How to Live Forever

This is a story about adversity - and I’m sorry, it was unintentional. I want to clarify that I did not set out thinking it would end well, and I still don’t really know if it has. I’m not going to give you a “hang in there, what doesn’t kill you etc.” It’s bad luck, for one thing. I know about this artist that spent all his time studying art, selling art, proclaiming that all he really did was paint and hope despite war and catastrophe. And then, one day, reclusion and insanity appeared to him like a magical orange grove in a nightmare, and he built a raft and lived the rest of his life alone in abandoned trucks and on remote islands.

Besides it being bad luck to mention that great art has forged a necessary alliance with hardship, it’s not nice, basically. I mean, art is not always such a valiant thing, and I think Berryman had no business saying, ‘I hope to nearly be crucified’. It didn’t work out for him. The real truth has nothing to do with luck or being nice; the truth is that I’d never known any brush with devastation to really work out in anyone’s favour. I, at least, had always yielded to it.

Google Translating Latin in a defunct wing at a psychiatric centre in West Sydney. It occurred to me that in a problematic but distant season of my life, it wasn’t an outrageous prospect that I would be in a room similar to this one. I am in a dark air-conditioned section of the heritage-listed ‘Ward 8’, examining a floor-to-ceiling mural that circumnavigates the entirety of the wall space in this room. The work, at first, feels fanatic. An excursion into religion, all its godheads, versions and failings. Egyptian sacrifice on one wall, then Greco-Roman nymphs, Islamic prophets, and Indigenous Lore. Light distends around the room. A cute disclaimer plaque tries to prepare you for it all at the front door. In the far right corner of this mural, a glinting coat of arms is painted. The symbol is dark green, with castles and swords, and an armoured elbow emerges from the metal cranium of a medieval helmet. It’s wielding a dagger. A golden ribbon above the crest reads in faded lettering, ‘Turris Fortis Mihi Deus’, God is my strong tower.

COAT OF ARMS

Ward 8

Ward 8

Ward 8

Ward 8

Arnold St Claire made this work while a resident at the ward. His already colourful police and psychiatric record had been gathering momentum over the years, and one day he had told a nurse about disturbing dreams he had to paint. Instead of berating him, she gave him a vacant room. That was 1972. Though it should be catastrophic to the artist, certain insights come with this affliction. They are hard to explain. People don’t like to talk about mental illness. They don’t like to think about it, except in the most ordinary of ways. They don’t like to examine the wealth and poverty it invests in us. The idea that a frequently lethal disease might convey certain advantages is a tricky conversation to have, and although I cannot find any statements of Arnold describing them, he counts them in his work. For starters, it is obvious that he felt things more keenly than most, insightfully conjuring up visions of spirits, spectral haloes and contorted shadows trapped in webs of paint and impasto. One might even say that he had special access to something beyond what is ordinarily known to an individual. The work of Arnold St. Claire comes to us in fragments, stitched together. They sweep up and down, surge in and out. Legends and night terrors of unresolved conquest, of systems failed. He did everything so consummately, each approach is entirely his own; he could infuse a cold, spiritual winter with yellow hope or turn a sweeping plain of light into a desperate sadness. His strong tower is a feeling, a colour, a body, a secret, a dream.

Below this coat of arms is another motto, this time in French, that reads, ‘Je Pense Plus’ - or - ‘I think more.’ A statement as short as it is apt, the few people I was able to track down who knew Arnold personally all drove the same point home: his scathing brilliance.

According to psychiatrist Dr Nancy Andreason, Fluency of thought, risk-taking, and improved creative association - are all behavioural symptoms of manic depressive disorders. It is ironic that if you heard these qualities on their own, they would sound like the description of an accomplished academic, not someone in the grips of cyclothermic neurosis. I had never before considered ‘genius’ through a diagnostic grid. Brilliance as something that could be medicated. This is what I was beginning to understand, in the churning green corner of the ward with the glistening blade emerging from an armoured scalp, Arnold’s painted lobotomy. I thought about what it means to live on close terms with darker forces, what it means to ‘Pense Plus’, to ‘think more’, and what fee it incurs. Poe said something relevant in Eleanora, when he made a case for his ‘madness’, asking “whether all that is profound, does not spring from the disease of thought.”

Arnold sculpting. This image marks the first time I had seen his face.

