Knock Knock ? The Right Pink Christmas Prawn Door

While others shop for gifts,  tinsellate their way to Christmas bon hommie,  each year I make something to declare it open festive season on my front door. This year it is the Prawn, pink and top-aligned, to turn one’s thoughts to the table.  Inside two other prawns levitate like thought bubbles. Then, for dining out ( really dining in )on this theme, one can’t go past a plate of festive crustaceans.

  NB No Prawns were harmed in creating this work.

 

Floralities: Indicia of Elegance in Chiang Mai

Arcs of petals, extravagances of style and stigma,  umbels and umbels of singular flowers, born on trees or emerging from ponds and water jars, there is plethora of things exotically floral to be found by the side of Wats all over the old city of Chiang Mai. Singularly and collectively tripping the Treasure Meter. 

 

Universal Reason for Visiting Bangkok’s Museum of Contemporary Art

 While there are thousands of reasons each crystallised into objects of art, that like thoughts  milling on their aesthetics, argue that you should go to Bangkok’s brilliant Museum of Contemporary Art, this unlabelled and mysterious lacquer cabinet which can be found at the end of a worm hole, where a large tryptic presenting Heaven, Earth and the The Unfortunate Place can be admired,  or one could argue also mirrors the the three spatial dimensions, I suspect this cabinet contains the fourth - which might be Time, or something equally enigmatic. 

Wat Phan Tao in Late Afternoon Light

One of Chiang Mai’s many Wats, late afternoon Wat Phan Tao’s golden spires and golden stupor might well be holding up the sky, this is Tao of what happens here.  

 

Christmas Beetle - Gold In the Hand

 One gold Christmas Beettle, one small gold Christmas Beettle,  will this be it for the summer?  Dear small golden thing, deceased, but still a  beauty.  The way it echoes the  wedding ring,  on the pinkish paw, makes it so much more than what might be the last Christmas Beettle I find. 

The Ease of Eggs - An Example of Benjamin Dodds’ Excellent Oeuvre

 Sometimes I write something about a book I like, and this is the case for Ben Dodd’s new book, The Ease of Eggs, for which I wrote what is called in the trade a puffery ( no puffins involved). And this is how I put it:

After reading The Ease of Eggs,  you may well look up and find the world is more acutely interesting. this book is a buffet of poetic bon mots, a cabinet of the eclectic: school  observations, the universe at large, men and gender, cinematic culture , science at work. But always we arrive at understanding and kindness: Dodd’s poetry is a quiet advocacy for a better world. 

And it’s true. 

Levitation: Scaling Up to Wild NIghts in Collage Town

 Up for a night out with The Spores?   Here we reach Peak Scale dispersal, and quite likely this one won’t go out without a bit of song and dance.  The is market parlance for a price. 

Fishing in the Devonian - Laurels from Laureates

 

Have I been hiding my light under a bushel?  I see that lately every week about 2,000 of you dear readers visit this blog,  aha, I think I must tell you about this book of mine, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Victorian Premier’s Awards.   Billy Collin’s the former USA Poet Laurreate said ‘Fishing is the Devonian is one o the most interesting books I have had the pleasure of reading on some time.  Every poem is lively with conceptual and emotional play.’   Andrew Motion ( ex-UK Poet Laureate says ‘A strange and original mixture of the intense and the humorous. Bravo.’  So, double laurels, and cross Atlantic high fives.  You can still buy it from Puncher &. Wattmann. Go straight there, buy all of my books.  You will like them. 

Cinematically Yours In Blue - Apre Le Petit Magot

 Yes, again it’s a redo in something close to Prussian blue, just ink with a peu eau, to make for a closer look at Willian Klein’s 1968 photograph of Parisians outside a cinema, and I don’t know what this film was about, and as I am setting out here to speculate I won’t be asking google, but I imagine the couple on the left, have just seen the film, and are still stranded in its mood, the pair in the middle are about to go in, and the fellow half in the frame is either the director or a passerby. It would be more satisfying to think of him as the Director.  Why?  That is French cinema for you once it has been through the blue ink mill. 

