Donald Friend's Vidual Arts Diary - 2006/11/14 23:03
I have not lived in Canada for the last 35 years, but I thought of my Canadian heritage when I saw the work of this Australian artist. I just wanted Canadian visual artists to know about him--if they don't already: Donald Friend.
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NOT MUCH MAGIC YET
In two months it will be twenty-three years since I made my first diary or journal entry. This evening I came across a paper presented in 2001 in Canberra on the subject: "An Inventive Magic: Donald Friend and His Diaries." The comparisons and contrasts between my diary and his are the basis of this prose-poem. Friend has well-constructed phrases, sentences and paragraphs in his diaries. He writes for posterity. With his drawings and his fine writing there is a magic in his diaries, as Paul Hetherington writes in his paper. I, too, strive for all these qualities as my diaries wander through the years recording the evanescent experiences of life. But my recollectiveness is far from torrential and is far from producing a million-fibered integument. My entries are periodic, lack the passion for reliving the day, seem strangely opaque like some ancient Byzantium text, often do not record my retrospectivity at all leaving the page blank, are never illustrated, are only rarely exuberant and rarely consciously constructed in their form.
It is for these reasons that my diaries, unlike Donald Friend's, have yet to really be much use to posterity and still less use to me.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 15 November 2006.
Some who write diaries can
switch from left to right hand
or from writing to drawing.
Some are like a latter-day
Samuel Pepys; some have
a precocious self-confidence,
a sense of humour, but they
all give their diaries origins
in themselves & their experience.
Some find in friendship a deep
and safe, a unique quality; some
have writing that sits comfortably
with the greats, with expression
and form, with ideas of interest
that is universal and permanent
that one could call literature.
But literature is no tidy category
with clearly defined boundaries.
It is rather a sprawling quotient
that moves and is reshaped as it
travels in a world of the private
like a supposed person, a voice,
a someone, a many-facetted sound,
beguiling, complex and literary.
--Ron Price 15 November 2006
2006-1999-Writer/Poet: George Town Tasmania
2005-2002-Program Presenter, City Park Radio, Launceston
2004-1999-Tutor and/or President: George Town School for Seniors Inc
1999-1988 -Lecturer in General Studies and Human Services
West Australian Department of Training
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