30 Tuesday Sep 2014
Posted in photos
… during which I woke up at my son's place; collected my friend (friends since we were 8) from the train; and drove south for 180 kilometres to Potato Point.
Sussex Inlet
Where I went for a morning stroll
Nowra
Where I rushed around trying to find fruit salad for a picnic
Bomaderry Creek Regional Park
Where we ate the picnic
Milton
Where we stopped for food and a short ramble
Home
Where we ate curry, and rhubarb and apple imported from Newcastle.
26 Friday Sep 2014
Posted in Eurobodalla beaches, photos
By exploring beaches randomly as the spirit and my other movements up and down the coast dictate, I'm challenging my anal desire to visit Eurobodalla beaches in geographical order, north and south from Potato Point, in sequence. Therefore I leap over ten beaches and land at Narooma Surf Beach, 25 kilometres from home as the highway winds.
The beach curves around from headland to headland. It's backed by a caravan park, a golf course, a cemetery, Little Lake which runs out onto the beach, and a small township of two and a half thousand. Just off shore, Glasshouse Rocks peak, and Montague Island lies low on the horizon, home to seals, penguins and a decommissioned lighthouse. It's late afternoon and the beach is busy, for a south coast beach – a photographer with a tripod, a fisherman, a serious walker, me and my shadow and the perpetual waves. Light-ripples reflect under the sand ridge where the lake meets the sea. When I reach the southern end of the beach I head up an almost invisible track between dune wattles and twisted casuarinas to the headland cemetery. I peer over the edge at every opportunity, down towards the rocky platform leading to Glasshouse Rocks. When I want to return to the beach I can't find the track again, so I walk across the long shadows of the golf course. A kookaburra laughs. A blue wren hovers in the undergrowth. I sit on a chair carved from a tree stump and contemplate the lake outlet and the island in afternoon tranquillity.
I return to the beach a few days later in the middle of the day, when the light is very different, and walk to the northern end, where I am promised, but do not manage to identify, pillow lava. I need a geologist guide who has a gift for turning geology into story so that I can understand the vastness of ancient processes and recognise the results.
25 Thursday Sep 2014
Posted in art, National Gallery of Australia
Black stone no 6
Within the stone
deep in its heart
delicacy like a thumbprint
whorls and textured lines
traces left behind by
gentle sponge
marbling
texture of fur
the marks of nature
evanescent, set,
like tiger stripes
a fan, masks with headdress
peacock tails
like patterns left by sea,
lines on a cliff face
dendrites, deltas,
starry sky
nebula cloud
meteor tail
stalactites, swimming sperm.
A world of beauty in a stone
that starts out looking like a splotchy heart shaped patch on black.
To see all this, you need to approach the print, nose almost to glass, and scrutinise it for a stretch of time, with imagination let loose! I don't know much about print making but the delicacy in the heart of the stone is not what I expected.
There were other very different prints, expanses of colour, often incorporating collage, with that colour occasionally drizzling, trickling, fountaining beyond the edge. The printmaker was a true collaborator with the artist and an artist himself: the collage elements had a dimensionality that made one ask “Was this stuck on later?”
For more of Robert Motherwell's prints, have a look at
24 Wednesday Sep 2014
Posted in Thursday's special
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I've become quite blasé about kangaroos and wallabies. Wherever I walk around home I see them: munching on grass with a joey hanging out the pouch; lounging, up to twenty of them, on the grassy stretch down by the creek; bounding off the track into the bush as I approach them heading out to the headland; and occasionally investigating my drive. I forget that to people from elsewhere they are exotic, and encounters I take for granted would be highlights of a visit for friends from the northern hemisphere. The down side of their presence is the need for supreme caution as I drive into my village from the highway: I would hate to hit a macropod eruption from the dark.
This post is linked to Paula's weekly non-challenge: have a look at her portrait of a cactus.
24 Wednesday Sep 2014
Posted in art, National Gallery of Australia
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With thanks to my artist friend Annette who enriched this exhibition with her conversation and insight
On Saturday I spent a whole day mesmerised by the works of Australian artist Arthur Boyd. I encountered his Shoalhaven landscapes a few years ago during a visit to his home at Bundanon, since bequeathed to the nation, a place of workshops, artist residencies and pilgrimage. His more apocalyptic and slightly surreal paintings I decided I didn't like much. Then, Artonview, the magazine of the National Gallery, featured Nebuchadnezzar being struck by lightning and I was suddenly interested enough to go to Canberra for a vast exhibition of Boyd's work entitled Agony and ecstasy. And so I spent an unprecedented whole day in an art gallery, without suffering from appreciation fatigue, or even leg fatigue.
What did I see? Paintings by Boyd at 17: a self portrait showing insight and technical skill; landscapes with sheep that are mere blobs close up, and display definitive sheepness from a distance. “The brothers Karamazov”, painted when he was 18, showing the beginning of a strand of the grotesque in his representation of people, often people who are deformed in some way. The recognisably Australian landscape, even when it is only peripheral like the cliffs in the terrifying “The king”. Then a complete change of light and style in “Boatbuilders Eden” and “The mining town – casting the money lenders from the temple” where I feel again my childhood pleasure in little details: the toppling runaway pigs, the figure heading to the outhouse, the lovers on the bench.