In His Cups with a Side of Sorcery

Those with a keen eye will see a certain Bart Brassica,  skiving off , or as Granny Eggwhistle likes to say, “In His Hiccups’. Bart who as sworn off pickled beet juice a while back,  thinks of time inside the green glass tea cup is the immersion part of the Spa Cure that Frank Winkler has upsold him with his latest deal.  Normally a spa experience should involve steeping in something liquid but Bart is now wary of anything deeper than a puddle ( here Mavis Eggwhistle gives her famous eye-roll) after spending some time under water after his Boatiquing Accident ( In the Ponderings Episode 2) so he figures the Oxygen therapy option is a a good move, and green to boot.  And as Frank Winkler says,  this is case of cup and sorcery

 

Graphite Mornings in Ink Town Photographs

 

In the sequence of re-do’s of photographs in Prussian Blue, or perhaps Parker’s Blue-Black Quink, while I have been a bit smitten with the smudge and blur to add some tone, here attempting to take in the detail of Werner Bischoff’s  1951, Meiji Monastery, to which this rough try delivers neither accuracy or justice, but it did insist that the graduations of grey needed a graphite overlay.  When does one thing stop being a copy of another and become itself?  

A New Kind Of Real Farm Cultivation

 

For a long time Bart Brassica has felt that being a farmer lacked for him a feeling of cultivation, which could be put down to how grandiose schemes come a cropper rather than grow crops, which together with his preference for animate livestock,  which both he and the Farmhands feel they have more in common with, he has decided to cultivate Inaminate animals,  the glass horse, an antique Indian elephant , and a stone rabbit - the latter being the subject of a joke by Frank Winkler which totally eludes Bart.   So far the new-old farm livestock have not eaten a thing,  and only move by the Big Hand.  Still Bart has his eye out for another one of each to make three breeding pairs. In any case, Granny Eggwhistle says this is culitivation. 

A Blurred Blue LIne

 A redo of a photograph, not  Prussian blue but plain blue Quink, of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1954 photo of a queue in a Moscow canteen,  showing a line up but no food. No-one seems to be in a hurry either.  Does this suggest it was not really a canteen, or the food was in another frame?  There is something satisfying about making ink run,  maybe the blurring between making and ruin. 

Viva La Fifty Zone

 Lucky or what? Hannah McKinney’s urbane pink chutzpah signals Viva the 50 zone, and with that lamp  like a microphone prompting the pink ranunculus for  commentary, whowith the tableau complete by the Le Gondolier’s nonchalance -Giovanni David has suggested he looks the other way, completes this rosy scene. Viva Hannah McKinney an artist and art teacher from Victoria for championing the urban. 

The Art of Floating

 Gaston Lachaise’s  Floating Figure in the sculpture courtyard of the Australian’s National Gallery shows an adroit control of the higher plane, that the figure is doubled y its reflection makes for double serenity, tripping the light voluptuous. 

Tarwin Lower Raises The Serene

 The flat and steady state walk from the edge of Venus Bay to Lower Tarwin on a winter-still morning raises the bar on serene, showing, that on reflection, the Bay’s aptitude for doubling up on scenery wins clouds down. 

If On a Winter’s Night

 It may be that murky green leavened with orange hallucinations, or the stylish man in uniform considering that large mushroom, the background vibrating to some syncopated throbbing, but really there is no reasonable reason for this to remind of Italy Calvino’s excellent novel ‘If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler’, but it does.  

The Fire-Wheel Tree Flower Reassembled- Two Takes this Time.

 Take two photographs of Stenocarpus sinuatus graphically satisfying flower, and reassemble.  This round two on reassembling this flower, the first was a single botanical style take on S.sinuatus .  Variations on a theme, evidently it is a thing. 

Morose in Melbourne? Award Winning Dog or a A Sad Tail?

 This sad-eyed guy takes the prize for Melbourne’s most morose pooch, why he is nose to window glass, flat out looking lonesome?  It is clear he did not actually win that award, but he is lugubriously, not so much as in the running for but the laying down for , for the Down in the Mouth Dog of the year. 

