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Her name is Heidi, her drawings are moody

5 March 2007, it could be 11.32am… Heidi stands with her thin arms across her chest looking down at a series of 20 30cmx30cm mostly-charcoal drawings lying in sequence on the sunroom’s lowered floor. Her sister and her sister’s friend stand nearby.

A dingo floats a sea of smudged charcoal black. A 1950s hotel room is drawn without a thing out of place. A young woman with a mid-50s curl-kick at the bottom of her hair stares out from the page with large, staring eyes. 

Heidi is waiting for their feedback. She is not impatient, nor precious. This is her day-job, and their feedback is important to her. “It feels as though I am looking at a Hitchcock film,” her sister’s friend says. 

Heidi seems happy with this response. She had hoped that the drawings would tell a very Australian story, like the ones she had imagined from all the hardback ‘70s kitsch Australiana picture-books that she has collected from opp shops over the years. 

The sisters’ cousin, the curator of the near-Canberra gallery where the work will be exhibited in a month or two, did not pick up the Hitchcock vibe when shown the series of drawings earlier that day. 

“I think she was hoping for paintings, and lots of colour,” Heidi says to no-one in particular, her very still pretty face looking down at her paint-splattered jeans and the old, cherry-red shoes. After a while she looks up and eagerly watches as her artist sister absorbs the work lying on the floor below. 

A few discarded drawings, those which the artist felt didn’t fit into this series’ story, sit on the outskirts of the sequence of drawings. Other rejects are piled in a cardboard box which may at one point contained fruit. The drawing of sunlit hair of the back of a girl’s head catches both visitors’ eyes. 

“I did those first,” Heidi says of the drawing of the girl’s sunlit hair and its nearby pair. “That is a friend of mine. I went in a different direction than, and I didn’t think those suited the mood or time at all.”

The sister’s friend says that the sunlit hair to be her favourite. Heidi’s delicate mouth forms a thinking smile. She invites both women into the small weatherboard shed located in the backyard behind the suburban grey, brick-clad house which she and her rock-band husband moved into a few weeks earlier.

A larger drawing of the girl’s sunlit hair sits on an easel by shed door. Tiny oil paintings on drink coasters line a long ledge. Like the series of 20 drawings, the coaster paintings are also dark and gently moody. A perfect female bottom sits in the middle of a series of six or eight. 

One of the drink coaster paintings is framed in a small, dark wooden box and sits alone on a shelf above a desk covered in sketches, paper and very retro fashion magazines. “These frames are very cheap to do,” Heidi says as she picks up the wooden box to hand to her sister’s friend. “A series of six will be exhibited soon.”

While the sister’s friend handles the small, boxed oil painting, the sisters discusses the costly hurdle of framing. The other soon-to-be-exhibited series of 20 charcoal drawings will require 20 frames. Heidi considers and discusses all of her options. Her best bet is to sell some existing work to be able to frame her latest work.

Through the lowered sunroom, up to a small and laminated kitchen, into the dining room which is used as yet another art studio and then arriving in the moody, retro-fit lounge-room, Heidi reaches down to a low coffee table to retrieve a magazine.

The sister’s friend does not know the well-known artist the sisters refer to. The magazine shows the artist at home in his lounge-room, in his studio and his favourite coffee shop with his much younger and pretty wife. The friend does not find the artist’s face familiar, but recognises the screenprint of a female nude.

Up until a few weeks ago Heidi and her husband lived around the corner from the well-known artist’s expansive studio just off one of the city’s most popular shopping strips. Heidi still works at the well-known artist’s studio and gallery.

“He went through and selected a whole lot of my sketches,” Heidi says, with obvious artist-relief on her face. “He might give me around $800 for them, which might be enough to pay for the 20 frames.”

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