Gabrielle Brinsmead

Oil on Canvas

50 by 60 cms.

Sun creeps back into my tiny garden, and my heart. Potted tulips prepare to show themselves; pink and purple fuchsias are dancing. My son spends the day with his friend, my daughter sings in her room and shadows ever so gently caress, skate over my kitchen cupboards.

Oil on Canvas

40 by 50 centimeters

Having journeyed together for a time, I am now very aware, too aware, that we are traveling in different directions. Valete.

Oil on canvas

40 by 50 centimeters

Many years ago, a country priest baptized me with Holy Water. Joy, so strong that it felt like magic, raced through my body like electricity. A miracle occurred in me, at what felt like the cellular level. Even though I turned my back on it for many years, it was powerful and strong enough to pull me back from a dark and dangerous place.

Now I feel, bearing this in mind, that every time I pick up my pen, my paint brush, every time I step on my yoga mat, every time I say, I love you, I’m being baptized once again by the same Holy Ghost, that same fire.

Oil on canvas

40 by 50 cms

Right now, because he runs a business in Pakistan, my husband is here for one months and then gone.

The kids miss him, his laughter, his kindness, his utter silliness, as well as his readiness to drive them here there and everywhere.

I miss him even more. During the week, cooking and shopping by myself. When things are good, I miss not having someone to celebrate with. When things are tough, I miss his support, his wisdom, his refusal to want anything for me but the absolute best. Food doesn’t taste like much. I have trouble going to bed and sleeping, and when I wake up, I feel tired.

It seems like his month away will never end. But finally he returns, bringing the sun. And paints and brushes, palettes, palette knives and canvases, money, hope and plans for a bright future.

And who, who have been feeling so old and so terribly cold, slowly begin to thaw.

Oil on canvas

108 by 125 cms

Here it is at last, creeping and sliding along my back fence, poking through boisterous ivy leaves, dancing across spider webs, shivering on the glass, on the doormat, on the wall, on my shoulder, on the marble bench, and even on the cover of the Agath Christie novel that I read unbearably slowly.

I sigh with pleasure, confident that it will become warmer and more abundant as the winter’s cold deepens.

Oil on canvas

108 by 125 cms

I lived overseas for twelve years, and never stopped missing Australia. I started painting in Pakistan, and my first exhibition there was called Karachi via Sydney. I painted flowers that grew both in Pakistan and Australia. I painted the trees and grass and fresh air that I missed so badly. I tried to paint myself back here.

I have barely been back six months, in this country that seems both brand new, as well as like an old friend. On the weekends we travel outside of Melbourne: up into the Dandenongs, down to the Mornington Peninsula and along the Great Ocean Road, encountering the sort of majesty and beauty which I will never take for granted again.

I paint what I see and what I feel: all the colors in the country, all the elements, all the people who call Australia home. I paint her cheerfulness, her playfulness, her generosity. There is also pain and grief in what I paint, lingering scars of a sometimes violent past.

But ultimately, my entry is as big and as bright as possible, because that’s how I feel about my land and her psyche.

Oil on Canvas

40 by 51 cms

Where do the colors come from, and the shapes, and the brilliant music that flows with each stroke? It’s a mystery to many, although not to me.

Oil on canvas

40 by 51 cms

It is windy, rainy and very cold. The dirties are once again piling up, and my bedroom is a mess. My uncle died last night; after hearing the news I had a strange dream about burning the remains of my old horse. There is a leak in my garage and a splinter in my ring finger. And yet here I am, with time and energy to spare, ready to paint.

Oil on canvas

30 by 45 cms

I put out way too much paint, run out of time, and this is what I’m left with. It is a most accurate self-portrait: frantic, late, mind racing even faster than my hands, dripping with talent, able to turn anything into a masterpiece.

I see that

Oil on canvas

30 by 40 cms

To Saints Catherine and Luke

I dream of a bus in St. Ives,

Then my mother, along with my brother, who

Wish to take a walk.

Something, somewhere, is written in a book.

My daughter still coughs

But the song of the currawong reminds me

To lift up

My cup of hope,

To the Lord, so that He

May fill it.

Come Saint Catherine, be with

My eyes and my hands.

Come, Saint Luke,

Shine through my hands and my heart and

Let me Paint.