Self-portrait at 17
The brothers Karamazov
The king
The mining town
Old mining country near Bendigo
One thing I was particularly eager to see was a hunk of the mural recovered from the Boyd family home by embedding it in concrete when the house was demolished to make way for a quarry. It is a very gentle portrayal of the prodigal son returning home, and maybe a slight dig at expatriate Uncle Martin, who had finally and briefly returned to Australia.
The prodigal son
Ceramics were a new side of Boyd for me. The exhibition included tiles, glossy and luminous, my favourite a diving figure and a frog; and three ceramic sculptures, one of Ned Kelly in full tin armour riding a judge.
Diving figure with frog
Ned Kelly
Just when I thought infinite variety was exhausted I walked into the room filled with the unicorn etchings and aquatints, created to illustrate a poem by Peter Porter, graceful compositions and a magical unicorn. The last room was filled with the St Francis tapestries, based on Boyd's original pastel drawings, and woven in the tapestry workshop in Portalegre, Portugal.
The unicorn and the ark
St Francis turning Brother Masseo
All this richness and variety, but my favourite room, against all my expectations, was the room of the Nebuchadnezzar paintings. I spent a lot of time with my nose up against the thick paintwork, enthralled by the paint patterns in a small patch, and stepping back to see the whole, as a Lear-like king, reduced to a four-legged animal, ate grass and made his way though lightning and rain and blindness and greed.
Nebuchadnezzar blind on a starry night
Nebuchadnezzar running in the rain
This is by no means all. I'll be going back for another close look at the artworks I missed this time, and to revisit favourites.
Go to “Galleries” for the exhibition online, from which I've extracted the images on this post.
http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/Boyd/.
For a few Shoalhaven paintings and their influence (along with that of Fred Williams) on my photography have a look at
http://morselsandscraps.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/horizontals/
23 Tuesday Sep 2014
Posted in Eurobodalla beaches, photos
Tags
After my annual visit to the accountant to organise my tax return, I need a treat, so I head over the road to Broulee Beach. It’s different from beaches closer to home – a long beach, backed by low dunes, cliffs and a grassy headland at one end, and an isthmus connecting to a low island at the other. I’ve circumambulated the island a few times after other tax events, so I head towards the northern end. The rubber-matted track to the beach suggests more use than the familiar home beaches. I crest the hill into the middle of a group of bleached-headed surfie lads sussing out the surf while they wait for the school bus, shiacking and trying to coax a dog back home. There are three people out on stand-up boards, and five or six lots of walkers. The sand is a melee of footprints, human and doggy.
There are numerous indications that this is a busier beach than mine: a vibrant mural, featuring sea creatures (shells, starfish, anemones, seahorses, octopuses, a whale, and human beach paraphernalia – a surfboard and thongs);Â information boards, a shared walkway / cycleway behind the dunes, a series of shelter sheds for picnics, and a warning against chopping down trees to improve the view.
I walk along the beach and climb the root-stairway to the headland, grassed and daisied to the verge, where I have an unimpeded view out to sea and then back to the island.
Now it’s time to explore the rocks and the rock pools, as the tide slides in, carrying a small wedge-shaped fish with bands of dots back and forth, back and forth.
I admire the shapes and patterns and the shimmer of ripples; the sharp ridges of rock and the peepholes through to the next long shallow pool.
As I return to the car, I look back across the creek to the sea and the island, and end my walk revisiting the painting and the mosaic on the toilet block.
For the story behind the toilet block mosaic read this
https://pacificl-secure.onthenet.com.au/news.asp?id=3383&category=1
22 Monday Sep 2014
A photographer’s dream space. So many images to capture, from the outside to the inner heart. This is an installation at the National Gallery of Australia, a place of shadows and reflections, sharp lines, angles, circles, curves, triangles, apricot and grey and vivid blue, all created by a concrete and basalt stupa, water, earth, landscaping, lighting, sky. Thank you James Turrell.
Approaching the installation
Inside the installation
In the heart
Back out to inside
Outside
For more information
21 Sunday Sep 2014
I've just spent the weekend in Canberra, making the acquaintance of Lake Burley Griffin on foot: in the late afternoon, the not-so-early morning and at sunset.
Landmarks: the Captain Cook Fountain, the National Library and the Australian War Memorial.
17 Wednesday Sep 2014
Posted in creating
On Wednesdays I head up the highway to East Lynne, into a clearing in the bush. In a shed surrounded by eucalypts, women gather, four or five of us most weeks, for a day creating. I write a bit, but mainly eavesdrop on wide-ranging conversations, as the other women paint and chat. My drafts are very rough: my creative pleasure is watching paintings evolve.
L, our host, is an Aboriginal woman, using dots in a non-traditional way, creating a vase of leaves. M. is doing a series based on waterholes – the current one evolved into a crane, and she visualises his raucous cry, using dots in a fountain above his head. L's painting is fantastical, and vivid with pinks and purples: it shows a figure having a haircut. Four disembodied hands are cutting bum-length hair to skull-fuzz: as it falls to the ground it turns into tiny snakes and lizards and other half-real creatures. She too ended up using dots to define the carpet. I wondered how I could incorporate dots into writing – a piece composed entirely of full-stops perhaps. Maybe one time soon I too will dare a paintbrush.
We celebrate a birthday with a lunch feast, using crystal and best china, sharing food we each bring, and finishing with a red velvet cake.
I'm posting this with a link to Paula's Thursday's Special, although it's really a case of Wednesday's special for me!
http://bopaula.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/thursdays-special-favourite/
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