Peteskibreen's Blog

Art Love Spirituality Oneness

ALSO

I sat up last night and watched the funeral of Glen Hansard live on RTE You Tube. The midnight gong had me turning into a pumpkin so I went to bed having been moved and moved and moved…As they said often in that service…thankyou, thankyou, thankyou.

I never knew this man nor his music. Only of him.

But I felt I knew him and a hundred thousand others said the same.

A short poem in response:

When the good people die

When the good people die

The dead people sing

While more of the living

Live to live.

Let us live to live

Let our spirit

Soar

Let love be our wings

On our weight and more.

When darkness grips

The heart

We’ll laugh

And love by our will

Turns the fear to chaff.

Let us live to live

Let our spirits

Soar

Let love be our wings

On our weight and more.

Peter Breen

RIP Glen Hansard

It is worth a watch somewhere soon. It was a almost reprise of the Sean McGowan funeral where Hansard lifted the spirits and now silenced in death was celebrated with profound grief mixed with his legacy framed by the stunning poem written and read by his distraught wife, Maire Saarista.

The voice of popular music, any music it seems, and visual art, and public murals, maybe not graffiti, has been sucked into the money making machine and to bypass that monster is an invitation to be ground to pulp. But Glen Hansard was a machine with a huge soul and heart, driven by voice, talent, determination and spirit.

The making of art is for the self. It is for the self. Not for the market or the family or the exhibition or the gallerist or the next prize to enter but for the self. That is all. And that is in the world of male ego a massive machine to push back from.

I am in my studio making work for an exhibition where the great bloke who invited me to join another 5 artists pitch was: “Make small work that’s what Brisbane people are buying.” I get it and it forces me to make but the hope in the clear blue sky of hope is that I will sell something. Something. Something that must be good for the eye of the other! That is how it goes.

An old mate from Jugglers days put up a post today that sums this up beautifully. Benny came to Jugglers struggling with his street smarts and addictions but as is often the case, as wtih Glen Hansard, he split the liminal space open:

“This is something

“On my travels today saw an old boy with mnd in a wheelchair with a Bluetooth speaker singing frank Sinatra songs,I said fuck the train and sat down and took a few songs in..didnt need a photo”

Ben Ben “

As Glen Hansard said: Make art! Make art! Make art!!

Can art change the world? Maybe every now and again but it can and does and will change people, the artist, the musician, the comedian, the actor, the composer.

Make art! Make art! Make art!

Peter Breen

ART . Love . Spirituality . Oneness . ALSO

Mark my marks.

Young and old artists will form collectives and make work in hiddenness and joy on infrastructure and rubbish, on good paper and linen on tree stumps and train skins.

Poets with ink and pen reading in the dead of night.

Novels whispered from manuscripts found behind shed doors.

Comedian improv side splitters outside under trees or on tin shed lounges.

Musicians on trains paying interruption fines.

Candlelit Macbeth in desert caves.

Didge echoes in rain forest seclusion.

The dark deep spiritual intelligence of artists

births endless evolutionary miracles.

Artists are gods

untouched by an eternally limited golden calf intelligence.

Peter Breen

“3 Wise Men” Acrylic, guache on canvas. 2007. Artist: Peter Breen

Goomburra Landscape

Limited Edition Stone Lithograph on BFK Rives Paper. Framed $150 + Postage

This print was made during a two week long lithograph workshop at Queensland College of Art Griffith University Campus at South Bank [Brisbane] taught by master printer, Chris Hagen of Greyhand Press.

It was a steep learning curve for me, to say the least as I had only done my own lino cut relief prints at home and dry-point print making at Brisbane Institiute of Art during COVID. As a late comer to print making it gave me a taste for diverse options to chase up and master.

Print making means among many other things that a drawing can be made multiple times at the highest level of production and in fact it was part of the whole idea of the developement of print making – that is, to make art and mark making affordable.

This work is a simple drawing of the outline of landscape at Echo Valley Farm in the Goomburra Valley [Githabul Country]where my son and his wife work at regenerative agriculture.

