snail mail addresses are being mailed next week. Even with my assistant and I working together on them, it has taken much longer than expected to sign and number them all, wrap them in glassine paper, and address the envelopes. However, as a package, they present well and I hope recipients will be pleased with them. If nothing else, they're a memento of an unique art studio initiative.

As I've written before, everybody who has requested a print will get one – provided they've emailed their address. However, don't expect to get them within a week or even two. Those to overseas destinations will be sent by surface mail.

And yes, there's still time to request one.

Small Rituals Of Self-Examination

I've sketched and photographed a lot of Asian girls and every time, there is this sort of slow, almost ritualistic unravelling of themselves, which comes across as an unsettling hesitancy to unveil not just their bodies but their selves. I've always found it hard to explain.

Then, today, when I came across this passage in a short story. The woman described is a late-20-something, 21st century Japanese, but it conveys very beautifully what I have glimpsed in Koreans, Chinese and Thais.

"She sheds her soiled clothes in front of a mirror in the windowless bathroom, and surveys her body with forensic detachment. It is still brown and thin but to her eyes, it looks, somehow, amorphous. She pokes the unblemished skin on her arms and legs to test its tautness, and pinches her narrow hips and concave pelvis to check for fat. Her palms heft her small breasts and flat buttocks to gauge their subsidence, and her fingertips trace the shallow fissures at the corners of her eyes’ epicanthic folds. Like many Japanese, her lower front teeth are crooked, yellowed by nicotine. She pretends a smile that exposes only the straighter, less damaged enamel of her upper teeth and reminds herself to visit a dentist.

"Her body is the only object of the few disordered rituals she observes. As a child, her grandmother took her to the local public baths and, with an almost spiritual rigour, ensured that she learned not only to bathe with an abrasive efficiency but to look no further than the surface of things, to respect the efficacy of veneer. It was always implicit that her appearance was an asset, and even before she could possibly understand why, she was encouraged to put every effort into improving its longevity and value – a value to be determined later, by others, most of them men.

"She still senses her grandmother’s stern grey eyes every time she bathes. If she were still alive, she would be fretting about her grand-daughter who had failed – she would use that word with bitterness – to find a husband by the time she was 25. Marriage for her grandmother’s and mother’s generations was not about love; it was a practical transaction in which a husband provided a reasonable level of security, comfort and status and, in return, a dutiful wife raised their children, cooked, cleaned and from time to time, serviced his sexual needs. Affection was a happy accident, not a necessary part of the deal."

Dark Matter

My first studio was a ground floor apartment in a block of Art Deco flats, in Brisbane.

The block was perched high on a hill at the outskirts of the ciity. In front of my windows, a sheer cliff dropped to the edge of a busy road and stairs zig-zagged down it to a narrow footpath. The rumble of heavy trucks and buses reverberated through the timber floors of the studio; I could feel it through my bare feet and through my mattress which lay on the floor. Blue industrial plastic was taped as a protective cover on the walls in the living room where I painted and it reflected a shimmering blue light throughout the space. At night, even the black seemed to glow blue.

The deadline for my first gallery exhibition had been moved forward. Suddenly, it just wasn't possible finish all my paintings in time. It felt like a death sentence – so I decided to work myself to death.

Every few hours I inhaled dexamphetamine, bought from a raver who had conned a gullible doctor into thinking he was narcoleptic. I stayed awake, buzzing like a ripped high voltage wire, for days on end. If I crashed, I slept a little then just upped the dosage. It was my first real chance and I refused to blow it. After six weeks, the fabric between dream and hallucination was torn. Visions of vindictive angels whispered about me as they hovered at the edge of night-time shadows. Some called my name faintly, as if from a distance.

The day before the exhibition opened, I collapsed. My father carried me away from the gently vibrating floor and the softly glowing blue room. He delivered the paintings to the gallery while I slept.

Today, wide awake, I wanted to paint a little of what I still remember of those savage, dislocated days.

The Secret Of My Success

The day after my very first exhibition at a commercial art gallery, which had sold out, the gallery's director told me, ""Whatever you do, don't change your style."

It wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear.

She went on to tell me about other artists who had become financially successful this way. I recognised the names – and hated their works. They were repetitive, formulaic, and worst of all, stupid. The only reason the gallerist liked them was because they were easier to sell. The repetition had no conceptual reason. In every case, it was just about easy money.

I became an artist because I wanted to explore more deeply the emotional and psychological terrains that intrigued and obsessed me. I never considered making the same thing over and over, with small variations, just for the money – unless, of course, it was part of exploring an idea. Without an underlying concept, the work became meaningless, insulting and exploitative.

And yet for many major artists, the central problem of success remains breaking free of the commercial and popular pressure to do the same sort of works over and over. It affects so many of us, from Australia's painter of outback desolation and burning rope', Tim Storrier, to Vanessa Beecroft, Damien Hirst, and yeah, me.

I think I'm still young, hungry and reckless enough to rid myself of this burden and ignore everybody's expectations. I have done it before and it has paid off. But it has always been touch-and-go.

I just figure I have nothing to lose. Besides, risk makes my heart beat faster. It turns me on sexually and it engages my mind, even when it frightens the shit out of me. In every instance, I never hesitate to put everything on the line.

Artists only lose when they play it safe. Jeff Koons' Rabbit is just another floating balloon in a Macy's Parade. Vanessa Beecroft's early installations of naked women have been turned into a branded retail display for Louis Vuitton. Damien Hirst's endless versions of animals in formaldehyde make the stronger works in the series weaker. His most powerful works, such as A Thousand Years, are further undermined with each new pickled carcass, fast-money dot and swirl painting, or high profile diamond-encrusted skull stunt.

I always knew that repeating the same works over and over was a trap. One of the reason's I did all my Dangerous Career Babes as dress-up Barbie dolls stuck in the same action pose, was to rip the whole idea of repetition to shreds. So this is not a problem I am confronting with any nervousness.

No, my biggest problem is the one I thought I'd never have – embracing my own success.

I fought so hard, and for so long, to have a measures of critical acclaim, celebrity and wealth and yet I never really imagined it would be even a fraction of what has come my way in the last few years.

I'm used to scuffling, scratching, and hustling for any scrap of attention and to make enough money to get me through the next canvas. So it has been unexpectedly confronting to be on the receiving end of so much opportunity, praise, acceptance, and yeah, money. I know I wanted those things – badly – but I still don't know how to handle them with grace, appreciation and satisfaction. They make me uneasy, make me feel like something must be wrong because I feel so damn good. Sometimes, it gets so bad, it drives me crazy and I try to pull it all apart.

It's going to take some time for me to be able to accept my increasing success, let alone enjoy it. It going to take even longer for me to feel like I deserve it.

Out Of Africa

The SeekProject is an art and design brand initiative established in, of all places, Lagos, in Nigeria. It describes itself as "an avenue for us as artists to constantly look at ways to get our art perspective out to the open and to add more art to the world. Its a platform for self initiated and commisioned work, creative independence and growth." Since 2003, it has been a source of ideas, practical information, inspiration and hip product for young, both for and from Nigerian artists and designers. Recently, Seek approached me about republishing my essay, Life Study, first published in the Australian quarterly, Griffith REVIEW, a few years ago, on its site.

It can now be read there in its entirety, along with a couple of other interesting articles on commercial graphic design.