Knit One, Purl One, Cats Two

 

Cat’s paws, cat’s cradles, a cast on of cats, kittens knittin’, the purr of purling, all these play on words, or more correctly wool,  from the new scarf-in-progress,  with its tabbiness of stripes, albeit with tonal shift to the red phase.  

Bart Brassica Preps For An OK Canal

With the segue into autumnal days, Bart Brassica, who has turned his energy to thinking , a task he finds so consuming that it renders him virtually immobile, but now an idea has come to him, based on a 1939 copy of the P- T section of the The National Encyclopaedia - which he found in a roadside ditch, and the news that, as he understood it  the Panama Canal, and Panama were now more or less, Wards of the US, and as such provided a possible source of both straw hats and irrigation for Brass Acres, prompted by Frank Wiinkler, he has put together a story board to explain to a committtee of Farmhands, this might be achieved.  Winkler has asked for a handsome consultancy fee, but Bart who’s gone over to cashless cash crops, says he should hold his breath. More later. 

 

 

The Joliot-Curie’s Handover

 In the continuing quest to properly take in photographs I admire, here with Henri Cartier-Breton’s portrait of Iréne and Fédéric Joliot-Cuire, I have given them both a bad case of the wobbles by my inky re-do, and in the process changed them both, the original photo is a potent study of duplicated posture.  It is all in the handover. 

The Allure Other People’s Bookshops + DIY Luck

 This could be carbon dated row of cookbooks and therefore tantamount to a declaration of age, also being part culinary biography, partially colour-coded row, with its magnetic roller of the alpha and numeric, and handy dispenser of counsel, which is by and large invisible to most kitchen visitors. The trio of toucan, elephant and the worker from the nuclear power plant are on standby.  But really who can resist browsing other people’s bookshelves?  

Bogong Moth Days Explained

 The Bogong Moth Collage is a compressed narrative of movement , flutter, travel , how fish swim, how boats set out, a bagworm identikit,  with a fish that went through a lot of scan collages and still lives. 

It is about empty space and air currrents, travel in Japan, amorphous blobs, layering and camouflage (what a word ) . It puffs, it sighs, it flutters with strata of air pressure and currents, it might be a barometer but it is Useless. 

A Bird In the Shrubs is Worth its Green Shade

As I’ve been on light duties due to misadventure, I’ve had plenty of time for cut and paste, and in the flurry of things assembled - making doesn’t count as exercise does it? -  this small borrowed bird has flown into a it of greenery,  and no, it seems like one bird, not in hand, but in view, will do the trick.  
 

Ephemera of Leaf and Fiats of Curl

 Of things that come down in the wind, a spray of angophora leaves, is a an ephemeral treat,  one day straight, the next day curling, that’s the sclerophyll  leaf for you. That it is  proximate to the cymbidium’s long stay blooms might be ironic, but I am not sure if things in vases can be ironic.  Still the double retroussé is, on reflection, a fine take on fleeting. 

Awash in The Sea of Words, Malachite and Hematite Ahoy!

 Still with traces of scale, a swift lesson in telemarking, in this collage we are living in wordy world, and here is all the requisite elements for Scissors (off stage now but they have had starring role), Paper  - good old Arches, Rock- and  I think you can’t go past Hematite for suave curves and Malachite for its green wonder,  and AGreen Thought, if Andrew Marvel was till about, might he approve or think this shady? 

When An Excess of Accessories is Best

 Bags and bags of bling, bound and hung, bear witness to the joy of excess accessories, a bounty of boucnce, a plethora of pink and purple plush.  This was my fun streetfashion find for September but I am keeping my eye out for more. 

Making Things Up - And is Less is More or Less More?

 This is a cut and paste up that might have become much, much busier, but sometimes white space has its attractions, and that the plant in question is Nicotiana,  also prompts an abstemious approach.   Less said, say the scissors. I’ll snip to that.

Sentient Vases, Sentient Daffodils on The Nightwatch

 

With all directions covered the Night Watch Daffodils are the peak of Spring alert but not alarmed, their very yellowness and sweet translucence, the gallant green of the upright posts, suggest Spring will continue watching, not necessarily over us but at us, observers simultaneously knowing this and that in three days or so the peak, for this trio, will be all over. 