Peter Breen

Deitrich Bonhoeffer and Donald Trump

Last night I sat down after everyone was in bed and nonchantly started reading a new print edition copy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous pre World War 2 book when his execution by the Nazis made him “a saint” – “The Cost of Discipleship.” It was a go to book in the 1970’s for the radical disciplship movement in my little church world where “cheap grace” was almost a mortal sin and the call Bonhoeffer made was “a call to follow Chist was a call to come and die.” I bought my book after the 1970’s in a second hand book shop and it was printed by SCM, a leftist Christian student publishing company. I filled it with underlining, anotations and notes. A friend brought her boy friend around one night for dinner and I loaned him the book – for some reason he was interested. I shouldn’t have let it go as he confessed to losing it! There’s a lesson in that somewhere but maybe it was some kind of wake up. He bought me a replacement, one printed in 2023 by a conservative publishing mob in the USA , Touchstone Press. I decdied to read the new forward by a guy I had never heard of, Eric Metaxas. I had no idea who he was. But after the proverbial Wikipedia search I found that he is indeed a very conservative writer and radio host and a passionate supporter of the US President, Donald Trump!

By a coincidence a Facebook friend posted this today on his page and so our converstaion evolved as per below.

“Metaxas is a deeply unpleasant individual. I would definitely skip the forward and go straight to the text. Notably, the title of the book actually translates as simply: “Discipleship,” though I am unaware of who it was who decided that title was insufficient. Furthermore, Metaxas has, particularly in more recent times, completely distorted Bonhoeffer’s theology and message for the world.”

Thanks for this update and some clarification. The actual application of this is a daily stuggle. I am still recovering from this discovery and my on line search has found that Touchstone Press is a conservative press [ across protestant, catholic and orthodox ] and was once part of Simon and Schuster. My old copy of this book was lost by someone I loaned it to sadly as it was highlighted and had my anotations in it and was the copy printed by SCM.

Ah, that is a shame…His “Letters from Prison” – a collection of letters written to people while imprisoned – probably better represents his theology, at least as it developed towards the end if his life. “

The struggle to be as Bonhoeffer calls is a struggle. The reminder of the path to tread “to come and die” is a bit dark in the light of, say, Oscar Romero or Bobby Sands. Or even Jesus! There are a host of folks across religious strains and divides who say, the death of the self/selves is the path to life and liberation. That the Puritans didn’t know how best to know how to know if they were Christians except convertive piety, devotions and church attendance is indicative. And influential. And leads to such people as Metaxas writing fowards in books about being one who throws out “cheap grace” while espousing the wonder of the current president of the USA.

But who am I, to come and die,

to live a life for others?

Who am I to attempt to be

a signpost for the living?

The way of living

in the land of plenty

is poverty and death.

But then it seems

as if it is

impossible to find the door.

The only snare are weights and measures,

countless hoards that block the way.

The way is slim, slim and slimmer still

but not in monastries and stripes.

The way is solidarity,

incarnation

inconsequential endless love

and nothing more.

If only it was possible to be

while

blinded by the light

and a dark moon’s shadow.

Peter Breen

Recent work for inclusion in DOA Exhibition on June 13, 2026 at BLOWEHAIR & ART SPACE, Hamilton, Brisbane.

This work was birthed out of time spent with one of my grandchildren in the salt water swamp marshes close to where he had been living on Moreton Bay.

The area was along the road approach to his house. This kind of area, grasses and low marsh trees affected by tidal surges has always had romantic appeal for me. When the tide is high the grasses are in pools, some on higher islands of sandy soil and rocks. The grass is not spikey but has a similar architectural appearance to mondo grass. It is a tubular clumply grass with a striated varigated appearance. The area was in patches stretching along a salt water creek which led out to the bay and long tidal changes.

Some of my drawings and prints, maybe all of them, arrive as conceptual images in my imagination from moments in my living and being. A suggestion, music, another artist’s work or a movie or in this instance, the beauty and impact of the area not to mention the demands of my grandson as we plodded along looking for lizards and frogs.

Here is the first impression of the image in my mind and a couple of quick smart phone images [since deleted] – graphite on paper. I followed this up with the first lino cuts and artist proof prints on Japanese Paper from Daiso – the best and most affordable A4 print paper I have found and that can be used with or without an etching press.

Artist Proof Print using Gamblin black water based ink on Japanese Paper.

I used a blue oil based Japanese Sakura Ink on Japanese Daiso paper for the final run after I had made new marks on the lino. As I don’t own an etching press I made all of the print runs easily with my hand and baren.