Unschooled

Recently, a student wrote to me to ask about becoming an artist. She told me that she planned to go to art school "to make contacts" and to be around other artists. In my experience, art school doesn't help you to make contacts – unless those contacts are academic. I've made many more simply by exhibting my work and promoting it on- and offline.They are in the 'real world' of commercial galleries, collectors, corporate patrons, curators, critics (and their editors), publishers, as well other artists.

I didn't finish my art degree. I dropped out after only one semester. But I remained friends with many who remained. All complained that the rigid course curriculum leached as much, maybe more, from them than it replenished.

Those who were most passionate about art when they began – and in my opinion, were the promising artists of my year – abandoned art completely after finishing their degrees. They were worn down by the theory-laden criticism of lecturers and tutors and the low marks they got for what was unquestionably intriguing, innovative work. Their imaginations were strangled – not inspired – by the system's hide-bound notions about the sort of work they were 'supposed' to be producing.

The bottom line is, art colleges in Australia just aren't that good. None can claim the rich histories – or famed alumni – of Slade, Goldsmiths, or St. Martins in the U.K. And none of them can offer an aspiring young artist access to a senior tutor as distinguished as Michael Craig-Martin. Originality is elemental to the success of these institutions as well as their sustained influence on the wider culture..

In Australian art colleges, as in Australia generally, originality is actively discouraged – if it's recognised at all.

Mixing It Up

I spent the early afternoon peering through a miasma of enamel fumes at an expanse of carefully prepared board. On it, a jigsaw of pencilled outlines marked which angular fragments of red and yellow were to be painted. Even though I knew the fumes were toxic, I couldn't help sniffing to feel the familiar, acetone-tinged fizz at the back of my throat.

Later, Jim, the painter who assists me on my large enamel on board works, helped me prepare paint. I chose and double-checked colours; he mixed them. We daubed a little of each on a small area of the board then let it dry to gauge how much it would darken. If I'd been alone, this process would have been slow and painstaking but with Jim, it moved along quickly. Maybe I was less inclined to be distracted.

Now it's raining. Above our heads, the heavy downpour sounds like rice cascading onto a steel drum. Occasionally, a strong gust of wind rattles the studio's old roller doors.

Snapshot From His Album

In the yellow-walled living room, he put on a Linton Kwesi Johnson album. I could hear the clink of scissors against china as he chopped marijuana over small bowl.

I was in the bathroom, standing over a small sink, splashing water onto my face. In the mirror, I studied the crystalline rivulets as they trailed down my tired skin. On a long thin shelf below the mirror were tooth brushes, toothpaste, incense, an obelisk-shaped ARIA Award, and a syringe half-full of water, blood and heroin. After I dried my face, I put away the bottle of bubble bath and some candles from our night of sex after his gig.

I could hear him singing. He had moved to the kitchen and now he was chopping vegetables to pulverise into fresh juice. I tip-toed in to stand behind him, naked, and hold his cock and kiss him while he shifted his weight from one foot to the other with the beat. He smiled absently, relaxed by the combination of music and dope.

There was always an energy between us but I couldn't figure out whether it was sexual frisson or plain discomfort. I never got dressed until I was about to leave but I never went back to bed with him once I was up. This morning, like every morning, we sat drinking juice – him clothed, me naked – but I was jittery to leave, to get home, to paint.

Often, I left in the middle of the night. I wanted to sleep in my own bed, alone, then get up at dawn and start painting. So I'd creep from his bed without waking him. I knew it hurt his feelings but I didn't care. He did his thing. I just wanted to do mine. Besides, he'd said he wanted a girl who did something.

I just wanted someone to understand me, even a little.

I was happy that his music was going well back then. When he wasn’t on tour, he could do whatever he felt like – hit on bikini-clad schoolgirls at the beach, skate, get stoned, masturbate. I figured that, if he wanted to spend time with me, he could come and hang out at my studio while I painted. It never really worked out that way.

Deal Breaker

At first, the Fillipino doorman preteneded to ignore my dented red van as it pulled up to the kerb. Then, all of a sudden, he bounded down the steps from the hotel entrance to open the driver's side door.

“Welcome back,” he said.

I didn't tell him I'd never been there before. Instead, I eased myself out of the seat like a boxer rising at the bell to fight a losing round. My muscles ached with tension and my head hurt. The impulsive rush of mania that had kept me jacked-up all day had begun to ebb.

It was dusk. The early autumn sun was about to set, leaving only a smokey, umber smear above the rooftops north of the harbour.

Inside the hotel, the air was ionised, cool. The rubber soles of my heavy work-boots squeaked as I crossed the polished marble lobby to the dim, beige womb of the bar.

The gallery owner was already there, sitting in one of two high-backed armchairs on either side of a small round table set apart from the rest of the room. He invited me to sit with an offhand wave towards the other chair. He didn’t stand. I didn’t expect him to. I was taller than him and I'd learnt that he was acutely sensitive to every nuance of advantage.

He looked like an aging tennis pro’. Dressed in white slacks, a white t-shirt, ribbed to emphasize his lean-ness, and a pair of rope-soled canvas slip-ons over bare feet, his barely wrinkled, 60-year-old skin was as dark as well-oiled saddle leather, if a little too consistent, unblemished, and buffed to be natural. His silver hair was cropped short, with the iridescence of expensive conditioning.

A waitress came over to take my order: a large bottle of Evian, no ice in the glass. I sat back in the armchair, and closed my eyes for a few seconds to compose myself. When I opened them, I glimpsed a reptilian furtiveness within the gallery owner’s gaze.

“I’ve wanted us to have this time together, just the two of us, since…”

I sat back, rested my head against the chair-back and closed my eyes. My chest felt like it was being crushed beneath a slab of coarse granite. From some black hollow inside me, a muffled voice was screaming.

Just leave me the fuck alone...

I think I slept. When I awoke, I squinted to staunch the salty fizz of tears welling in the corners of my eyes. How long had he been speaking?

“Huh?” A congested, interrogative grunt was all I can manage.

“This could really work well,” the gallery owner was saying. “We'll work closely together. After a month or two, we can assess where we’re at and figure out what's best for us both.” The words had the slick veneer of a con artist’s close.

I stood up. It was getting harder to breath.

“Think about what I’ve said,” he said. “We can talk more tomorrow.” He offered his hand to shake but I ignored it. All I wanted was to was get out of the bar and across the halogen sheen of the lobby to the cool, night air outside without falling.

What Am I Doing Now?

I finally succumbed to the simple-minded, gossipy allure of Twitter. I now upload snippets of information there, as DooneyStudio, a few times a day.

Yes, this is yet another distraction in an already utterly distracted, over-mediated life. However, the intention is to keep everyone with an interest in my work better informed about what I'm up to – including planning for upcoming events, auctions, stockroom sales, press coverage, new merchandise, and so on – wherever in the world I happen to be, as well as enable my collectors to keep track of progress on specific commissioned works.

Skinned, Nothing Like Fur

Some readers have suggested that finding models should be easy for me. Actually, it's almost impossible. The pay is negligible, the hours are long, and my demands are several. And that's even before we get to the knotty question of nudity, which, in the resultant work, is sometimes translated into graphic depictions of sexual acts. Not exactly the stuff of art school life classes.

