A section of the sandstone cliffs in the Great Otway National Park in Victoria:

The area is between  Point Franklin and Parker Inlet,  and it is  only accessible in low tide. 

This  black and white version of an abstract rock formation near Petrel Cove is from the archives in 2019.

A colour version, which was posted in 2019,  is here.  

I have been starting to research and write about  photographic abstraction that moves beyond the modernist idea of abstraction as non-figuration of the mid-twentieth century. Whilst doing so I have been working my way  through the  archives. 

Read more

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.    

Read more

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.  

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.

Read more

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.   

Read more

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.   

It was bright and sunny and so I explored a rock wall of the gorge that was in open shade.

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 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.