blue and red abstraction

Made whilst wandering in the local Waitpinga bushland on a poodlewalk in the late summer of 2022.

It was a branch of a pink gum, but I can no longer remember where it was exactly.

bark abstract #5

These colours in the local bushland in Waitpinga caught my eye whilst I was walking through it:

This macro of the bark of pink gum was made whilst I was on a poodlewalk with Kayla. This was in late February. It is a continuation of the kind of abstraction from nature series here and here.

trunk abstract #3

I recently needed to fill in 3 or 4 more hours walking with the standard poodles around the Adelaide parklands. This was in mid-January 2022.

It was a warm day and we walked amongst the trees in and around Veale Gardens. We moved slowly through the shady areas beneath the trees to fill in the time. As we did so I made a series of photos of the trunks of the trees.

It was a return to what I used to do when I lived in the CBD prior to 2015 -- walking the poodles in the parklands and making photos. Only this time I wore a mask and kept my distance from everyone because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic is a game changer.

trunk abstraction #2

From a recent poodlewalk in the Adelaide parklands:

We had several hours to fill in between commitments so we used the time to slowly walk around the parklands behind Veal Gardens. I spend most of the time photographing the trunks of the various trees. It was hot that Sunday, so we took time out to sit in the shade and watch the world go by.

colour

This abstraction from a snapped pink gum branch in the local Waitpinga bushland is from an early morning walk with Kayla between Xmas and New Year. It was made a bit latter on the same morning as this one.

Several of the branches of the pink gums in the bushland had cracked and snapped over the Xmas period. I wondered why as it had been a wet spring and the early summer months had been cool. I had assumed that it was a period of extended dryness that caused the branches to snap or splinter.

Kanmantoo abstract #1

I have been calling many of the rock abstracts that I have made whilst walking along the coast between Petrel Cove and Kings Head granite, when they should be termed Kanmantoo. These Kanmantoo group rocks are typically derived from the Cambrian Period sedimentation in shallow ocean.

According to the Coastal Landscape of South Australian text these Cambrian metasedimentary rocks are aligned with the Encounter Fault, occur northeast of Newland Head, diminishing in height towards King's Head and the Bluff (Rosetta Head). The small pocket beaches, largely derived from erosion of Permian glacial deposits, occupy bays eroded into less resistant Cambrian rocks.

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a note on abstraction

This is a bit of iron that I saw lying on the ground when I was on a recent early morning poodlewalk with Kayla. The iron was laying on the beach amongst the seagrass, and it was from the rebuilding of the causeway to Granite Island that had been happening during 2021.

It had been raining that morning. The sky was still heavily overcast and so I did not need to take account of the early morning sunlight shining directly onto the iron.

McCaughey on abstraction

I have started reading Patrick McCaughey's 1969 book Australian Abstract Art. He says that there is no absolute distinction between abstract and representational art, that much Australian abstraction keeps in close contact with the physical world, and its aim is not to give an illusion of the physical world but to provide us with an experience of it (p.3).

McCaughey argued that the Sydney modernists (eg., Ralph Batson, Grace Cowley) in the 1950s embraced a constructivist interpretation of abstraction as a new order different from the natural order: ie., a new vision appropriate to the 20th century. This is linked by McCaughey to Moholy-Nagy's book The New Vision. The new vision was rooted in the technological culture of the twentieth century.