cork oak camping

Camping in the cork oak plantation recently – I do always find this place rather special, and it was great to be there in the evening and early morning.  I did some drawings, and also a scroll of ink rubbings from the many cut stumps where trees have been cut out for some reason.  Rubbings are a major part of my work at the moment – particularly of tree stumps and stems.  I like the directness of a rubbing – gives a direct recording of the actual shape, size and texture of the object, but also turns it into an ‘image’.

mushroom print figure

I recently found a huge, almost diner plate sized mushroom.  It was finally time to try something I’ve been thinking about for a while – since doing a lot of mushroom prints last year.  Using a simple paper cut stencil between the mushroom and the art paper underneath, then this striking image was created.  The figure is a little over six inches high and positioned on a large sheet of paper.  No pigments or traditional art materials are used – the image is made up entirely of mushroom spores.

drawing on leaves

There are a lot of Tasmanian Blue Gums planted around Canberra.  Many of them have been under stress in recent years due to the ongoing below average rainfall and in some cases direct impact of fire.  Anyway this has caused many to produce new shoots from the base that bear leaves in the juvenile form – broader and when new, covered with a white waxy coating.  This coating is easily scratched into, allowing a drawing to be made.  The whiteness doesn’t seem to grow back – this leaf looked just the same a week later.  I wonder if any permanent mark will be left as the leaf matures and the rest of the wax is removed by the elements.

into the studio – and back out again

Leaves featured pretty heavilly in my ephemeral work durring autumn, but have been featuring less frequently lately. They have, however, been making their way into the studio more and more. Leaves have been getting drawn, drawn on, printed on, and printed with!

And then after that they sometimes make their way back out of the studio again – altered, yet still simple leaves, taken back to the source.

the right place for art?

Part of my work with the art out and about projects and chalk drawings has been about placing art back into the context of the ‘real world’, ie not a specific art world context like a gallery.  Not a new idea of course, nothing ever is.  Well it is one thing to do this with ephemeral work, which isn’t really an art object anyway, but what about works on paper.  So I have been thinking about taking some of the woodcut prints back to the source of the images. In this case a plantation of pines in Fyshwick.  I wanted to install them there, and had intended to paste them onto some old concrete structures.  This turned out to be more of a technical challenge than I had imagined – pasting onto the rough concrete simply wasn’t going happen with the glue I had – so a work still in progress.  I still did some photography of the prints at the site, and then started using the concrete walls as a surface for drawing on – hopefully informed by the site – again a work still in progress.

Wrapped on a tree…

…and on the ground.  This print did end up pasted onto a flat slab of concrete on the site – amongst the faded old porn images someone else had left weighted down with sticks.

I started some drawings in the main concrete tank structure – a figure rising from the soil, seemingly associated with the mysterious mound of soil – again left by others unknown.  The barbed wire a reference the the fact the site was originally built as an internment camp for German citizens during WWII.  As it happens the site never was used for this purpose.  The pines were planted after the camp was dismantled in the 50’s.

shadow drawings

Did some shadow tracings in chalk today.  Firstly the bare branches of an oak tree on the curved wall on University Ave.  It was sunny and warmish today so I began to think of the arrival of spring and added some nice green leaves.  A playful fond memory here in the middle of winter.

Followed by a tracing of the shadows of the main trunk and branches on the ground.  With both of these works and with other shadow tracings I have done before, it is always surprising just how quickly the shadows move.  By the time the drawing is finished the first parts are already way out of alignment, so the drawing can never perfectly replicate the shape of the shadow at any one time.  Then of course there are clouds.  An annoyance when the shadow disappears and thus interrupts the drawing time, but great for photographing the finished work with the “source” now removed.

semester II begins

A new semester started this week and to get things moving, part of the set drawing program is to do a drawing a day.  Thought about doing this many times, but it can be tough on the self motivation skills to get the habit established – and I never have managed.  So having it a set part of the course will be great because I will do it.  I don’t plan to put them all up here but here is yesterdays.  Graphite pencil on pine veneer, and a feather.

A simple little drawing, but I found it rather interesting the way in which it developed.  Found a strip of pine veneer during a  workshop tidy up.  I rather like bits of wood so I claimed it.  At the same time I noticed a feather on the floor – quite how it came to be there I don’t know.  The last couple of months whenever I see a feather on the ground I photograph it, and I’m on the lookout for them now.  Usually I leave them there but this one I picked up.  So then I was playing around arranging the black feather and the light strip of wood spatially on the wall and this is the arrangement I settled on – for no conscious reason.  Then I came to thinking about the days drawing and it seemed obvious to do it on the pine veneer, and of course the obvious thing to draw on it was a pine tree – both because of the material and because it has been a subject I have been using lately and there were photos and prints of pines right there on my desk to refer to.

Now what I find interesting is that having completed the drawing in this seemingly playful, ad hoc sort of way, I realised its relationships to works by Anselm Kiefer that I have looked at before and which turned up in a theory class the day before.

Untitled 1996 Anselm Kiefer

This is the image shown to me this week, but there is another one that I can’t find at the moment where instead of giant sunflowers, withering and bent but full of dark ripe seed,  seeming to grow from the prostrate man, there is a young pine tree.

Time I got off here and did todays drawing.

Untitled, 1996
Anselm Kiefer (GeUnrman, b. 1U945)
Woodcut, shellac, and acrylic on paper, mounUntitlested on canvas; 11 ft. 11 1/4 in. x 8 ft. 1/2 in. (3.6 x 2.4 m)

M16 Drawing Prize

M16 artspace hosted its third annual drawing prize this week, and I was quite surprized and delighted to be chosen as one of the winners!  The judge, Michael Desmond, Senior Curator National Portrait Gallery, decided to split the prize into two equal firsts.  My work, titled The Shape of Matter, was made using pollen mixed with an egg binder and brushed onto paper.  Then when dry the varriations of texture and tone created were enhanced with a fine tracery of graphite pencil.  Using the pollen as a pigment creates a vibrant, almost glowing yellow hue.  I’ve been interested in allowing materials to determine their own patterns and textures, analogous to the way that the patterns in nature are a result of the physical characteristics of the matter which creates them.  Like the shape of clouds – every one is different, but they also take on recognisable types with characteristic forms depending on factors like humidity and temperature.  Or the patterns of ripples in the sand – determined by the size of the sand, the depth of water, the amount of wind etc.

detail from “The Shape of Matter”

more silhouettes

Today I made a cut out silhouette from a large gum leaf I collected from Namadgi National Park a few weeks ago.  Then got carried away photographing it against various backgrounds I had to hand.  This is just a small sample.

leaf silhouette on a woodblock print from this semester

and an electronmicrograph of wood structure…

and on a drawing from one of my sketchbooks.