Pentatonic Scales : The Return of the the Retuned Scale

Like an exclamatory break in proceedings the background here has made a break for it and maybe be about to bounce out of frame,  suffice to say, the collage of Scale insects continues, size-wise i am going upscale, but not into whole scale. At some point I will run out of scales, until then it will be a case of measure by measure. 
 

Unself Portrait: The Disintegration and Re-integration of Identity

 Fe Fi Fimo - that model clay - frames up faux Baroque style - the bitsy snippets of past proof of personal and some gold pen -in homage to the thoughtful Japanese practice of kintsugi, so like the opposing processes of differentiation and integration, some albeit clumsy variant of this process, here has come into play.  

You can find more of my work in book form by going to Puncher & Wattman,  where you’ll find poetry collections Fishing in the Devonian, Xn , A Crooked Stile and the illustration episodic novel  Select Episodes from the Mr Farmhand Series .  first literary work to feature instant polenta and dirty snow in the same sentence.  Here is link to these titles at Puncher and Wattman 

Questions of Scale : When Scale Insects Rescaled

 How big should collaged scale insects get? Is it a valid use of the small scale if these  22 by 15cm collages magnify their substrate insect parts in different scales?  Would either ReScale (above) or To Scale (below) be much bigger as to qualify as art?  Will the subject be deemed a Generally Modified Object?  Sale A Vie.

Knit-wise Weather’s Soft Slow Progress in Pattern

 It is sloth slow, one off, one on, knit forth, purl back, rhythmic travel that goes nearly nowhere but even four ply eventually gets somewhere, here a pause some one-third through, the wool designed to make faux argyle socks I have reconsigned to a scarf, my venture into socks being more down at heel, than well-shod.  But the partly made knitted thing, the yarn’s two states of pattern, the needles angles, the afternoon light, all contrive to please. 

Wet Weather Vintage Treasure - Study in Colour and Pattern

 These four favourites, freshly washed, ironed and about to go back into that how didn’t I notice colour coded drawer of scarves, are aside the wonderful fish net pattern from an epic mob in Newcastle, are all vintage finds, rayon on the left and right,  arcing , geographically from Las Canarias to Istanbul, and a silk English paisley centre left.  Yes, there is a small hole in what I think might have once been a souvenir from Istanbul, but for something round about my age this is a mark of honour.  A wet five days in a row can make one go a bit Kondo.

And thanks to F for the Lighthouse momento ! This i

The Un-Self Selfie or these Old Shades

 Here we the shadow of my current self, which is as close to Selfie-ing as I like to get, the better and more graphically pleasing shadow play is the stag fern’s upright and declaratory fronds, the frillary of top and bottom fronds, in clear sunlight is worth a moment or more of consideration.  This fern has been keeping company with its shadow now for two decades plus. My advice:  forgo the Selfie, go the Ferns. 

Did. You Play Your Cards Right? #18 in the Valentine Day Series

Do not worry if you missed Valentines Day - in this blogpost it will always be VD and your cards will always come up hearts.  It is nearly odd to think that this is the 18th and therefore coming of age Valentine in the Valentine Day Series .  

It seems I might need a retrospective? 
 

Shimmer Man -Tin Man’s Fancy Cousin ?

 There was much to watch at the Australian Open,  not just ball bounces but light bouncing off in a series of angled volleys and smashes from this, the golden Shimmer Man. There was a Silver  Rabbit too, but on this you will have to take my word.

Ambiguity Contained - Celadon and Red Glaze Days

 Any visit to the Art Gallery of New South Wales gives one something to ponder, if you’re the pondering kind. Here Liu. Jianhua’s take on celadon and Ox Blood glazes, the Container Series 2009,  suggest that they a full of blood, and that are hollow under the meniscus of glaze. Of course the impulse to turn them upside down to check their construction is not on.  But then there is that view, the distant cranes, the long roofline of the pier, the dry meadow of long grasses, each with its own ambiguous connection to the Chinese classics. 

