Thoughtfactory: abstractions

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 »

 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. 

Another in the salt abstract series:

These salt ponds are very ephemeral. They only appear during the hot weather when the heat of the  summer sun dries out the various rocks pools after a  high tide. 

From late spring in 2017: 

This was made on a poodlewalk amongst the  granite rocks west of Dep's Beach.  

This picture was made with the newly acquired  Sony A7r111 digital camera  whilst I was on a poodlewalk to the foot of the Newland Heads in Waitpinga:

These little salt ponds are very ephemeral. They are there one day, gone the next. 

This was made on a poodlewalk  yesterday with Heather Petty, and Kayla and Maleko:

Heather, who is a Nikon DSLR photographer,  had a  new Sony premium compact camera with her,  which she was trying out before  she started to use it for her underwater  photography.  It was a Sony Cyber-shot DSC RX100V --with a fixed lens I think. It is compact in the sense that Heather could put the camera in her  pocket.  

The Sony DSC RX100V's   point and shoot characteristic makes it ideal for underwater photography.

Read more »