There will be two of the blue ink prints framed and available from June 13 at BLOWEHAIR & ART GALLERY. I’d love to see you there. Further promottional information is available on my socials – Instagram in particular.

Peter Breen [ Peteski]

Self Love and Compassion

Collage, gauche on paper, A4. Artist: Peter Breen. Part of the series “I want to tell you” – Body and Soul Berlin Artist Magazine #45, 2025. Prints available.

Group Exhibition DOA at BLOW HAIR & GALLERY, Hamilton North Shore, Brisbane, June 13, 2026

If you are intereted in any of these works and cannot attend the exhibtion in Brisbane, please email me at pbreen@bigpond.net.au

Swamp Grasses Moreton Bay Lino Cut Relief Print on Japanese Paper Ed 5 2025

Framed $95 x 2

Goomburra Landfall Lithograph on Hahnamule Paper 2022

Framed $95 x 2

All the bees are [not] dying Ink, graphite, gauche on water colour paper [ 2023]

Framed $95 x 2

Untitled Water colour, gauche, red pencil, graphite on paper [2026]

Framed $95

Untitled Water Colour, guache, red pencil, graphite on paper [2025]

Framed $95

City Lights a Mile High Chacoal on Arches Paper 84 x 60 cm ref Melbourne based musician composer Stuart Greenbaum’s composition of the same name. [2024]

Framed $495

Out of the Office Charcoal, guache, collage on Arches paper [2024]

Framed $375

Dawn Chorus

First – this is a sunset photo I took last evening as I ventured out on my daily walk and so it is not a sunrise. The mysterious folding back of used rain clouds which by this morning had vacuumed the sky clean was worthy of a photo. At around 6am this morning in Brisbane the sky was crystal clear as the orange opening transitions let the sun evenentually make its extroverted presence felt on a crisp autumn morning. Maybe the humidity has gone for a bit.

As I write, the radio and more news is off and I am listening to William Basinski’s September 23rd recorded initially in September 1982. It is just the right pace and sense for this writing about what always is a slow paced event.

I was up at 5am today, not my usual time but after watching Patrick Shen’s “The Dawn Chorus” on Vimeo last night – a reasonably regular habit of mine – I decided to follow suit and just stand in the kitchen and then sit on the back deck and immerse myself in the unfolding Brisbane dawn chorus. No smart phone or photos. just being and watching or as my regen farmer son suggests: I immersed myself in the experience of sunrise as a patient, attentive observer.

Here’s my edited quickly written journal entry after “the sun” had arrived and lit up the room:

This morning the trains began as usual around 4.00 or 4.30. I can’t read my luminous watch face well without light or glasses. I couldn’t get back to sleep so at 5 I got out of bed determined to sit and wait for the dawn chorus – no phone, no lights but with a cup of Irish breakfast tea. I stood in the kitchen and watched. The dark was still. There was a breeze in the trees that slowed and stopped and all is still now at 6.30. Shapes of trees and the light in the street across from us. Always there. As orange began to leak into the sky an orange matching hi-vis shirt and internal light both made their silent appearance across the road. Plumber neighbour Shane having breakfast. He roared off in his ute right on 6 as usual.

The sun is now pouring into the kitchen through the trees, unapologetically. The small lights have gone. The small sounds are big sounds as the dawn chorus finds her voice. The first dog just as the orange glint flickers. Road sound cars picked up volume from around 6 when Shane left. [ Brisbane is the earliest rising city in the world I am told].

A fitness runner, probably in his mid 30’s, jogged by in the half light with no possiblity of tripping, falling or being hit by a car or bike. At least less possible than for me after the close call with a flying push bike in the fading day on my walk near the park last night. Half a metre – I just saw him, he just realised I was about to turn off the footpath on to the walk bridge. Why bike riders are so fast on the footpath is a puzzle. I had a light-coloured jacket on – maybe that helped a bit.

The golden orange fountain keeps creeping up behind the trees in the narrow north eastern horizon. The sun is pouring in now. Birds are well and truely singing. The first to fly by was a fruit bat/flying fox about an hour ago. Then as light picked up speed I saw the emigration from the gums and pines. An ibis circled and left for a better view and vantage point. One or two crows cawed and had a committee meeting across the space then decided to wind the meeting back a bit. A murder of crows reminded me of committee meetings that felt murderous! Plane lights in the distance over Brisbane Airport. One in the grey monument coloured sky then a few more around 6. A loud helicopter low over the house heading south east – a hospital emergency transfer or some other.