Between Me and the Sea - Jennifer Blau at Mosman Art Gallery

 Jennifer Blau’s thirteen photos are now up in ‘In Profile’, an exhibition space dedicated to local artists in the foyer of Mosman Art Gallery.  If, like me, you haven’t as yet paid attention to this small space, now is the time to check it out, as Blau’s subliminal treat is only up until 2 February 2025.

Between Me and the Sea can be seen as a lucid photographic survey of what Blau describes as the ‘liminal space’ between land and sea, but it is also very much about place and light, the intertidal space acting as a metaphor for the transitions of grief, impermanence and loss.  These thirteen photographs are of, or taken from, ‘The Moorings’ Blau’s former family home which is cantilevered over the edge of the rock platform at Chinaman’s Beach. The view is, and will declare here I have seen it, mesmerising. The Moorings is an architectural folly, a piece of history, a boathouse repurposed to domesticity, a look-out point with a precarious tenacity, and a wily subject for Blau’s lens.

Here, we have thirteen photographs that, bar one, have Middle Harbour front, centre and, or, side, some six of these images play with thresholds; windows, doors, the veranda, and the way glass frames and distorts, and, like water, reflects and refracts sun and moon light.  The photo image used here is ‘Smashed by Waves’ which gives us the mad washing machine of waves pounding onto the windows just outside the living room — with its implication that perhaps we are just a step away from madness or catastrophe.

Contrast this with ‘Clouds on the Piano’, a whole skyscape limpid and lovely in the lacquered lid of a grand piano that segues into the harbour beyond, showing us, to paraphrase Seamus Heaney ‘the music of what happens’.  Blau also gives us a Pantone® range of blue, from pale aquamarine where a teenaged daughter floats, a little like Ophelia, and little like Obelia, through a cobalt glint of glassine, pixelated sea, to a perfect stretch of moonlit midnight blue. Mostly we are with Blau, inside looking out, or down, and with her contemplating in the end, her empty home.

That Blau trained as a photo editor earlier in life is evident in this precise set of a baker’s dozen. 

We  are shown the garden by the shadows on the front door, and only glimpse the whole place and its solitary perch from what might be the wrong end of the telescope.  There is much to attend to in this collection, we are wavering on the edge on consciousness, like the two submerged rails of the old boat ramp going somewhere and at an impasse, we are under the opalescent movement of high tide, and we are balanced between the sea and the shore, past and present. 

Photograph Credit: ‘Smashed by Waves’  Copyright, Jennnifer. Blau  

Jennifer Blau’s photographic portrait “Forget Me Not’ from her ‘Patricia’s Room’ series, a study of aging and memory loss, was a finalist for the National Photographic Portrait Prize.  Her exhibitions include ‘Patricia’s Room’, ‘After Midnight’ and ‘Their Space (Teenage Bedrooms)’. Her ‘The 50 Book: Women. Celebrate Life’ is available directly from the50book.com and Booktopia.

The Leaning Brick Tower of Mt Melville

 Rakish? You bet.  Brick a brick?  Emphatically brickyard.  This homage to the leaning Tower of Pisa, is one of the secret treasures of Albany WA., eight levels of the not-so-level, eight tiers of columns. All those pristine beaches of white sand and clear aquamarine are one thing, and this is entirely another. Even its shadow is a model of obedience. 

Beach + Abandonment Barbie

Whatever happened to Beach + Abandonment Barbie that finds her in disarray on the sand, handbag and sunnies suggesting it was a big night out, arm up to shield her eyes from the morning sun’s inquisition, I hope it was fun.  

You might think, dear Reader that this scene was a set up, and B + A Barbie has been framed, but this is exactly how I found it. The beach, as in Victorian novels, must remain anonymous. 

 

Ten Fish Hanging Out at Fishmass

So,  this school of fish missed going up by Christmas but now they have flocked up for what might be called Fishmass.  At the moment they are having their sway from on this inside hoistable clothes line in the bathroom but I think they may need to migrate to less humid climes.  Their mobile is made with 1.3mm carbon rod, some Christmas twine, cheating tabs of sticky tape and double-sided fish.  

Now for the chips.