In the past, I've tried to work with friends. A good idea in theory but in practice, the discomfort they feel as I subject them – almost without being aware of it – to what I've described before as a rigorously forensic study not only of their bodies but also their psyches can be discomforting.

Part of the problem is, when I'm working, I'm ruthless, selfish and probably exploitative (although I do try to maintain a semblance of empathy and care). In these respects, I'm rather like the predatory Diane Arbus, as she was described by Australian über-feminist and author, Germaine Greer, who regretted her decision to pose for the late photographer in a room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, in 1971:

"... she asked me to lie on the bed, flat on my back on the shabby counterpane.

"I did as I was told. Clutching the camera she climbed on to the bed and straddled me, moving up until she was kneeling with a knee on both sides of my chest. She held the Rolleiflex at waist height with the lens right in my face. She bent her head to look through the viewfinder on top of the camera, and waited. In her viewfinder I must have looked like a guppy or like one of the unfortunate babies into whose faces Arbus used to poke her lens so that their snotty tear-stained features filled her picture frame. I knew that at that distance anybody's face would have more pores than features. I was wearing no make-up and hadn't even had time to wash my face or comb my hair.

"Pinned on the bed by her small body with the big camera in my face, I felt my claustrophobia kick in; my heart-rate accelerated and I began to wheeze. I understood that as soon as I exhibited any signs of distress, she would have her picture. She would have got behind the public persona of Life cover-girl Germaine Greer, the 'sexy feminist that men like'.

"I concentrated on breathing deeply and slowly, and keeping my face blank. If it was humanly possible I would stop my very pupils from dilating. Immobilised between her knees I denied her, for hour after hour. Arbus waited me out. Nothing would happen for minutes on end, until I sighed, or frowned, and then the flash would pop. After an eternity she climbed off me, put the camera back in her bag and buggered off."

– from Wrestling With Diane Arbus by Germaine Greer, published in The Guardian newspaper, 8th October, 2005.

If that doesn't put someone off, then yes, they're probably an ideal subject. If they're between 19 and 35 years of age, female, reasonably fit, uninhibited, creative and/or smart, they should email me a photo and tell me about themselves. But they can't say they haven't been warned.

(Oh, a couple of plusses: I serve wonderful lunches and the view from my studio is amazing.)

Show, Don't Tell

My assistant took my place on the studio floor to fold glassine envelopes and insert signed, numbered prints of my photographic self-portrait, Study For Modern Strategies For Survival : Resized For Mass Consumption. They'll be sent next week to all those who supplied their snail mail address (and yes, if you've been dithering, there are still a dozen or so left from the edition of 500).

This week has been lost to 'house-keeping' and catching up with preliminary work on some new commissions. Meanwhile, the repainting of the last half a dozen enamel on board works affected by technical problems in my studio, last year, continues across town. My input isn't required until some large blocks of colour are rubbed back and re-coated. With my allergy to enamel now very acute, I have to manage carefully the amount of time I'm exposed to its toxic fumes.

So, for the first time in several weeks, I've been able to spend more than two days in a row at home, drawing. I'm also planning some ideas in other media, including video.

Years ago, when I was at art school for a brief period, I experimented a lot with digital video, creating a handful of short, somewhat obscure pieces. For a time, it almost supplanted painting as my primary medium of expression. Now I want to use it to delve further into some of the themes underlying my paintings and maybe, for the first time, work with models or actors other than myself.

Then again, given the prurient controversy that swirls around my work – and me – from time to time, I might have a problem finding anyone with enough nerve to work with me.

The Price Is Right

Well my work didn't break any records at auction tonight – no works by artists under 40 did – but at least none were passed in.

Quite the opposite. Two were sold within the narrow range of the auctioneer's estimate: Bird Of Prey for $A10,800 (estimate $10,000 to $14,000) and Sports Babe:The Boxer (Resized For Easy Consumption) for $4,320 (estimate $4,000 to $5,000). Sports Babe: The Basketballer (Resized For Easy Consumption) exceeded its upper estimate of $5,000 by $280.

Am I pleased? Well, I'm not disappointed. I would have loved my prices to reflect more than just resilience – although given the awful and still declining economic environment, resilience is good. Besides, the prices achieved were hardly peanuts.

Now I am going to put them out of my mind completely. Tomorrow, I'll get up early and have a coffee on my verandah overlooking the sea. Then I'll begin drawing and painting new work, reminding myself that the wild crap shoot of a major art auction can be a lot of fun (even if you're just breaking even) but it has fuck-all relevance to what art is really about.

Not Just Sitting On My Art

It's nearly midnight and I'm sitting on the floor of my studio folding 150 glassine paper envelopes for 150 signed, numbered copies of my limited edition photographic print, Study For Modern Strategies For Survival : Resized For Mass Consumption.

The glassine is almost transparent so the image will be just visible within, along with a printed sheet that explains the relationship between the photographic study and the large enamel paintings inspired by a 2001 expedition to Lake Eyre, particularly Bird Of Prey, from the Lake Eyre On Acid series, which is being auctioned by Deutscher-Menzies in Sydney, tomorrow evening.

Tomorrow morning, I'll pack the small packets into a box and deliver them to Menzies Art Brands, where I'll meet with the National Operations Manager, John Keats, and supervise the ushers as they place a packet on every seat in the auction room so that they might be taken home by those who come to bid – hopefully for one or all of the three works of mine included in the evening's sales.

The give-away is an extension of what I'm doing here on the blog. As well as being an unusual way of saying thank you for what's been a wild – and wildly successful – two or three years, it's an unprecedented opportunity for self-promotion in an unexpected context. It also happens to mesh with my committed independence of the traditional gallery system as well as some residue of youthful socialist ideals.

What's In A Name?

I wanted to call her The Surf Punk because that was how I thought of her as she first began to take shape in my sketchbook.

Later, I took a liking to the word 'fierce'. She became The Fierce Surfer for a while but the adjective has become so bloody trendy and self-congratulatory among a generation of young American female celebrities – look at poor Beyoncé sashaying around inside her corporately constructed alter ego, Sasha Fierce – I couldn't live with it for long.

When the acrylic on paper study was finished, she looked more savage, less pretty, a really dangerous-looking Career Babe, despite the deliberately ironic palette of girly pinks and caramel creams. I fell in love with her toughness and care-less sexual tension. I took to calling her The Hardcore Surfer – and yes, the double entendre was deliberate.

By the time I scanned the image to email to the Sydney collectors who'd commissioned it, the title had been pared down again. It was now just The Surfer.

In the end, simplicity said it all best.

Painter's Block

Sometimes, no matter how well-conceived a painting is, it fails to come to life on the canvas (or, in my case, board). It can be a matter of composition, choice of colours or a combination of several elements that don't quite coalesce the way I'd expected. It can take a while to figure out what the problem is.

In the past, I used to get frustrated and abandon the work. I'd just throw it away. Now I'm smarter. And more patient. I wait. Eventually, the painting itself begins to tell me what's wrong and in most cases, I can fix it.

For the past ten days, I've been working on a study for a new painting. I was pretty happy with it right up until I finished applying the largest areas of colour. Then I wasn't. I wasted several hours tinkering with it until around midnight, last night, I realised what the problem was.

This morning, I'll strip away everything I've done over the past few days – not to start again exactly but to finish differently.