The stillnes of moments as light arrives with warm promises of the end of weeks of rain.

It is still, still.

Dawn has arrived and we are still here. Slower but still here. The world in Brisbane is rushing awake and racing on to get ahead while tomorrow the sun will rise again as the end of a humid hot autumn leads into at least a few days of winter cool. Climate change only affects the world below the stratosphere while the sun laughs and warms with light and beauty, casting dancing shadows, rocking crows’ nests and starting the chlorophyll photosynthesis cycles in leaves, spinach and grass trees. Gratefully blessed.

Peter Breen

ALSO is an acronym from a weird dream I had and now use as a loose fitting theme for my blog posts.

Exhibition Group Show – Hamilton Foreshore [Brisbane] Opening night June 13

Show title: DOA

On June 13 I will be joining a group of artists most of whom have exhibited at and certainly visited Jugglers in the time we were in the Valley and this will be a great opportunity to rekindle old connections and friendships.

The show will be in a hair dresser’s salon where the owner is very passionate about art as well as hair.

BLOWHAIR/ARTSPACE – ART GALLERY SPACE, HAIR N BEAUTY EXPERTS.

This ticks the boxes I have around my interest in shared public and private spaces for art and business/home.

The following works of mine – and quite few more that I will post up next week – will be part of this show.

All works are for sale.

If you are reading this in Brisbane I’d love to see you there.

If you want to buy before the show let me know.

#1 Out of the office Charcoal, pencil, gauche, collage on Arches paper, A1, Framed: $460

#2 City lights, a mile up Charcoal on Arches paper, A1, Framed : $950

#3 All the bees are [not] dying Ink, gauche on watercolour paper, A4, framed: $225

Peter Breen

pbreen22@outlook.com

A.LS.O.

How well is the world doing? Not too good.

These are the books we read in the 70’s and 80’s.

Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.

Living in a World Falling Apart.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

I am mostly out of touch with what is current now in the religious world but I have the distinct sense that we can make some survival community sense of this through Pete Seeger’s “Turn Turn Turn” sentiment while depressingly aware that all of these authors would just have to change the dates and all would be the same. The systems, the power and control has not changed for a better world.

Except – there are commuity love lights that flicker on hills all over the world and maybe that is all that we can hope for.

Peter Breen

ART

Ink Jet pigment ink on found paper, gauche, charcoal, ink on paper, pencil on paper

These drawings of mine – except the pencil drawing of the three friends – are part of a series of 25 for an artists magazine in Denmark around a Friends theme. The invitation came from the founder of the Denmark based magazine who saw my drawings in last year’s Body and Soul Berlin Artist Magazine #45 where the theme there was I want to tell you.

Charcoal, gauche, found collage on paper

This opportunity in 2025 came initially via Instagram from a Kyiv/Ukraine artist/designer based in Berlin who is an outstanding internationally known printmaker – lino cut relief print is her expertise area – and who is part of the design team for the Berlin magazine. I have a private Instagram account that I set up during COVID – on_being_isolated and so if nothing else, Instagram has become a portal for my art practice. The June 30 deadline and theme have hints of term papers while keeping me focussed and organised. One of the most important practices for an artist is to keep making marks and these invitations have been a prescription for this for me.

Friendship/friends have featured as a central life dynamic for me. I still chat and visit with a friend that I met in kindergarten in Melbourne over 70 years ago! My wife and children have become best and closest friends while my time in organised religious groups, Medical Imaging and Jugglers/The Stairwell Project have given me a range of remarkable friendships.

When I first read the C S Lewis quote I decided to include it in the series as a provocation while holding that friendship, art and philosophy are life lines for me. I would be “lost” without them. The ink stick figure gauche pieces find their origins in loneliness and that the spaces between friendship and “the other” are real. Not as an agenda for bridging necessarily but as a reality of modern life where individualism and isolation have serious impacts on community and an individual’s experience of living and being.

The “Friends Zone” is a drawing from the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker where a “stalker” leads two friends to a zone where all desires can be realised. The drawing taken from a film still evoked for me experiences I have had of complete stuckness in a friendship where the next step, word, piece of advice or decision were nowhere to be found.