Life is partitioned by time. Following this chapter, Arnold was discharged and went on to produce so much more art, including a golden 30-foot-tall statue of a rearing horse (that has gone missing). He would then start drinking something called a ‘White Lady’, an imaginative mixture of methylated spirits and milk, burn a $1200 cash cheque and land himself in his final stint at a different psychiatric centre called Chelmsford. Here, he would ultimately pass away under distressing circumstances on the 24th of May ‘74, not two years after he completed the mural I was looking at. This sounds like a tragedy, and it can be if you look at it a certain way, and still, Arnold produced some of the most affecting art I will ever see. There have been thousands of artists who have lived with alcoholism and mental illness, I won’t even begin to list them, but only one of them painted this room.

Consider his achievements. Arnold studied art, very successfully drew from the wells of Surrealism and Abstraction, had finalised in both the Sulman and the Archibald, sold many works and frequently received commissions for large-scale murals. Still, his name is entirely unrecognisable. I am at odds with this. Some people like their art easy to consume, something recognisable and safe. They don’t allow it to be complicated, I guess they feel they have earned some relief, an escape. Arnold didn’t make art for these people. One generation after the other had finally missed the point. His career is one subsidised by neglect, infected by error and very almost extinguished by time. For some months, I could make nothing at all of this peculiar and seemingly ‘relevant’ tale. So vast was my confusion with the culture that overlooked this story; the kind of culture that simultaneously reveres my aforementioned hermit raft friend, Ian Fairweather, for his mercurial behaviour while redacting Arnold’s work from the script. But I see now that the redaction and the culture are precisely the two details that lend this story its great interest.

I rolled off the Hume highway, deranged by the heat. The Toyota I was driving had no aircon, and two of the windows didn’t roll down. At one point, I was pouring water down the back of my neck to feel it evaporate off my skin. The temperature topped 41 degrees in those intervening hours. In the evening the hills looked like suede. Then it was dark, and I was buying tins of Bundy colas in an air-conditioned pub. They weren’t for me, they were for the tradie sitting next to me called Ian. The particular bar we were drinking in had the faces of bush rangers peering at us from every wall, gunpowder firing, pinstriped convicts fleeing moustachioed policemen. Captain Moonlite, his ‘friend’ James Nesbitt, and the Kellys fly around us, a paranormal fresco. Open warfare. Very different from Nolan’s boys. Arnold painted this bar in the late sixties, it is just one of two obscenely large areas in the pub completed by him. He did it for free beer, room and board and refused to start painting until he was drunk.

‘I grew up around here. Been looking at these paintings since I was fifteen,’ remarks Ian.

One gets a sense of a kind of odd humour that a person less rural than Ian might find unhinged, or at least insensitive. I asked him if he knew anything unique about Arnold, and he looks at me,

‘Fucked if I know’.

I had to laugh. I wonder if he knows what the favoured motto of the Kelly clan is. It has something to do with a tower and God. It goes something like ‘Turris Fortis Mihi Deus’.

Gundagai is a town that has been entirely rebuilt twice. Nobody listened to the Wiradjuri ‘Mor-un-beed-ja’ flood warning, so you can imagine the white astonishment when in a current of water a mile wide and 30 feet deep obliged to drown everyone in their sleep one night in 1852. In a canoe fashioned from bark, A Wiradjuri man ‘Yarrie’ saved 49 people. The flood was ravenous, it quietly came to town to break the severest drought known to colonised Australia. Of the 78 houses in town, only 7 remained. If you bee-line it straight through the bush ranger room, you can see the flood. Arnold painted it.

The 'Flood Room'

The human body and water -the cardinal virtues of Australian painting- are worshipped here. Bodies contort and gurgle, eyes are wide with fatality. Pallid golems make lamenting and desperate reaches with tired limbs for exaltation and for each other, writhing, like a Goya. Fresh death is found in every detail, in all the strange grey, blue and white compressions of paint. If I am meant to consider both these works at the same time, it becomes comparative. The valour of the gang and their guns seems diminished by the efforts of a single man and his paddle. The flood room is important. For a while, it seemed unimaginable that anything could lie beyond these walls. That this was not, in fact, the end of the world. Then your eyes get caught on a flatscreen with TAB stats that is obscuring some surface area in the corner, and you realise that Yarrie is braving a cresting wave directly above postmix and beer taps, and you remember about the beer in front of you that is now flat and warm. In an institution dedicated to the ritual of staring down your schooner, everyone’s gaze tends mythically upwards, trying to make sense of the drama unfolding around us, the water enveloping us.

The Flood Mural, in the Criterion Hotel, Gundagai.

