For those too young to remember, The Flying Nun was a television series from the late 1960s in which a nun became airborne whenever a strong breeze caught her enormous cornette.
The moment it was mentioned, I was transported straight back to art school.
At the time I was working on a fairly large painting.
The problem wasn’t painting it.
The problem was getting it home.
I didn’t own a car, so my journey from the city involved public transport. Not one bus. Not even two.
It was bus, bus, ferry and then another bus.
For someone standing all of 157 centimetres tall, transporting a large canvas across Sydney required a level of planning, determination and optimism that now seems slightly absurd.
The first challenge was getting the painting down the many flights of stairs.
The second was fitting it onto the bus.
The third was convincing fellow passengers that I wasn’t attempting to move house.
By the time I reached the ferry, I had developed a series of elaborate manoeuvres involving rotation, tilting and apologising.
“Excuse me.”
“Sorry.”
“Just coming through.”
“Terribly sorry.”
“Nearly there.”
I must have repeated those words hundreds of times before finally arriving home.
Then there was the wind.
Anyone who has ever carried a large stretched canvas outdoors knows that it behaves less like a painting and more like a sail. On a still day this is manageable. On a windy day, particularly on the harbour ferry, it becomes something of an adventure.
The wind would catch the canvas and suddenly I wasn’t simply carrying a painting. I was hanging onto it.
More than once I found myself thinking of The Flying Nun as I stood on the ferry deck trying to prevent both myself and the painting from taking flight.
Needless to say, I remained earthbound, although only just.
Looking back now, the whole thing seems faintly ridiculous.
At the time it felt completely normal.
Art students simply accepted these things as part of the job. If the painting needed to get home, then somehow it got home.