Friendship can be “strong as death” – it is certainly a version of love – and it can be stuck. It can be the most wonderful shared experience over years with never a moment of strong argument or a short lived geographical or institutional experience.

Friends and friendship is an interesting theme to represent with marks.

Peter Breen

LOVE

“Real love, the only kind genuinely worthy of the name, is a kind of dialectical overcoming. It only becomes possible at the point where one comes to understand the full reality of one’s beloved, which necessarily, means encountering even those qualities one finds infuriating, loathsome, or detestable.

For surely, if you know enough about anyone, you will find something in them that you hate. But it’s only when one encounters that, and decides nonetheless to love them anyway, that we can talk of love as an active, redemptive, and powerful force.

Real love can only be love if it conquerors hatred, but not by annihilating but by containing and transcending it, and not just once, but forever.”

– David Graeber

I have pinned this at the top of my Facebook Page to remind me of Graeber’s words and the deeper meaning – to be a love activist. In my living and being. It is easy to preach if one is a teller, a preacher, a teacher – or a con artist. But to choose first the battle of “dialectical overcoming” is not for the faint hearted or as good spoken word.

In C.S.Lewis’s “The Four Loves” he suggests that when eros, philia or storge fail – and they will – that agape will need to be the main love word for a life in a relationship/marriage. And as a mentor of mine said to me once “I can only really love one person well Peter and that is my wife.” I am not sure he was right but in Graeber’s words, I get it. Agape is, I sugggest, the kind of love that best describes Graeger’s battle. It’s then that “…we can talk of love as an active, redemptive, and powerful force.”

There’s a bucket load to talk about that this small paragraph from David Graeber unlocks and it is a worthy few words to chew over.

Peter Breen

David Graeber

davidgraeber.institute

Peter Breen

This Friday’s art post

Experiments with water colour, Japanese ink and gauche with brush on A4 paper.

The trigger for these is the garden and botanical specimens around our yard and particularly my studio.

All these works are available to purchase. $25 each unframed + Post.

Feeling Disconnected – and how to Reconnect

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ART

I am planning to to post various mark making ART projects here each Friday afternoon while continuing to post essays on middayWednesday.

I am keen to share these works and invite comments and even collector interest.

Graphite, ink and gauche on 2016 Diary ( NFS)

Peter Breen

ALSO – Art.Love.Spirituality.Oneness

“Grief explains everything” a friend in another life once suggested to me. She was working on a Masters in Counselling degree when her supervisor made the comment that has stayed with me for the last 34 years. That year [1992] is etched in my mind. It was the year a young woman died in a car crash just 10 days out from her wedding to my wife’s nephew. I was her minister/pastor at the time, due to curate the wedding and instead, I had a massive funeral to curate and a cataclysmic amount of grief to attempt to make sense of. Which I never did – for the family, for the church or for myself. Of course there was the high handed know all Christians in the parish who proclaimed the necessity of trauma as a means of refnining faith! God have mercy! No doubt learning and maturation develop out of the unexpected, bad decisions and trauma but it makes no sense to sermonise in the raw moments of a shocking loss!

The “grief explains everything” suggestion is making some sense for my lived experience and observing family and friends. I am caught up with family of couse and in attempting to make sense of losses in family groups and individuals my emotions and judegements are sometimes too present for me to make sense of their losses, emotions and fears. Different family systems create emotional sparks when they are in decision making mode as values are challenged and loss is anticipated and actual.

The times we are in are full of loss and grief as we carry our smart phones and with one click can see children blown to pieces in Palestine or The West Bank or Nigeria. We can read of the sudden or gradual loss of old well worn respect values in society, the elevation of racism as a value to hold as necessary for white privelege to prosper. And on it goes. Silence and social media abstinence can reduce the overwhelming impact of the “tons and tons” of desensitising exposure. Any loss can bring a grief emotion – a child losing her worn out favourite toy, a favourite book being water damaged or the sudden death of a loved one.

I have attempted to consider love as an intention and regular re-focus in the face of losses I have been experiencing. C S Lewis wrote The Four Loves a “simply profound and profoundly simple” essay on understanding four Greek words for love and activating them as a way of living in community and in a community – however broad and encompassing those communities are.