Oil on Canvas

40 by 48 inches

After five long weeks, my husband returns from Pakistan. He brings paints, palette knives, canvases and three custom-made canvases, offers to cook for the foreseeable future and collect the kids from school and their various activities. All this means that today, Monday, the significant and magnificent first day of the new week, I have space and time to paint.

I arrive in my studio (basement, actually) with a plan in mind. But light shining through the slats of the garage onto the canvas suggest a simpler (or perhaps more complicated) design.

Blending new paints with old, using new strokes on a canvas I recognize as belonging to a former life, I am infused with joy, energy and excitement. Then I get paint everywhere and spend an hour cleaning up, desperate not to walk paint through my (relatively) pristine townhouse.

Oil on canvas board

11.5 by 16 inches

My life has not been the way I planned for it to be. There have been plenty of disappointments and I have made more mistakes than I honestly care to count. And yet I am certain that I have lived, and continue to live, sheltered by invisible, mighty and supremely loving forces.

Oil on paper

30.5 by 30.5 cm

For we were as sheep gone astray. My daughter and her words of love. My son and his friends, one on either side. My, my paintings and the ones that are to come. My husband. All the world and a magpie, singing mysteriously, singing away madness. And the cuckoo singing too, as she did in my former and latter gardens. Thanks and knowledge and praise and perseverance.

Amen.

(and two angels that stood)

Oil on Canvas

50 by 50 inches

An old, unfinished canvas gets updated with a brand-new look. Over two days, I layer cadmium, scarlet, crimson, magenta and rose, then surround it with a contrast of lamp black, olive green and mid-yellow. I add splotches in the same green-black tones, beginning gently and slowly and rapidly increasing in force, until I am breathless and my legs ache. While working, I think about the way that I crave sameness and stability, and make patterns that mimic permanence. Each day I reach for the same food, and prefer to end each day in the same bed. When my patterns are disrupted, I am overwhelmed by a sense of dizzying freedom, even while strenuously resisting it.

Oil and enamel on canvas

48 by 72 inches

Gray city/ fluttering Pakistani flags/home for 12 years/ mosques/ crows/ low-hanging monsoon clouds/ Christian girls in the salon we quietly discuss church/ Bangra in the background/ flies, always flies/ the roar of hair-dryers/ the black and white gown, pinned at the front for modesty/ kites/

The city has changed, but not a lot: solar panels are the only visible improvement, still not as many as there should be/

My family and I have changed more dramatically. I have a son, a gift from Pakistan, now eleven. My two-year-old daughter is fourteen and a half. My dark-haired, black-eyed husband has gone gray and walks with a limp (from a recent surgery, hopefully not permanent),

Although I have wrinkles, guilt, more anxiety (the result of having made many, many mistakes) I’m happier, as a mother, as a wife, in my marriage, with myself.

Maybe this fuels my future tension. We are moving to another city in another country. Recently fifty, I am moving into a new decade, perhaps, probably, the second half of my life.

I won’t look better. But I can still be better, kinder, more gentle, spend more time dreaming listening, speaking up and out.

My daughter is anxious. She accuses me of not being there for her. I know I’m not, I’m barely here for me. I feel slow, dull. Pain in my chest. Half the time I’m in the future, in Melbourne, worrying about how I will do things there. Shopping? I don’t drive. Washing? Ironing? Haven’t done it for twelve years. Cooking? I’ve been trying to cook once a week with my son, so far everything has been a disaster. Which school will the kids go to? How will my husband make money? Will I ever paint again? Have exhibitions? How much will it cost to have my roots done there?

Endless questions, for which I don’t have answers as yet.

Meanwhile, we start with the long list of last times. Our last school assembly. We’ve been herded into this school for almost the last ten years. Our children are unrecognizable, and we are unbearably proud of them.

But the school hall and its chairs look too small for them now, as they do for so many of them. And I could do without this beating October heatwave, and the dust.

Oil on canvas

40 by 48 inches

In a dark place, I once again seem to have lost my way, paint-wise. Frantic, worried, sad, agitated. Green and pink, black and white, a dash of red. I get too excited, make too much mess and go through too much paper, cleaning it up.

At the end, I’m averagely happy with it. But is it complete, or does it need more? Am I done, complete? Definitely not. Do I need help and guidance? Yes. Can I rely on it to come, winging towards me through the air? Most certainly.