From the category archives:

Art

A cautionary tale

January 12, 2010

Inertia results, not so much in the delay of the future, but in the destruction of its potential. For a very long time I was aware that the Shakespeare Bench was slowly degrading and that if I wanted its carved-into-the-wood message of “tongues in trees, sermons in stones, books in brooks” to have a longer [...]

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A 2nd life

January 4, 2010

Jerry Michalski has been coming to Windgrove off and on for a month doing sketches, preparatory small paintings and now, today, a larger, final oil painting of Roaring Beach. Generally, his routine is to awake at 6AM, observe the light on the beach, take notes and then meet me for morning coffee and toast around [...]

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A peek into four months of an artist’s life

November 23, 2009

Just over a year ago I was working long hours seven days a week on the sculpture ‘King Neptune’s Beads’; a process that was to consume four months as there was a time deadline to meet. The sculpture had to arrive in Denmark in time for the opening of an outdoor exhibition of 60 international [...]

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The model

March 27, 2008

A Gary Snyder zen poem reads: “In the shaping of the axe the model is close at hand.” As a sculptor who uses axes, chisels, gouges, rasps and other tools-of-removal, I am fond of this poem, not only because of its multiple koan meanings, but because of literal wisdom in the notion that if one [...]

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An artist’s life – 4

February 15, 2008

Last night I slept 12 hours. Bone tired, I was. Not to say that I wasn’t content in my tiredness, because I was. You see, the past two weeks have been spent preparing for and executing a site specific sculpture at the Friendly Beaches Eco-Lodge on the east coast of Tasmania. The only requirements were [...]

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An artist’s life – 3

January 30, 2008

Lifer Hunched over hard white bread and plastic soup bowl filled with gruel, he looked like a stork, a silly angel, all neck and bony shoulder-wings and awkward beak. His head lifted, then fell in a slow deliberate dance, three, four times, dough-skinned in a gray room sickened by yellow light. He kept his eyes [...]

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An artist’s life – 2

January 23, 2008

We were never told it would be easy. What we were told was that it would be worth it. After all the trials and tribulations that go into both the painting of the paintings and the hanging of the paintings, Sally’s exhibition opening was nothing less than a stunning success. The joyful party atmosphere throughout [...]

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An artist’s life

January 15, 2008

All too often people think that being an artist is a care free, no stress, easy going way to make a living that just touches on being a serious, worthy occupation. Our office (our studios) can be visited, it seems, at any time of the week because we’re not really doing anything that requires a [...]

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Entering the dark

January 11, 2008

Just last week Sally’s and my kayaks cruised languidly along the sandstone shoreline in the relatively protected waters of Norfolk Bay (as opposed to “Storm Bay” where we live). Looking at the below photo where she is lulling about at the entrance to a shallow cave got me thinking about how every new artistic endeavour [...]

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Continuing our journeys

January 2, 2008

January 2, 2008. Here we all are at the start of another year. Each one of us on our individual journeys doing the best we can dealing with the winds and currents that buffet our boats as they course their way through life. May we all have a safe passage to whatever awaits us. To [...]

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