Distraction

Gaze, touch, hold, inhale, embrace, kiss, savour, nip, suck, squeeze, caress, sigh, exhale, lick, linger, tease, tremble, graze, fumble, unzip, grasp, finger, circle, swell, rub, stiffen, tongue, seep, taste, moisten, stroke, twist, throb, urge, press, want, arch, probe, pull, thrust, enter, pant, bite, delve, rim, spit, penetrate, hurt, flinch, oil, smear, clench, relent, ease, open, sweat, cup, throb, turn, climb, straddle, ride, part, widen, grip, gape, leak, quicken, push, slide, lap, grind, pinch, jerk, whisper, cry, clutch, glisten, ram, surrender, flood, slam, fist, abandon, loll, engorge, fuck, vibrate, flush, near, spasm, jolt, scream, spurt, heat, gasp, ooze, scratch, slacken, pour, fall, sate, shiver, withdraw, spill, catch, share, sip, swallow, drip, adhere, entangle, ache, pulse, need, eye, dilate, murmur, reach, wet, harden, giggle, tug, slip, fill, moan, spill, soak, grunt, smile, relax, glow, fade.

Peace Work

Once again, I'm living somewhat schizophrenically between the industrial tasks associated with completing a handful of large enamel paintings and the imaginative process of developing preliminary drawings for several unexpected new commissions. There are also some low-key promotional projects to undertake ahead of the Menzies Art Brands auction of three of my works on Wednesday, next week.

As usual, the regularity of my blog entries has suffered.

I like the rhythm of busy days, even if several hours can be wasted driving from one end of the city to another. The fragile edges of my psyche begin to fray if I have too much time on my hands. I get to thinking too much. It's always better for me to be doing, making, producing.

To The Next 500

My studio has been overwhelmed by the unexpectedly large number of requests for the free limited edition photographic print – and yes, everyone who has provided a snail mail address is guaranteed to get one. The prints will be packed and sent out during the first week or two of April.

I have also been emotionally overwhelmed by the many, personal comments that have accompanied the requests as well as the geographical spread of the correspondents: from Mumbai and Singapore to Auckland, Tokyo, Los Angeles, London (a special 'hello' to the girls at Christie's!) and Berlin. Many have been from women of my age, many from other artists, but there have also been a few from teenage school kids and grandmothers – one of the latter wrote, "I am a pensioner (old person) and could never afford an original piece, but I plan to pass it on, eventually, to my Grandson who is also a fan. I love your clarity and honesty, you are a breath of fresh air - wish I had half your guts or talent! I always look forward to your blogs."

To everyone, just know that I am very deeply moved and grateful for all your words. My offer of this small print is unequal to the enthusiasm, care and support you have shown me.

For The First 500

I can't believe it! This is the 500th entry here – two and a half years after I wrote the first.

To celebrate, I've decided to offer everyone a chance to own a Dooney original: a small, limited edition, color photographic study from my Lake Eyre series, titled Study for Modern Strategies For Survival : Resized For Mass Consumption (see the entry below). Each print is stamped, signed, dated and numbered on verso. The image size is around 2" x 3" on 4" x 6" paper.

Of course, only 500 are available.

To obtain one, all you have to do is email me your name, snail mail and email addresses and my Sydney studio will post it to you (at my expense) by surface mail.

In The Pink

Forgive me if I've told you this before but I have a fetish for panties.

When I was 15, I blew my first paycheck on a pair of hand-sewn black silk french knickers. At the time, I was practically living in a pair of recycled men's 501 Levis and I didn't yet date, let alone have a boyfriend. So buying the knickers was a purely selfish extravagance. I loved the slightly lurid sensation of soft silk against my skin, so unlike the coarse chafe of denim that I was used to.

In my late teens and early 20s, I discovered the provocative anticipation of putting on panties only to have someone else take them off again. I preferred the plain fabrics, in fine mesh – just sheer enough to enable another to trace the undulating topography of the anatomy beneath. My favourite colour, even then, was pink. In many of my paintings, I 'd use hot pink combined with camel and the candy-like hue worked just a well against my own skin. Hot pink was as seductive – it could conjure up anything from reluctant, shy sensuality to crotch-rubbing randiness.

My bought my first pair of pink panties in a set with a pale, metallic pink Calvin Klein bra. I wore both the bra and panties a lot for my boyfriend at the time but they found their way into my art by chance when I photographed myself wearing them for a number of of Polaroid studies I did for a new series of paintings

My favourite pair of panties were hot pink mesh with orange trim. They were a forgettable brand. I don't even remember where I found them. I bought several pairs. When I went to Lake Eyre as the only female member of a highly publicised artists' expedition, I threw a few of them into my bag. I intended to wear them only under my dusty jeans but I ended up donning them for a bit of 'spot colour', first in the series of 35mm study photographs then in the large, high gloss enamel paintings inspired by the journey.

The same panties became somewhat notorious – and inextricable linked to my public image – when a photograph of me wearing them with only a dusty white wife-beater, Aviator shades, and a pair of high, leather boots (oh, and a 12-gauge shotgun and leather bandoliers) was chosen as the cover image for a national weekend newspaper lift-out. You could just make out the dark shadow of my pubic hair beneath the sheer mesh bunched slightly around my crotch.

Getting me out of my pink knickers isn't as easy as it might have been when I was in my twenties. Getting them out of my work is proving even harder. It's as if, somewhere beneath their flimsy fabric and thin, elasticised waist bands is the sweet, sticky secret of a girlhood fantasy I'm reluctant to leave behind.

The expression 'pink bits' still means a lot of different things to me – and not just as an artist.

Fucked In The Art, Final Part

I'm not done ranting yet.

I've always wanted to tell those who leave nasty, mean-spirited or just plain dumb anonymous comments on this blog to eat shit and die.

It's easy to spit bile at me from the shadows. You don't have to show yourself the way I do every day when I write, draw or paint. You don't have to show your work either – especially the work, because then you'd be faced not just with my judgement but others' as well. But remember this: anonymity is relative on the web. Here, an IP address is logged with every comment. And although I choose to ignore the worst of what's written to or about me, you can be damn sure I can know exactly who – and where – you are, if I want to. Go too far and yeah, I will come looking for you.

The worst nearly always comes from people from my past, people who think I owe them something. Which means most of them are from men: men who resent that I didn't do what they told me to, men who are pissed that I didn't fuck them or pander to their egos, men who failed to turn me into their cash cow, men whom I just didn't like (or, in a couple of cases, love) anymore. Most are too pathetic for me to spare them a second thought.

I respect those of you who use your real names on your comments. It shows you're willing to stand behind what you say, whatever it is, and take whatever comes back at you (usually from the malevolent anonymous dweebs).

I live what I write and paint. I'm candid to a fault. I don't care how anyone takes it. Which gives me the moral high ground when it comes to gossip: I have nothing to hide and nothing I'm ashamed of. I suffer from a serious mental illness. I fuck both boys and girls and sometimes find it hard to tell the difference. I spend more money than I earn. I'm hard to deal with when things aren't going my way. I work long hours – long fucking weeks – without a break and when I do, I don't answer the door, the phone or my mail. I lose months to angry, self-destructive depressive epsiodes during which I can barely drag my ass out of bed.

I handle my business just as openly. I don't bid for my own work at auction. I don't do deals under the table. I respect the contracts that I make. Also, I don't back down when someone does wrong by me.

