June 7th, 2024Out of despair comes … art
Brilliantly coloured images of rock and pop stars fill a book by Yandoit’s Dave Lewis. They arose out of extreme trauma.
He says if his wife had not heard a bump as their daughter Kate fell out of bed, she would be dead. It seemed that Kate, then 16, was having a fit. She was unable to speak.
An ambulance took her first to Ballarat, then to the Royal Melbourne Hospital. She was there for six months recovering from an aneurysm.
Dave and his wife, Sharon Treloar, moved to Melbourne to be with Kate in March last year.
“They operated on her for nine hours,” he says. She was in intensive care for weeks. “It was insane,” says Dave, a 55-year-old teacher’s aide and part-time rock muso.
Recuperation was slow. Physiotherapists helped, as did speech pathologists and helpers to take her shopping. There were setbacks. Kate had a stroke and a second, much milder, aneurysm. An aneurysm is a bulge in a blood vessel in or around the brain.
“We just took it one week at a time,” Dave says. “We were lucky that she lived.”
Now Kate can walk, but with a limp and has little movement in her right hand.
During Kate’s time in the Royal Melbourne Dave lined her white walls with Texta drawings of music legends, from Bob Dylan to Patti Smith.
Here, too, in his 136-page book are Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Blue Lines, Massive Attack, Kurt Vile, and Yo La Tengo, a famously noisy American alternative rock band formed in 1984, with their 1997 album I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. “I tried to liven it up.” Dave says.
His book will be launched at Words in Winter in August. Dave has nursed an ambition to produce an art book for 32 years and now aims for another.
Another American band in the book is one that Kate introduced him to, the Neutral Milk Hotel, formed in 1989. They split up for what seems an eccentric reason in rock: they could not cope with the attention they were getting.
Which is unlike Dave’s band The Bedridden, which also split up, got together only to split again, only to recently emerge at Yandoit.
The spirit and survival of these bands and musicians, caught on Kate’s hospital walls, may have meant a lot.
Words: Kevin Childs | Image: Kyle Barnes
