The Grey Gums on the Woodford Fstival Site are looking splendid in their new orange bark. Many Eucalypts shed their bark annually, often revealing quite a different appearance to the older bark, which in this case is grey if you are wondering why such a colourful tree would be called a Grey Gum.
Self Portrait at Warri Reserve, Shoalhaven River near Braidwood NSW. I’m camped here on the lovely Shoalhaven ready for a dash into Canberra in the morning. I do love autumn in this part of Australia, and especially on a day like today when a big cold front pushes through and the air turns cold and clear. It is after sunset now, the big white gums are splendid against the violet sky, the wind has eased but still quite breezy and turning cold. The sky is clear here, but low clouds loiter on the mountains to the south.
I found this wonderful land art construction on a recent walk in Canberra Nature Park. It is quite large and sturdily made. I’ve no idea who by – I’ve asked a couple of people I know who I thought were possible candidates, but no. The partial dome, made entirely of Eucalypt sticks, is sited amongst the branches of a large fallen tree. This area, at the base of Mt. Majura, has a lot of dead trees through it. Big old Eucalypts. I suspect years of over grazing, first by sheep and more recently by kangaroos and rabbits, has left the soil compacted and less able to absorb moisture. With prolonged drought over the last 10 years, even these hardy native trees have succumbed.
Not technically a basket I guess, since it is really just a cylinder with no base. All the same it still sits in my garden under the big Eucalypt that sheds this bark in the summer. The bark is only pliable to manipulate like this after several days rain.
This is the view out an upstairs window today. It has been raining the last couple of days, best rain for months. The gun trees have been shedding bark recently and the colour looks great in the wet.
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.
The blog has been a bit inactive lately I know – holiday lazyness. I have still been doing the occasional out and about figure, though I am starting to feel like that project isn’t really going anywhere new so I probably will not be doing so many in the future, though I expect they will still pop up now and then. Well I’ll try to get back into some regular posting for the new year and there are some ideas simmering for new projects. In the meantime here’s a figure from a couple of weeks back.
These are leaves from a pink flowering Iron Bark – in fact these recently fallen leaves are a pretty good match to the colour of the flowers.
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.
Spring is well and truly in full swing now – though it almost goes without saying that rainfall is still below average. The Cherry and other blossom trees are the most obvious, but also there seems to be a lot of Eucalypt flowers of various kinds at the moment too. So plenty of material opportunities for art out and about at the moment, if not always the time.
A large branch had fallen from a Eucalptus tree with lovely silver leaves – so it called for an art out and about. There haven’t been any storms or anything lately, but Eucalypts can be like that – a perfectly healthy looking branch can just drop off at any time really.