All of which leaves little that's true as fodder for gossip or trash talk. Most of what circulates about me that hasn't actually come from me is bullshit. How can you know for sure? Ask yourself how much of it turns up in public, where it risks being embarrassed by proof of its untruth or worse, aggressive legal action.

I don't owe anyone anything (except, of course, money, lots of money). I sure as hell don't owe other artists. I try to support or encourage some I care about. I try not to hurt the feelings of others. But I feel no obligation to like everybody's work – nor to like them – let alone nurse them in their careers. If you can't glean the 'secrets' of my success, such as they are, from reading this blog then maybe you're just stupid. If you're too lazy to read it all, don't write and ask me for a summary. My limited free time is precious to me: I'd prefer to waste it on reading, watching TV or sticky sex.

I don't give a toss if you feel abject because I didn't respond to something you've written to me. If you've got the urgent need to express your resentment, be a grown-up and keep it to yourself.

In the last few years, I've made more money than many gallerists and certainly, most artists in Australia. I've spent almost all of it on my work. If, one day, the income evaporates completely, it won't bother me. I'll live in my van or in some squat in the middle of nowhere. It's not like I've never done it before. And I'll keep painting. Fame, money, social status, popularity and the easy life are fine but in the end, they're only really fun if you haven't got anything better to care about.

All I care about is my work, about doing it well. If I have one piece of advice to offer about being an artist, that's it: care about your work and nothing else. It's harder than you think.

Fucked In The Art, Part Two

Yesterday was a very bad day.

For one thing, it was if every other conversation I had was with someone whose agenda did not include doing the right thing by me. I got told nasty tidbits of gossip about myself, by people who've only ever pretended to be friends. One of them implied I had a sugar-daddy paying my way – a tired male chauvinist dig reserved for any woman who makes her own way, on her own terms, except this time it was delivered by a middle-aged woman. I got threatened with unrealistic, un-doable and entirely arbitrary deadlines. I was told at least a dozen obvious lies.

Then I snapped. I decided I'd tell the very next person who pissed me off exactly how things really stood.

I know I'm not always easy to deal with. I don't clock into and out of work at regular times and I don't set, let alone respect, deadlines. The only thing I guarantee is good work. The collectors and curators who commit to the expensive, drawn-out, sometimes difficult process of working with me on a commission are rewarded with getting exactly what they'd been hoping for. In that, I don't disappoint.

As far as I'm concerned, my only job as an artist is to do my art well. I'm not a decorator or a tradesman. I'm not in a service business. I don't do house calls, estimates, plans for approvals or timelines. I don't match the colour of my work to the drapes. I sure as hell don't sell it to people I don't like.

And you know something? It works. I'm independent entirely of a tired, creaky system run by socially aspirational middlemen with no real care for art or the artist. I was one of the first Australian artists to opt of this system, thanks to the web, broadband and a bunch of smart advisors (many of them women) whose strategies I was foolhardy enough to implement.

These strategies weren't some 'last resort' because I couldn't find the right gallery to represent me. Quite the opposite: I chose to cut ties with two of the very best Australian galleries in order to have my freedom. The old ways of selling art and artists – some of which are so archaic they were established even before the Renaissance – are dying. A new generation of artists – and musicians, writers, film-makers, and performers – are showing themselves to be smarter, more media-savvy and better organised than the smug, self-promoting 10-percenters (or rather, in the art world, 50-percenters) who used to 'represent' or 'manage' us and 'deal' on our behalf.

I make the best art that I can. I make it with as much thought, emotion, and sheer bloody craft as I can. It takes time. So if I don't want to deliver a work until it is ready – I might be the harshest judge of my own work but I've rarely been proven to be wrong – then that's the way it has to be. Even if it takes a lot longer than was expected.

Most fashion designers, art directors and interior decorators are forgotten in the month or so between one issue of Vogue Living and the next, but artists' reputations are affected by their worst work for generations.

I've lost patience with the occasional collector who infers from a delayed delivery that the work is flawed or, worse, not going to get to them at all – as if it's controlled by some mysterious, mystical force rather than my own blood, sweat, tears and intellect.

My most recent works are now valued in the tens of thousands of dollars but I've had to pour in a lot more money, time, effort, and emotion than I've earned back yet in order to make this so. When I fall behind on a commission, it's not because I'm tired or lazy but because I'm just trying to get it right. I understand collectors' fears, frustration and frugality when it comes art and money, especially in these bad times. But I've proven my commitment to the value of my work, over and over again. I've never let anyone down over the long haul, never promised anything I couldn't or wouldn't deliver, never delivered a disappointing work, never not delivered.

There are those who get it – who get all this – then there are those who don't. I won't deal with the latter at all, no matter how much money or fame is on offer.

Fucked In The Art, Part One

This morning, I found out that a Queensland gallery had used an image of mine, Under And Over, from my Lake Eyre series, to promote a fund-raising exhibition. The invitation had been sent to a list of recipients that included several of my collectors. The image was also used, badly cropped, on a web site associated with the event. I'm usually pretty relaxed about how, where and why my work is reproduced, online and off. As is highlighted at the bottom of the right hand column of this blog, I'm a supporter of the ideals of Creative Commons – the words and images on this blog are all licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License – but that doesn't mean that I'm up for a free-for-all when it comes to my rights.

The way the Queensland gallery appropriated my image without permission and without any respect for the terms of the published Creative Commons license stuck in my craw. Firstly, the work was being used to promote a fund-raising event – the objective of which was to buy guns for a private girls' school's shooting club. This is not 'non-commercial' under the terms of the Creative Commons license and thus subject to my permission. Secondly, the image, which was downloaded from my web site, was low res', slightly blurred and placed within an unflattering design promoting not only the gallery but also the use of guns for sport (not exactly an issue to which I'm sympathetic – for the record, my image was intended to be ironic). I was given no opportunity to object to this. Finally, the image itself was altered by the addition of a strip of mismatched colour at the top. Even if one put this down to clumsy graphic design, it altered the image and was yet another breach of the conditions of my Creative Commons license.

I don't know the gallery's director well. I dealt with her briefly once, a few years ago, when she was learning the ropes at a gallery I was in the process of leaving. Today, when I called her to express my objections to the use of my image, she was dismissive and unapologetic. When I emailed her afterwards, specifying the ways in which she had breached my copyright, she offered an insincere apology and tried to assure me the invitation had not yet been sent out. Of course, it had – that's how it'd found its way to me via not one but several of my collectors. She then tried to 'stroke' me by telling me, "I'm a big fan of your work, and consequently, your fan base has grown as everyone loves the image."

I am not exactly an unknown artist who should be bloody grateful for any exposure I get. Quite the opposite. The series of works of which the image featured on the invitation was a part had been the subject of a nationally televised TV documentary and had toured several regional and national galleries. As far as I was concerned, she had callously and clumsily appropriated a widely recognised name (mine!) and image and exploited the existing, widespread interest in both for commercial gain.

And for the record, I don't give a toss if a gallerist or anyone else is a 'fan' of my work. I'm an artist, not a pop star or TV personality. I don't need to cultivate a 'fan base'. The interest of my collectors – and those of you who read this blog regularly – is a lot more complex and committed than that.

In the end, I sent the gallery director a much stronger, more insistent email, instructing her to 'cease and desist'. I copied it to the pit-bull-like, big city law partnership I use to escalate these sorts of battles for me. Less than ten minutes later, the gallery director offered a formal, public apology, albeit without being specific about how she would do this.