Flood room, Criterion, Gundagai

Flood room, Criterion, Gundagai

Flood room, Criterion, Gundagai

‘If you’d left it a little bit longer, I wouldn’t be here.’ Insinuating a joke about her age, Corrina Killeen sat across from me, our chairs angled towards each other; we spoke over a slanted mountain of newspaper clippings and photo albums. I recoiled at that statement, calling it divine timing to which she smiled. A great smile. A great voice. The truth is that I could not focus on these important things in front of me - her grin, the Tooheys (bitter), the articles, without compulsively averting my eyes toward the walls of her house. They are covered in art. Canvases lean on each other in hallways, murals peel from orange walls in her light-filled kitchen, and the bathroom door bears the delicately painted figures of Adam and Eve, mischievous, dancing and strategically-leafed. It seems to me now that I had gotten used to feeling almost there - like I had only just missed out. I had scraped the most obscure and tangential threads to chase down leads for months, only to come up dry. A dead-end. A no-comment. A lick of gossip. I had been existing in that grey area between ‘on time’ and ‘too late’, scouring Google street view and community Facebook noticeboards. This grey area is a triumphant chasm in which information gets lowered six feet, forgotten or generally evaporates into the ether. Against all natural conspiracies to stifle this piece of writing, and against the inertia of time, somehow, I had found the crucible. It had been in Campbelltown this whole time. Just as important as who was in the home was who wasn’t - Arnold and Claire. The two fixed stars of this story are gone, but their work was all around us, cladding the walls like petroglyphs in a subterranean chamber, testimonies of lives lived in art. And Corrina was here, Claire’s daughter.

It’s easy to write a sensationalist piece when you’re sitting on a good story. Way easier than you would think. It’s almost better to start with a simple piece of information and make it interesting. This is not a simple piece of information. The conversation that transpired between Corrina and I during our time spent together was full of theatre and interest. And yet, not much of it can empirically be used in writing. If you’ve been paying attention, you can guess at its skeleton. Arnold had some kind of manic depressive disorder, most likely bipolar. There’s a love story in there, a tragedy, a comedy. And at the end of our talk, there are still gaps. I still don’t know anything about Arnold’s life before around ‘64 ( he was 38 by then), or why he signed his work ‘Rip’, or whether anyone knew where that giant golden horse of his went. Again, the feeling of a near-miss. Like I grazed something good a few times but didn’t catch it. The prospect of what could have been: the detriment of imagination! The seductive trap of using it to gain insight into a timeline that isn’t even our own. How special. How ordinary - that we are given this gift and use it to doubt ourselves. It is the human cliche over which I trip. Let’s play.

What might have happened? What if Arnold wasn’t admitted in May ‘74? What if people were not cradled into institution and dysfunction by broken mental health systems? What if a man called Harry Bailey was never given his medical license? What if he never succeeded in committing a single atrocity at Chelmsford, let alone 51 fatal ones? Or, what if, Claire had never gotten a job at Forest Lawn Memorial Centre in the year ‘66? She might have never come across an enigmatic creature named Arnold making a ceramic mural of St. Francis in the garden. She might not have found him otherwise. She might not have changed her life the way she did. I definitely wouldn’t be sitting in her daughter’s living room, in a home that has multiple radios playing in different areas, all synced to the same channel. 

Corrina's Ceramics, Campbelltown 2023.

Corrina's Ceramics, Campbelltown 2023.

Leaving and being left - the impossibility of meeting - has been with us from the beginning. What each of us really has is not each other, but the past. All we are is a transcript of the possibilities that didn’t fail. Until they do. And as far as the gaps go- I don’t even really mind that I couldn’t get to the bottom of them all. I think it is right for artists to keep their secrets and a measure of their strangeness from the world. Arnold’s work is recorded, and some of his life is too now. And yet, he remains unbreached. Unscathed by fact, I will never know what his creative genius was like, or where it came from. However, the art does betray him. It does seem to be the product of an imagination that had somehow gained a new resilience, connected to all the kingdoms of nature, like it had lived through the tension, interaction and transition between changing mood states and had resolved itself anyway. Can madness and mental illness have benefits? If you’re in the business of making amazing art, maybe. If you’re in the business of living a good life, or living at all, maybe not.

Finally, I think it is inappropriate of me to speak of madness and not speak of its’ socially accepted format: Love. I remember being heartbroken and realising that the most fantastic way to keep someone around was not even to just have them in front of you. You could achieve this phenomenon by remembering them and their behaviours even when they were gone. In this way, you could keep them alive for as long as you could recall them, untethered from reality. This is casual delirium, a madness in its own right, and we are all guilty of it. I guess what I’m saying is, I’m trying to remember someone.

I’m trying to keep someone alive.

Arnold st. Claire

Arnold st. Claire

Claire st. Claire's work, Campbelltown 2023

Claire st. Claire, aka 'Pain in the Arts'

Missing horse monument.