The Trail of the Meraki Man

I was in Peru. I believe it may have been Paracas, but it’s been so long now I could be mistaken. The memory of the beachside township burns like a roll of film, flexing in the heat upon its fourth year of residency in my mind, but I can still make out the sea. I can still make out the boats, the harbour, the sealions, the people and the markets. They just exist now in this beige state of fleeting existence.

The clock in my apartment ticked over to 8pm after a day of raucous splendour. I remember the time well, because it was when my new roommate was meant to arrive. Thing was though, he hadn’t.

Like many, I was in Peru to make the trek to Machu Picchu and, as a result, I’d joined a tour group to get there. As a solo traveller, I’d been informed that I was to be sharing my room with a fellow single lad who would be joining our group in the capital of Lima. He never showed up though, nor did he meet us the next day as planned.

As day three of the trip peeled back its outer layers, so did the mystery surrounding my yet-to-arrive roommate. Information bubbled its way to the surface. He was Australian (okay, common ground – probably, also explained his tardiness). I then heard that he was coming from a medicine retreat deep in the Andes Mountain Ranges (okay, maybe not the most common of grounds then). 

As 8 turned to 8:01, and I sat nervously wondering who may be joining me for the next month of travel, the door to my apartment room swung open and he finally arrived.

At first glance, he was merely a wanderer. His face was consistent with the limited oxygenic patterns of the wilderness he’d just emerged from – gaunt from travel and whittled down to the bare essentials of cognitive human swag. His hair was a bird’s nest; his clothes wore like burnt butter – beige and drooping down a figure that stretched too far out of them. His height disproportioned the room, but though his reach was remarkable, his body sloped into a hunch.

It was his gaze that swept me in though, and led me to want to better decipher the character before me. His eyes revealed a passage into a man I believed could see me not for the flesh or bone that made me, but the spirit that resided beneath it all. To him, I felt exposed.

His name was Birdrock Jefferson.

He spoke as though he was a disciple of Bowie, poetic and cosmic – never mind the Australian drawl that dragged his sentences. Despite being younger than me, he had an aura of wisdom that felt consciously collected and absurdly elegant for his age. In the bluntest of terms, he felt like an attempt to adapt The Dude from The Big Lebowski to the real world, if not with some of the slightest of nuances woven into the character.

We got along really well and really quickly.

Together, we traversed from Paracas to Nasca, Nasca to Arequipa. I learned he was an artist – a painter, to be specific, with a satchel of brushes he’d show to anyone who queried. What I found most fascinating about his practise, though, was the absence of perhaps the most essential ingredient in the artist’s arsenal: a canvas.

I didn’t inquire for an elaboration on this peculiar absence, as I figured perhaps he was just in-between canvases.

Although, it cared not to explain the fact his hands remained splattered with rainbows, or that a singular stroke of magenta would occasionally appear in a slash across his left cheek.

Then one night in our room, the veil between Birdrock and I dropped.

“Hey man,” he said as I was getting in the shower. “If it’s all good with you, I may be doing something a bit weird out here when you get out. It’s hard to explain, but hope you’re okay with it.”

“Ahhh… sure,” I replied with a sense of doubt.

The shower that followed felt eternal as I questioned what the hell ‘something a bit weird’ may be. Drugs, perchance? Hotboxing the hotel room? But also, how would that have been hard to explain?

When I got out of the shower, Birdrock sat hunched over on the carpet, his back to me, with his head deep in his lap. His arms, like feathers, angled out from his sides as he worked away on what appeared to be the upturned coffee table.

As I approached, I noticed his paints sprawled across the floor. A brush was perched in his fingers as he lightly stroked the underside of the coffee table. Before him bled a forgotten twilight on the cusp of the Huacachina oasis. It leaked through the wood of the upturned coffee table, creating a portal into the cavernous memory of the painter.

He was there for about an hour painting this gorgeous landscape on the underside of a piece of furniture.