In the art world, as elsewhere, words are cheap.

Banking On It

Two years ago, none of my work ever turned up at auction. I liked to think that it was because, as gallerists put it, my work was '"closely held". The truth was, my paintings just weren't sought after enough to make it worthwhile for potential sellers to submit them to the better auction houses.

When one of my earliest works did, finally, make it into a a low-key Lawson-Menzies sale in Sydney, in 2006, you might have been hard-pressed to find it. There was no illustration in the catalogue and its lot number was so high that it might have been mistaken for a footnote. Nevertheless, it sold well above the pre-sale estimate.

Since the new highs set for my work at Christies' sales of Australian art in London, in December, 2007 and 2008, interest in my work has hockey-sticked upwards. I'm now seen as 'bankable', something of an up-and-comer, maybe even a minor marquee name. An illustrated description of the main work of mine being offered at the upcoming Menzies Art Brands auction is featured in the front pages of their glossy, printed catalogue.

Bird Of Prey, shown above, from my Lake Eyre On Acid series, is lot no. 2 in the Deutscher-Menzies auction in Sydney on the 25th March. Executed in high gloss enamel and reflective vinyl on a 100cm x 150cm custom-made board, the estimate for the 2003 work is from $A10,000 to $A14,000 – a generous range given the current economic climate but still just half what two less interesting works of mine sold for in London, 15 months ago.

Bird Of Prey can be viewed in Melbourne from the 12th to the 15th March at Menzies Art Brands Gallery, 1140 Malvern Road, Malvern, Vic. 3144, and in Sydney from the 19th to the 24th March, at 12 Todman Ave., Kensington, NSW 2033.

Two smaller (40cm x 50cm) works of mine, The Boxer and The Basketball Player, from the 2002 series, Sports Babes, Resized For Easy Consumption, are included in the Lawson-Menzies on the same evening. Estimates for each are from $A4,000 to $A5,000.

How It Is, Lately

the first sign of mania
is the aluminium-tinged
odour of my sweat, bad
chemistry in ferment,
a smoking circuit in the
fragile motherboard
of my brain.

depression has no smell.
which is maybe why i
imagine that its grim
episodes of jittery unease
are just a symptom of a
commoner life, encircled
by dull routine.

Some time ago, I copied this brief poem (by an Australian writer) into a sketchbook. I'd wanted to use fragments of it in one of my watercolours. Then I forgot all about it. Last night, I came across it again, scribbled in frantic pencil along the inner margin of a page. Its stark truth disturbed me, more than a little.

Re-Surfacing

Large frames are stacked against the walls of my living room. They're all custom-made for me by Graham Reynolds , a master frame-maker based in Brisbane, Australia. Their edges are cambered to mimic the first frames and canvases I made myself in 1997 and they're sprayed with gesso. The fronts have been sanded to a satin-like smoothness.

Over the years, I've asked Graham to undertake more of the preparatory work on my surfaces. I used to roll on the base paint in an equal number of coats on the back and front so that the timber was sealed evenly. Last year, Graham began to spray these layers in his workshop. The finish is far better than anything I could manage, even after a dozen years of practice. They're so seamless I hate to sand them even very lightly to adhere the first coat of enamel.

The fronts of several of the boards I have are raw gesso. I'd planned to use them for large watercolour works. Water-based paint seeps into the porous gesso, which wicks and blots it a little like expensive cold-pressed paper. But now I need to use all of the frames for new enamel commissions. With the help of a local student, I've been wrapping them to courier back to Graham to be sprayed.

It's expensive and time-consuming. However, when I discover a new way to improve the craftsmanship and surface quality of my work, I embrace it. These days, I hardly ever look back to how I used to do things.

Indulging My Self

A comment on one of my recent posts referred to its content as self-indulgent. This isn't the first time someone has said this. But I'm not offended.

I agree.

My writing is sometimes self-indulgent. So is my art. I write and make art as a way of processing my own experiences in, or perceptions of, the world. My efforts don't nourish anyone (except, maybe, spiritually or intellectually). They don't give them shelter. They don't make them healthy or give them a basic education. In other words, they're not essential to anyone's existence other my own. The fact that I've dedicated my life to them is entirely about indulging my own urgent impulses – nothing else.

There are people who connect with my work in different media. It means a lot to me that others find meaning within what I do. It also saves me – if only because my egocentricity is transformed, in some sense, into community. As I write about myself, as a young woman and an artist, and about the experiences, perceptions and yes, prejudices that motivate me, I am trying to reach out and touch, inform, inspire and sometimes, enrage. But I don't expect always to be successful – and if I'm not, I don't really care. I do it because I have to. Which is another way of saying I do it for myself.

For a long time, I struggled with the innately selfish, self-indulgent, and solitary aspects of being an artist. I recognised there were higher vocations – just as there were, certainly, better jobs – and I admired them. But for better or worse I've learned to accept that I'm not suited to them.

I'm an artist. There's simply nothing else I can be.

No More Fingers In The Dyke, Final Part

When I try to make art to please someone else, it always fails. The pressure of seeking approval destroys anything it could have been. The only way I can make art is to do what I want and to explore the ideas that interest me. I can't fake it.

I can't fake who I am either.

When I decided I wanted to express my long-repressed sexuality, this fed into my art and for a while, it got me branded – wrongly – as an erotic artist. But I never really thought of myself as an anything other than political, trying to subvert sexual identity and the mixed perceptions of post-feminist women's roles spawned by advertising and 'old' mass media to further excite a consumerist culture.

Sex is still a political matter and it still has the power to subvert and confront. That's why governments waste so much time trying to control it. In Australia, the Rudd government's determination to filter sexual content from the web or to whip the art establishment into line with Rudd's own middle-class, middle-brow Christian moral standards is an example. And before you argue that his efforts are about protecting us all from child porn', remember that most child porn isn't even on the web. It's distributed anonymously via P2P file transfers (outside the control of Rudd's proposed filters) or stored in email accounts to which passwords are shared. Filtering the web about controlling our flow of information and experience not about protecting children.

Conservative moralists always target sex first. This is entirely political: after all, it appeals to the prurient interest of the mass, the unindividualised 'old' media audience. Depicting even 'straight' sexual acts between consenting adults is taboo while acknowledging (let alone practicing) 'perversions' – like fisting – is akin to a guerilla attack. Even with modern, fetishistic subcultures there are protocols, rules of misbehaviour, if you like: expressing oneself outside of them can be construed within them as an act of social or political revisionism. I'm not your proto-typical feminist dyke or nor am I a partner-swapping 'swinger' of suburban cliché: my relationship is 'flexible' but not 'open', other than to shared experiences. In other words, I set my own terms.

Mostly, I've used only myself as an object in my work because I've had ethical problems with objectifying someone else, especially another woman. Women are objectified in millions of ways – by men, by each other, and by themselves. In the sexual encounters I've had with two partners, the other woman has nearly always been an object; I'm respectful of her but unemotional about her. In some ways, the experience is akin to creating an artwork: physically and imaginatively intense but with a degree of detachment, of forensic observation. (That said, I still surrender myself completely to a really good fuck.)

