Powerful Owl Service

A fuss from the noisy miners drew my gaze to a tree on the edge of the park next to Balmoral Beach. Too wit, an owl, something red, messy and deceased in its claws, was ignoring the miners' protestations, to stare down the spectators with its one good eye. It seems out of sync with time of day, maybe even with a  slightly hunted aspect, but that is the ambiguity of nature's predators.  The head, strangely small for such a large birdy, gives the odd idea that  the whole thing is a collage of feathers, claws and beak.  Fortune favors the observant.

Making Up Stories for Matrices

Yesterday, strolling to the beach, all at once I came upon a box of golden paperbacks, with a help yourself note.Not one to look a gift horse in the eyes, I pocketed an an old Penguin. on which I will report anon, and for more immediate fun the 1938 school classic, Raven's Progressive Matrices, and duly progressed through them at the beach. Maths being a story told only by number and operation,  the less obvious ones give, albeit brief, moments of mental traction, the pleasure of filling in the story.   This maybe a case of raising Ravens.

Cycadic Motion

Like an aggregated botanical exclamation point, the cycad is emphatically exuberant in putting its best fronds forward. These graphically elegant set are no slouches on speed either, from yesterday to today, the remind that fronds waits for no time. Viola.

Thinking Tools for Hour Glass Days

Like Wordsworth's sister, all at once we came across a host of fluoro digging tools.
What would be par for the beach if  seen in a single pair, this quiet riot of spades and buckets inveigles a disquiet, a singular sense of whimsy whooped up, an idea that this mise en scene is  not so much an invitation to play but an invitation to think: Why? Perhaps it's the first of a sculpture in the sand series, a base camp to look at the dispersion of  toys over time on sand, an invitation to construct a sand glass?

Resolution of the Chicken and the Egg

Falling, or might I say stalking, smack dabbers between those two hoary competitors, the chicken and the egg, the bird and its orbital origin, this one member of a small flock of similarly headless aves, suggest, in the no nonsense stride towards the sand, that maybe we are all a little parochial in our perspective.   Sculptures by the Sea, maybe here is skulkers by the see.

Come in Spinner

Like a visual merry-go round, a reverse of spinning out, this was base camp and summit for one of a set four coast totems from Caterwilliamson and Linda Matthews in Sculpture by the Sea (2104). Bravo, these just might be my favourites for their clever rearrangement of the horizontal plane, spun out into near meaninglessness, then coalesced into a reflected circular and upright image. The naming of t his process, anamorphisis - which makes complete sense once you take it down to its Greek constituents.

Un-Selfie-ing in Lisbon

Perhaps the Cacau Cru mean to pivot on the ambiguity of whether their character is painting himself in or out of the picture but I like to think that this may be discreet advice on the perils of the selfie, a call for modest self-effacement and a certain level of anonymity.

Return to Keirle Park or The Dissolution of Memory

This an overlooked aside from the  Keirle Park series, those once a week sketches in the car, cataloguing the to's and fro's, the oval walkers and dog ball throwers, the skater set, tennis players, aspiring football  teams and slouchy sets of teens who smoked in cockie circles in the furthest corner, all playing second fiddle to the day's slide over into twilight, twilights' slip into the night.  Here, that blur of lightened sky, brighter strokes that give the nod to sunset, the feeling you're in a car, going past, or is it the trees that travel?