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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the way back from walking for 6 days in the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park we spend some time exploring Brachina Gorge in the Ikara-Flinders Ranges National Park.
This is an abstraction of the trunk of a eucalyptus in the Adelaide Parklands:
It was made whilst on a recent poodlewalk . It was raining at the time we were walking.
This was made on a recent poodlewalk in the Adelaide parklands:
The area was the southern part of Victoria part though which South Park Lands creek runs through The southern part, where we walked, w has been revegetated with open woodland. It's a good space for a quick poodlewalk.
This quartz abstraction was made recently on an afternoon poodlewalk with Maleko. The walk was along the coast in Waitpinga, on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula South Australia.
During early autumn it has been cloudy in the morning and , clearing around midday and sunny in the afternoon. It has been a while since we have done this pm walk as the afternoon light has been too bright around 5-6pm. I was fortunate on this occasion. There was afternoon cloud.
This abstraction of salt + coastal granite rocks was made whilst I was on an afternoon poodlewalk with Maleko amongst some coastal rocks west of Petrel Cove on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia.
It had been a hot summers day and the small pools of water that usually lie amongst the granite rocks from the high tide in the morning had evaporated. I made a number of studies of these salt abstractions that afternoon.