My choices in life and work are all intricately connected. They're driven by forensic self-analysis and a desire to re-programme 'the norm. We tend to become what we construct – or allow others to construct – in terms of ideas, opinions, beliefs or ethics – around us. Our successes and failures are defined by ourselves and others within these conceptual structures but for that reason alone, we shouldn't ever let them become too fixed or permanent. They tend to limit our freedom or, worse, become places for us to hide, even from ourselves.

If the artist has just one role it is to test these structures, to stress them, and from time to time, to tear them down so new ones can take their place.

No More Fingers In The Dyke, Part Three

It took me a long time to get around to telling any of this to my father. I already knew how he'd react. Even the most understanding parents don't want to know details of their children's sex lives but I'd had enough of trying to hide my self. Besides, it was now all there in my new work – the large, easily accessible, billboard-like enamel on board paintings had given away to expressive and explicit watercolours on paper and stark, faux-porno' photographs.

There was a time when my father exerted a huge influence on me. From an early age, he'd taught me to do things usually reserved for boys and encouraged me to excel in all areas. I was a straight-A student, despite having attended a different school every few years. I excelled in school athletics. I rode horses and motorbikes and I shot rifles with extreme precision before I was eleven (I even earned a license for the guns). I skinned the animals I hunted and prepared their meat to eat. I cured the skins. He taught me what he knew and had others teach me what he didn't. He also indulged my pre-teen girlish whims – Barbie dolls, fanzines, hairspray, frilly dresses and exotic, impractical shoes. Other children wore uniforms to primary school. I wore a t-shirt (on which I often painted) and a denim mini-skirt.

He also let me read his collection of '50's comic books: in them, outrageously sexy villainesses and heroines with bodaciously curved and scantily clad bodies used their sexual wiles as weapons – Vampirella was a favorite. I became a fan of Wonderwoman and Catwoman.

In my teens – and even in my twenties – my father gave me newspaper clippings about the inequality of wages for women and books about strong and unusual women, including a biography of the eccentric poetess, Edith Sitwell. He encouraged me to "be a loose cannon" and reminded me that good girls don't get ahead, gutsy girls do.

I don't think my father realised that a lot of the women he brought to my attention had been persecuted, rejected or condemned for daring to choose to live and work outside the conventions of their time . When I finally got up enough courage to live the way I wanted, it became clear that what my father preferred was the comic book version of a strong woman: sexy, glamorous, even a little tough but still able to fit neatly within society's boundaries. No complications and no substance either – the sort of women I still paint in glossy enamel, using myself as a model.

Ironically, my father's efforts to turn me into some kind of socially acceptable superwoman backfired. He was unprepared for what I did with the information he gave me: the reality was that it involved risk, defiance, the breaking of taboos. When I expressed my own opinions or, worse, began to act on them, my father derided them and even tried sabotage them. When push came to shove, the last thing he wanted was a woman in control. He wanted a woman in her place, which, as far as I was concerned, was being an obedient, subservient daughter.

Unfortunately, for him, I'd become the woman he had raised me to be.

I spoke to my father for the first time in three years, just last year. I took him to view some of my new art but he didn't really want to know about the works that weren't the colourful, comic-book 'shock pop' that I painted when he was still an influence on my life.. He still wasn't interested in anything I was trying to express, especially about myself. I accepted this for a while but then he couldn't resist spearing me with critical barbs disguised as 'jokes' at my expense. Then it got worse: the disparaging or dismissive comments about nearly every aspect of how I'd chosen to live and work flowed stronger and became as corrosive as acid.

I cut off contact again.

No More Fingers In The Dyke, Part Two

I left Melbourne and severed ties with everyone I knew, including my family. I had already stopped painting. I had come as close as I dared to the edge of a high, dark precipice.

Then I met a man. He was strong, smart and steady and I fell in love with him harder than I thought was even possible. He loved me back and not because of who I was pretending to be but in spite of it. My family disapproved of him.

For the first time, I learned to trust someone enough to reveal everything about myself. To my surprise, nothing frightened him, not my manic work habits nor my moodiness nor my bouts of destructive self-loathing, certainly not my suppressed sexuality. He recognised early on that I needed to sate my curiosity about my own sexuality, to soothe the hot itch that had persisted long after I'd lost touch with M.

He gave me the space to experiment – in everything. When I asked him how he might feel if I wanted to have sex with a woman, it didn't faze him. He'd lived enough that little surprised or shocked him. I asked him if he'd be with me, to still my nerves and who knows, maybe to keep me safe.

Kelly was everything I was not; tiny, physically delicate, with long straight ebony hair that hung like a heavy curtain around her delicate Asian face, she smelled vaguely of cigarette smoke. I felt more shy with her than when with a man. Women see each others flaws and sometimes its competitive. Her body language betrayed that that she felt the same.

Maybe part of me, the part still in denial, was hoping I'd be repulsed by seeing her skinny, boyish body naked. It'd make it all much simpler, I thought – it'd mean that I was 'straight'. But repulsion was the last thing I felt; I was intoxicated by the smell of her skin, aroused by the way her small, firm breasts felt against mine. Her skin was soft and warm to touch. Both hesitant, both just as apprehensive about touching each other, our curiosity about how and where each other's body might respond was a subtle, urgent pulse.

I was self-conscious about knowing what to do. I felt it should be second nature, if only because we had the same anatomy. I'd had a deal of straight sex in the past but I'd only just begun to feel free enough to explore more of what made my own body feel really good. Again, my new man made me feel it was ok for me to do this – alone, with him and now, with this young, pretty woman. With him, I wanted to try it all: anal and multiple penetration, fisting, pissing, squirting. Before him I'd never enjoyed giving head and I hated any man trying to come on my face. I saw these as subjugating, anti-female political acts. With him, it was only about exploration, pleasure, intimacy, trust and love. Even with Kelly's hands and tongue on (and in) me, I wanted to gaze at him. He motioned or spoke softly to me and showed her and me how to make each other come.

She tasted different to the men I'd known. And I'd never imagined that the nerves of my fingertips could become so sensitive. I felt the heat and wetness within us both. Her pelvic muscle spasmed on my fingers deep within her.

Since then, the less I've hidden, suppressed or denied, the better I feel. Each time I delve a little deeper into some part of me I've repressed, I feel lighter, happier, freer. What lies beneath the surface of me is complicated. It isn't always easy to confront. But I realise, finally, that it's ok. A liberated sense of possibility (that can sometimes, admittedly, provoke episodes of reckless abandonment) has seeped into every aspect of my life and art. The exercising of my sexuality has been, unarguably, the most important influence on the evolution of my work, even the most recent work that's not apparently sexual. I'm driven to test my fears, to go beyond them, without any thought of being judged.

After my first time with Kelly, I made love with my man alone. Tears of relief spilled from my eyes as I came with him even harder than I had with Kelly. We continued to experiment together, with Kelly and others, and I became more confident and secure. In sex and in my art, I could be myself without rules or restraint – even without him, if this was what I wanted.

This unprecedented freedom only made me want to share every part of me with him and to have him near always as I uncovered more of who I was. My heart and mind belonged only to him, no matter how intense my phsyical response to another woman might be.

No More Fingers In The Dyke, Part One

During my brief stint at art school, I fell in love for the first time.

M. was a young Indian-Iranian woman, with wild hair and a stylised tattoo of a grumpy face on her upper arm. We developed a fast, intimate friendship, hyper-aware that we were openly expressing only the surface of our feelings for each other. Our relationship was complicated by my hesitance: I was scared by the idea of sex with another woman, even a woman with whom I was romantically involved. I wasn't even sure what such sex might entail. Nothing much happened between us.