I keep coming back to sidelining judgement of people – that is, individuals – while attempting to value them as humans of value, critiquing systems without apology and attempting to listen and listen again to understand individuals and their actions. I see this for me partly as what love is. And it is not an emotion as much as value that I have the choice to make my own time and time again.

I’m seeing more and more that grief and loss make up a large slice of some behaviours and activity in my world. Even the current ridiculous interest in One Nation as a viable option to vote for in Australian politics is, I suggest, an inablity to let the old days of simplistic, racist, white superemecy go to where that set of values needs to go.

Loss and love are inextricably locked in together or can be. We can live in the darkness of an unassessed grief or we can, while owning the emotion of our loss for as long as is necesary for healing and change to beging to flourish, attempt at some point and with communication if necessary with other parties and being kind to ourselves, to chose love as a focus on listening, valuing and expanding our understanding of the other.

Peter Breen

SPIRITUALITY

Jesus and Paul

Thanks Glen*.

I am not a scholar nor the son of one and I’m tempted to say I am not far from being biblically illiterate. I have recently read Luke as part of my tentative Lenten focus and it is a rare thing to read the Scriptures these days. In the version I used I found the headings and chapters a nuisance while attempting to read as if for the first time. Almost impossible. However I found the story around the lawyer and Samaritan instructive where the teacher said to the lawyer he would live if he loved God and neighbour. Pre- Pauline. There is the rub for me as the kingdom was never so much introduced by Jesus as much as lived and promoted with prophetic intensity and no failed let up and had nothing to do with a fire insurance “I am saved now”. The kingdom was and always shall be. Last night I read a chapter by Bishop Spong on the resurrection in “Jesus for the non religious.” Not a bad attempt for this evolving mystic [me] while wondering how “reliable” is his source material and deductions on the non-bodily resurrection. And in the past couple of years after recommendations by friends and Wesleyans I have waded through David Bentley Taylor’s scholarly “That all shall be saved” and have been convinced by his arguments. Just joining in this conversation. It is bloody hard to be a “good Samaritan” and to live day in day out as if in a “kingdom” and not join a sect. I consider Paul to be a hard line domineering teaching Pharisee the likes of who both enthrall me and send me running into the nearest cave. If there is love and “kingdom” in Pauline writing then is that not a sign of some kind? Peter Breen.

Glen O’Brien.

*There’s a lot of discourse around at the moment distinguishing between the ‘Jesus that Paul invented’ and ‘the real Jesus’. The claim is made that the original radically revolutionary teaching of Jesus was replaced by an imperial religion created by Paul who turned Jesus from a simple Galilean peasant preacher into a cosmic God-Man figure easily manipulated for the purposes of empire. This seems to me a rather too simplistic dualism. How would we get back to some supposed ‘real Jesus’ rather than the ‘invented’ one of Paul? After all, the Gospel writers were doing the same thing that Paul was doing, creatively constructing narratives about Jesus that depicted him as a Divine Saviour figure (and not only John, but the Synoptics as well). Some of the genuine letters of Paul are earlier than some of the Gospels. So where is the ‘true Jesus’ to be found exactly? Maybe those who claim Paul invented ‘another Jesus’ have really just invented one of their own, but from what source material? 

The Pauline correspondence is a remarkably valuable gift that tells us so much about early Christianity (just as other New Testament writings do, as well as numerous noncanonical writings). Sure, Pauline Christianity is only one Christianity among many early Christianities (and there are historical reasons for the relative hegemony it has enjoyed) but it seems to me overly simplistic to construct a strict binary between Paul’s Jesus and ‘the real Jesus’. I’m more of an historian than a biblical scholar (even though I completed a Master of Arts in Biblical Studies in another life), but thankfully I count many biblical scholars among my Facebook friends (to whom I willingly defer on such questions) some of whom might like to weigh in on this. 

*Note: This post is an extract from quite a few folks in conversation with Rev Dr Glen O’Brien on FB.

Both drawings by Peter Breen as part of 2025 Body and Soul Berlin Artist Magazine #45. Collage, charcoal, graphite, guache.

A selection of drawings including these from the Berlin Magazine #45 are available as prints on 308gsm Hahnamule Photo Rag Paper. A4 $60 each plus postage.

