Melting Moments

Mr Whippy Ice Cream vans were not big where Baker or Smith grew up. It was 10 miles to an ice cream at the corner store for Smith. Baker was lucky if she scored a ‘special’ ice cream treat on a summer break – a 60-cent deluxe, rather than
the run-of-the-mill 20-cent ice block. 

The Mr Whippy van, more often then not, would surface on  beach jaunts. Where he could be spotted picking off the familiar kid haunts with a Pavlovian jingle crackling from speakers left over from World War II.

I had always wondered about the Mickey and Donald images that formed part of the livery of some of the vans. The renderings seemed like an arbitrary appropriation and a poor approximation of the famous mouse and duck. Would Walt Disney really have signed-off the intellectual property rights to Mum and Pop ice cream vans in Sandringham and North Balwyn? Better to stay quiet on that one.

An old school friend recently held a birthday party for his nine-year-old boy, and secretly organised a Mr Whippy to arrive on location. At 4pm sharp, he would pull into the driveway for a private ice confectionery party. I wondered to whom this soft serve fantasy might belong. Was it what the middle-aged dad would have liked for his own birthday? Was he future-fitting a memory to his offspring? No, actually. Well, yes actually. All this, but here was someone in tune with exactly the sort of thing a group of young kids would love – he had tapped into ‘kid think’. The delight and excitement was the only proof needed. A new future-memory secured,  frozen in time. I’ll have a double scoop of that, but could you make it lactose-free please?

One Time

Below is a writing exercise that grew out of the 100 ideas exercise we did together. The tale plays on different applications of the word ‘time’, and there is a surprising hero to boot.

One time,
I went to a park.

Next time,
I took my ball.

This time,
People came to play.

And over time,
a crowd gathered.

’Game time!’
Two teams squared off.
‘Game on!’
A whistle blew.

Scissor kicks.
Short flicks.
Sporty tricks.
No goal.

Muddy park.
Scuff marks.
It’s nearly dark –
but still no goal

‘Time is running out. We need a goal, quick!’

A splash,
a flap,
thump and a quack, then …
My team’s golden boot struck luck
‘Goooaal’.

The whistle blew once more.

‘Full time!’
‘Time’s up!’
‘Home time!’
‘It’s bath time!
’

‘Same time, next time?’
‘YES’, everyone agreed.

And I will bring my ball again,
and two golden boots for duck.

Jeremy Miranda

Jeremy Miranda makes paintings. Beautifully crafted paintings. We spoke with him about the narratives that run through his work and life on the North Shore.

Hi Jeremy, please tell us a bit about yourself, your environment, and background in art?
I live on the North Shore of Massachusetts, which is about 20 minutes north of Boston. My fiancé and I were drawn to this area because of the amount of farms, salt marshes and wild life preserves in the area plus its proximity to the ocean.
I graduated with a BFA in painting from Massachusetts College of Art in 2004 and have been making my living as an artist and occasional teacher ever since.

What did you enjoy doing as a child? Did you make art, did you read?
I was always making art, but of course didn’t know it by that name. As a child I was driven by my imagination and was inventing worlds, characters and narratives. Every Christmas my grandparents would get me a big block of printing paper (the kind you can get at any office store), and I would burn through it in a few months with drawings of different characters, book ideas, landscapes, whatever interested me at the moment. Drawing didn’t become about a product until I was told
that I had a knack for it. It may sound a bit clinical but up until then, like any
child, I now realize that I drew to communicate my thoughts and to give them a tangible, visual equivalent.

Children’s books had an enormous influence on me (and still do). I read all
the Chris Van Allsburg books, Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder, My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. I had a big collection
of field guides on minerals, insects and plants. I even spent my first year at college as an illustrator with the intent of making children books, but soon gravitated towards painting.

Do you still have the guides you collected as a kid?
Regrettably, I don’t have a single one, and couldn’t even begin to guess where they ended up. Nowadays I collect things found while out on walks. Driftwood, bracket mushrooms rocks, really anything natural with a unique form. We also have a growing collection of cacti.

There is a strong visual arts culture in Massachusetts, why do you think that is?
I’m not exactly sure, I would imagine that it has a lot to do with the sheer number of colleges and universities that have art programs in addition to the only state funded art college in the country.

Iceberg Nocturne

The iceberg paintings are an ongoing theme for you. What attracts you to them as a subject?
The iceberg series really began as an experiment in variation. I wanted a template where I was free to modulate the different elements, to observe a range of differences. Constable did a similar experiment with clouds, and of course there are the Monet haystacks which these are a bit of a nod to I guess. I also like the narrative of the lonely iceberg floating in the cold sea. I think it’s interesting how quickly inanimate objects become living things in our minds.

You play with facets of the icebergs and give them a curious architectural twist in some work? How many iceberg paintings have you made now?
The faceted icebergs are meant to imitate precious stones and gems. I don’t know exactly how many icebergs I’ve painted, but I imagine its somewhere near 100, give or take. I’m actually building a new website that will display all the icebergs I’ve painted so far in a large grid.

Faceted Iceberg

You place nature inside of interiors, or sometimes there is a sneak peak to an amazing view, or displaced object, like a ladder that links the underwater world to land above in Ladder No. 2.
The ladder paintings are metaphors about transition, more specifically going from what is familiar to something “other”, or foreign. They are more or less, romantic ideas about searching in the world.

Your paintings appear part of a broader story, they are not simply a moment in time or a one-off scene.
Yes, you’re completely right each painting is a component in a broader yet loose narrative about nature, technology and searching. I’m also very interested in the craft and how the paintings come off as physical objects, this is hard to see on
the internet.

Alaska

Some of your work gives a feeling a remoteness. The icebergs obviously, but also a greenhouse floating far from land, or the interiors.
The trick with all of these paintings is that while I’m painting them I’m imagining being witness to these events; being the one person on the beach who sees the greenhouse floating, or the one person looking out seeing the lone iceberg floating, or the one person stumbling upon a greenhouse illuminated in the woods. In that way, they are not exactly about isolation so much as they are moments when we get to be alone, which is a very different thing in my mind, and the kind of discoveries one can make, much like in a dream.

Ladder No. 2

Do you get to the outdoors when not in your studio?
I try and get outdoors as much as possible but the studio can be very greedy.
It has demands that sometimes keep me indoors much longer than I’d like.

Is there a wild area, reserve or beach you would recommend a reader must visit when in your part of the world?
With out hesitation Plumb Island Bird Sanctuary on the north shore. It’s a barrier island surrounded by the ocean and salt marshes and has the distinction of being in the flight path of a multitude of migratory birds. We were lucky enough to see a snowy owl there last winter and that was very surreal.

Find Jeremy’s work here and here and here.

Inside of a Dog

Recently we grappled with a boy character in one of our rough stories. The boy was doing boy-like things with boy-like behaviour, but something was missing from the drafts. We changed the boy character into a dog of uncertain heritage, and voila! The story still worked, and now the character was free to move about in exciting, unexpected ways.

Just how far should the boy be morphed when visualised? Should he be rendered as a regular dog with a collar? A smart casual town dog? Should he have a hint of residual boyishness? After some scribbles, the character had a resolution, of sorts. He would be an upright dog in a pair of sparkling red shoes of course! Although, maybe, he is still actually, kind of a boy underneath that fur – on the inside, waiting to break out. That’s not my read, he looks dog enough to me. Besides, some cigar chomping joker once said that inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.