Over the next three weeks, I watched as he sat in stasis, painting grand expressions of our adventures in the hidden compartments and shadows of unsuspecting hotel rooms. A bedside drawer would become a window into endless waterfalls, whilst tasteless hotel art would become a membrane for a much finer work depicting loping sand dunes and fantastical forests hidden on the wall behind them. It was as if every day we shared living these mythological moments were blueprints for Birdrock to adapt into artful memories.

However, the question still remained: why in hotel rooms? Why hide this bliss in such mundane corners?

Years later, when I asked him to elaborate on his craft, our conversation flowed like water.

“I always thought film burn would be cool to try to recreate as a painting,” Birdrock noted. “I wanted to make a trail of memories. A story. It’s kind of like a weird puzzle. Just something to leave behind. Make people think. But also, to show where I have been.

“Some of the artists who inspire me – who I look up to – have travelled and made art, so naturally I wanted to travel and make art. I didn’t want to get into trouble, though, by doing it on a massive wall in a hotel, so I [painted] in weird places, obscure places. I’d love think of a hotel worker who would one day go into the room, flip over the table and be like, ‘What the fuck, there’s a hidden artwork under here!’

“It’s how I reflect on my time. Then people can see it, and see my story and my memories. They can see the way I see it all.”

Since our time in Peru, Birdrock has returned to South America, exploring neighbouring countries like Brazil and Argentina, and keeping up with his secret art project in new spots around the continent.

“There’s probably nine all up. I did three when I was with you in Peru. I did a couple in Brazil. One in Argentina. I think I did a couple more along Peru… I feel like I should have taken more pictures, but I also like the idea that I never did much, and I now just have to rely on remembering it,” he explained.

On the topic of his subject matter, Birdrock continued: “There were the mountains just outside of Cusco. That was the first one. Then there was the desert I did in Nasca of Huacachina, the oasis. I think in Arequipa, I tried to do a night sky with the city in view. Then in Brazil, I did waterfalls and also a beach from the perspective of a bar. In Argentina, I went to a salsa club and became inspired to paint this couple I saw that night, dancing.”

And when did he start?

“The first time was just after I came down from this major medicine tour. We’d just been in the mountains for like, five days. I felt so good having been in such a nice place, but that was the end of the tour. I mean, I left my comfort zone when I first went to Peru, and then I became comfortable again when I was with this group of people. We were all pretty close. And then I left that comfort zone again and thought, What do I do now? I was sitting in my room in the Cusco hostel, the one we had been sharing, and I just flipped the table and thought I’d paint. I mean, I had time to kill.

“The first one I did was the mountains [of Peru]. I remember it had been a six-hour bus drive on a cliff up to those mountains and because I’m quite tall, I was feeling super uncomfortable in the backseat and my knees were cramping up. Finally, we reached this place, swung into a little carpark, looked down, and I could just see in the distance the sun setting on the mountains with a golden glow. It felt like I was on top of the world. But the hectic and painful car ride, I think, kind of helped to make the experience better.

“So, the ordinary part that wasn’t as fun, and was just pretty normal, was still a part of it and made that moment so much better. We had to go through so much discomfort to get there and I think that’s the thing. I knew I was going to the mountains, but I didn’t realise what exactly I would be seeing there. And I think I was trying to recreate that feeling [in my art]. Say you could pick up a table, not expecting anything to be under there, and then be like, ‘Wow, that’s there!’ Same with the mountain. The ordinary build up to it is why I [paint]. It’s these little moments where you’re in a hostel, before the big adventure, and you don’t necessarily have everything together and aren’t as comfortable as you usually are at home, but you can still feel as though you are a part of the big journey from the comfort of a bedroom.

“If I could give my work a title, I think it would be a journey of meraki. I think it’s a Greek word, meaning to pour yourself into a creation wholeheartedly. To place your soul and heart into it, so much so you leave a piece of yourself with it. I found that word on Instagram and I thought, That’s what happens when you make art; you leave a bit of yourself with it, or the feelings you felt at that point. And that’s what we do when we travel. We leave a piece of ourselves every place we have been. Not to leave a mark, no, but more to leave feelings and memories along the way.”

For Birdrock, the world is his photo album, and his memories now belong to us all.