Part of the problem was that I'd only just restored a relationship with my father. I'd been estranged from him for a number of years. Once, when I asked him what he'd think if I were gay – back then, I thought there was only gay or straight – he told me that he'd still love me but that he'd think I was stupid or, worse, that there was something wrong with me. It was as if he was talking about an aberration – I imagined a confused animal that didn't understand the natural, necessarily heterosexual requirements of mating.

The art I was making then – that I had always made – was messy, emotive, and unrestrained. I was experimenting with 'found' and natural materials and videoing myself (in one sequence, I stared unblinking at the camera lens for several minutes in some kind of emotional endurance test). Then somewhere in the middle of that year, my friendship with M. floundered. Impatient with my lack of boldness, she had relationships with men instead. I was heartbroken. I began to craft collages around fragments of women who looked sort of like me. Using ideas borrowed from advertising and 'pop' culture, the work gradually became slicker, more refined – and superficial.

At the end of that year, I created my first large enamel painting. Its glossy, seamless surface was intended to obscure any evidence of the personal, the emotional, the real. In other words, it hid any hint of who I really was.

M. and I parted. Like her, I began dating men. Most of them embodied the conventional ideals touted by women's magazines. They were young, good-looking, smart, and 'creative'. Most treated me well and tried to make me happy. But all I felt was empty.

I began to paint myself. These stylised self-portraits in enamel were supposed to look more perfect than I could be. Although originally I conceived them as a comment on how art and the artist are productised in a media-driven culture, they were actually acts of self-negation. I wanted to whitewash my real persona, to cover it with an impenetrable glossy surface. I guess I wanted to transform myself into something more 'acceptable' – devoid of deviancy, uncertainty, irrationality or imperfection. Over time, the paintings became a very weird sort of psycho-sexual cheesecake – sanitised 'pop' pin-up poses that sold out my sexuality along with most of my political beliefs. In many ways, they were conceptual works, not real paintings, bill-board-inspired pseudo-advertisements for a version of myself more palatable to everybody – including my father.

Ironically, the increased technical skills I acquired to create these hard, shiney, colourful surfaces paralleled the growth of new-found social skills. I became adept at presenting a perfect but entirely false public image of myself. And yet the more I tried to smother my persona beneath a smooth but brittle surface, the more I found myself wrung out by a relentless internal conflict . Eventually, in 2004, I created an entire series of enamel on board paintings of pairs of bikini-clad women fighting each other. Titled Self Vs. Self, the lesbian under-currents (depicted in a way that would have made Russ Meyer proud) weren't hard to miss.

I painted this series while I was still living at my father's house in Melbourne. He supported me financially but the shifting, ill-defined conditions of his support – along with the constant pressure of trying to please him – started to break me. My psyche began to disintegrate. So did my ability to control myself. No longer willing to hide my real self – I was desperate to give it free rein – my relationship with him deteriorated into rancour and resentment.

I decided to run away. It was the only way I could break free – and, at last, grow up.

The Market's Bidding

This week, John Keats of Menzies Art Brands let me know that three more enamel paintings of mine – a large work from my now hard-to-find Lake Eyre On Acid series and two smaller Sports Babes, Resized For Easy Consumption – have been submitted for Menzies' major auction of Australian art scheduled for 25th March, in Sydney.

I don't know whether to be pleased or to puke with anxiety. In the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s even the rich are shedding assets – starting with their art collections – and the news from major auction houses around the world, including Sotheby's and the venerable Christie's in London, where my work sold very well in December, has been less than encouraging. Only a tiny percentage of contemporary works by young (well, thirty-something) artists are finding buyers while well-known works by older 'stars', including Hirst, Emin, and Banksy, have been passed in without any bids.

I'm aware that many collectors and auctioneers regard my paintings as being sensibly priced. They rose steadily in value (around 1,000 per cent on what was paid for early works a decade ago) but didn't sky-rocket during the hyper-inflationary final years of the so-called 'art bubble'. Moreover, I was careful not to allow dealers or collectors to 'ramp' auction prices. Now my work represents, as one art consultant put it, "a combination of artistic credibility and solid potential for investment growth".

This doesn't ease my nerves. I feel the same way I did when I hung my first-ever show – edgy, unsure, wondering, "What if they don't like it?"

The Unbearable Rightness Of Being Myself

I've been very withdrawn this week. This has been reflected in fewer entries here. When I'm unhappy or troubled, I clam up. I throw myself into work. But sometimes trying to ignore a problem, especially an emotional one, is a bad idea.

I spoke to my father a few days ago. Our conversations are rarely about my art or my career but he knows that I've been under a lot of financial pressure lately. Technical mistakes in my studio, which I've written about here before, have been costly in every respect: I have had to spend a great deal on new materials and at the same time, forego new income while I repair or repaint some large works. I've always prided myself on the quality of finish – and durability – of my enamel works and its important to me that no second-rate work finds itself into collectors' hands. No matter what it costs.

My father had called to offer me money. I turned it down. We have fallen out over money before. I've learned that, with him, there are always strings attached.

Having refused his help, our conversation soon degenerated into a fight. He told me what a failure I am and that I should have handled my career the way he had told me to. The trouble is, what he had told me, five years ago, was that I should give up art. This was after a widely reviewed and much-publicised show, Self Vs. Self, at a well-regarded gallery failed to return what I'd invested in it. He considered that a disaster.

My father judges my success by the amount of money in my account and the number of my own paintings that I hold. Instead, I've invested in expanding my studio, increasing the number of my assistants and producing my own exhibitions and events. I prefer that my work is on the walls of collectors rather than in my store-room. My father doesn't understand that paintings don't just go up or down in value on their own. Their value is directly related to the amount of work I put in. At this stage of my career, paintings stashed in a store room do nothing for me whereas paintings in collections build awareness and appreciation of my work.

Besides, I'm an artist, not a banker or stockbroker. Communication of my ideas is important to me. My father would regard this argument as ridiculous.

In the middle of our increasingly bitter exchange, I mentioned the high price my work achieved at auction, at Christies in London, in December last year, despite a worsening economic climate. My father told me that meant nothing. All that mattered, he said, was how much money I had in my hand. The huge gulf between our values was suddenly so stark that I didn't know what to say anymore. I told him, simply, that I was proud of what I'd accomplished – especially as I'd accomplished much of it alone. His rage amplified and he hung up.

Sadly, more and more, my relationship with my father has deteriorated as I have become my own person and made decisions that reflect who I am rather than who he thinks I should be. My father used to ask me why I was so quiet and didn't speak my mind. It was because when I did say what I thought, he didn't like it.

My father doesn't really like the person I am and I don't like the person he wants me to be. He can't accept me as I am but I can't pretend to be someone else. What I can do is accept the way things are between us and ignore what he says to – or about – me.

Which prompts me to admit the only untruth I have ever told in this blog. After the opening of my PORNO exhibition, last year, I wrote that my father told me he was proud of me. He didn't. He had looked pleased and I had really wanted him to say he was proud. In fact, all he told me was that his favourite exhibition was my first, ten years ago.

Now I feel foolish for inventing what I'd wanted so badly to be true. It's time for me to accept the reality that it isn't and move on.