5C’s of Wellbeing

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Collage, ink, red pencil, gauche on found paper, glue on A4 artist paper Artist: Peter Breen 1 / 25 original works for 2025 Body and Soul Berlin Artist Magazine. #45 Theme: “I want to tell you” Available as digital print on 305 gsm Hahanamule Paper.

Art.LOVE.Spirit.Oneness A.L.S.O.

“Invitation holds a silent power. Our outreach workers go to the streets encouraging people to seek us out, their message being that everyone is welcome, and our mission will always challenge us to mean it. 

Contrast this with just last week, when around the corner from Wayside’s Bondi centre, a new reality show began filming with a sign that actively discouraged anyone who wasn’t beautiful enough from appearing in the background. Beauty is so shallowly defined and celebrated, isn’t it? Yet beneath the surface of this community is a depth of beauty that cannot be mistaken. 

Like the morning of December 15th, when our volunteers all showed up — rostered and unrostered alike — with broken hearts but open hands, ready to serve. Like the team who, for over a decade, have walked gently with someone who always seems to fall into the same holes, and who have never surrendered their care or their hope for her. Like the young woman who, during the heavy rain, shared her shelter with someone new to the streets as they huddled together under one of the local caves at the beach. Would any of these be ‘beautiful enough’ to make it on screen? Perhaps not to the untrained eye. But ask the owner of the chihuahua who limps in most days here, in whose clouded eyes and snaggled tooth, is seen only the look of love and a contented smile.  

Perhaps that is the truest thing we know — that beauty does not announce itself. It does not hold a sign or seek a camera. It turns up limping, or soaking wet, or with a broken heart and open hands, and only those with eyes trained by love will ever recognise it for what it is. 

Thank you for being part of the Inner Circle,

Jon

Rev. Jon Owen
CEO & Pastor
Wayside Chapel”

John Owen’s regular letters outlining his and the Wayside Chapel’s advocacy, solidarity and 60 years of this work in Sydney are very worth subscribing to. With the occassional donation. Maeve and I visited there in 2023.

http://www.waysidechapel.org.au

“Love” Gauche, collage on paper. Artist: Peter Breen

With over 600 pages of collected memories, reflections and images the book of Jugglers stories has begun to feel closer to publication. I have worked to keep the story as “our stories” as much as it not being a “how to grow an art collective for dummies” kind of thing. The list of donors that gave us $4000 + to bring these stories to print will be honoured! [ Their names are in the book.] I have had meetings with people far more skilled at this kind of thing than me along the way – Dr Marissa Lindquist, Jack Fitzwalter and the Queensland Writers Centre and more. The first draft is with the Jugglers’ board. Friends and family are in on it as it was a 3 x Breen plus one Lock initiative with foundations and personalities gathered up under the weight of this art collective’s momentum while stories to print have been drawn from the memories of myriad mark makers.

These two images are iconic – our logo and a gallery plinth awash with bits of layered spray paint. What’s in a name, what’s in a strange name, what’s in a mark made?

What is it like to take a risk as we did and find that our most recognisable descriptors are a grumpy juggler and paint bits on a plinth? What is it like? In my experience – and not in the experience of the more risk averse – it was a multilayered escape, rush and possibility. Messes have always been at beginnings for me. And to make sense has at times been like filling out the appoinment diary after the fact in case of an audit. The presssure to appear organised, visionary and strategic is a construct that really has the juggler laughing. Poetry is like that. The spaces between are the doorways to phrases while business plans are necessary to make sure bills are paid to every creditor. Boring but necessary. The world we live in seems to see water tight strategic buiness plans as life’s answer to every question not a random stack of paint shards. I have never held that strategic planning an a priori value.

There were struggles and dark paths, sadness and determination.

Wrong decisions and right decisions, remarkable people, art, music, recognition and successful ventures. The whole thing really was like a plinth awash with bits of old spray paint. Messy poetic processes.

We will have a launch party book signing launch this year. Keep a look out!

Thankyou for reading. Keep making marks wherever you are!

Peter Breen, Jugglers Co-Founder with Harley Breen, Phil Lock and Randal Breen.

Cover image : “Jugglers Art Space 1998 – 2024”

Guache, charcoal, gesso on found paper 1/25 original drawings/lino cut relief prints for the Body & Soul Berlin Artist Magazine, #45 , 2025 Artist: Peter Breen