Victor Harbor Archives - Page 10 of 21

July 25, 2015

Australian abstractions exhibition

The Australian Abstractions exhibition at the Light Gallery in Adelaide opens at 3pm Sunday 25th July, and all are welcome to attend. Avril Thomas, the portrait painter and owner of the Magpie Springs gallery, will open the exhibition.

Most of the work in the exhibition has emerged out of poodle walk in that these are the representation of the forms and textures that I’m seeing on the walks and in the different lighting conditions.

The abstractions are linked to the 2012 photographic abstractions exhibition that was curated by the Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne. Many of the images in this exhibition can be seen here.

All of my black and white images in Australian Abstractions are abstractions from nature. Unlike the abstractions of landscape from the air by Richard Woldendorp, my abstractions of both the bark of gum trees and the coastal granite cliffs are done with my feet firmly on the ground.It offers another way of thinking about ‘landscape’.
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July 10, 2015

struggling with photography

I plug along trying to scope photos of the landscape whilst on our poodlewalks without making much progress in finding material that I would go back and re-photograph with a large format camera. I take snaps on the walk with a digital camera and that’s about it. Sometimes I don’t even bother taking my digital camera with me.

I find a situation where light, form and landscape converge at a particular location in space and time, but the result is banal. Uninteresting. Dull. Boring. Empty, pretty pictures that don’t do anything much at all.

So where do I go from here? How do you bring the history of this landscape into this picture making? Power or politics? How do you move beyond pretty pictures–the pastoral? It can be done in words.

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June 19, 2015

winter has arrived

A few days after returning from walking the Larapinta Trail Suzanne is off to a 4 day Heysen Trail camp at Cape Jervis Station. I am looking after the three poodles, and working at Encounter Studio on my abstraction exhibition for the SALA Festival.

We–myself and the poodles—walked along the railway line at Hayborough early this morning. It was stormy and wet. It had been raining overnight. Winter has definitely arrived in South Australia:

At the moment the early morning is the best part of the day, since the rest of the day is overcast, with icy winds and intermittent showers that sweep across the coast. It’s not good photography weather along the coast.
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June 15, 2015

picking up the threads

Suzanne returned home last Friday from her 9 day walk on the Larapinta Trail plus some sightseeing at Kings Canyon, then Uluru and Kata Tjuta. She has a a few days at home in Victor Harbor, then she is off to a 4 day Heysen Trail camp at Deep Creek Conservation Park over the weekend.

I’m starting to pick up the threads of my photography which dropped away whilst Suzanne was in the Northern Territory. I have done little scoping of photography shoots during that period:

Most of my effort at the moment is devoted to preparing for the abstraction exhibition at the Light Gallery during the SALA Festival in August, which includes a SALA portfolio.
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June 2, 2015

along an old railway line

I’ve accepted the constraints of walking three standard poodles on my own whilst Suzanne walks the Larapinta Trail, and I just go with the flow. It is easier to go with the flow rather than be frustrated by the chaos.

Our early morning walks are along the old Victor Harbor railway line in Hayborough. Maleko and Kayla can play their crazy chasey games in and around the old Port Elliot-Victor Harbor railway line, Ari and I stroll along, my feet stay dry, and I can take a few photos.

It’s better than the beach, which is where everyone is walking in the early morning with their dogs. If I walk on the beach most of my time is spend minding the dogs and preventing them from getting up to mischief with other dogs and people.
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May 27, 2015

living with constraints

Suzanne leaves Victor Harbor today for 2 weeks or so walk to the Larapinta Trail in the western Macdonnell Ranges, and then go to explore other areas east and west of Alice Springs, such as Kings Canyon. I’ve just dropped Suzanne off at the Seaford railway station so that she can catch the train to Adelaide to stay overnight with her friend Sally, before they both catch the Qantas flight to Alice Springs tomorrow morning.

My task is to look after the 3 dogs at Victor Harbor. Our walks in the morning and evening will be in limited areas in order to keep Kayla and Maleko crazy chase and play games contained and controlled. So my photography is going to very limited, unless I can find a way to do it without having the dogs in tow. I cannot do large format tripod based photography with 3 dogs racing around the place.

The best that I can do is some handheld snaps on the walk. The above picture is an example. I was driving Ari and Kayla to the Victor Harbor beach for a dawn walk when I saw this view as I started to drive along Franklin Parade towards the Victor Harbor township. I stopped the car, took a snap, jumped back in the car, and continued driving to the township. The trouble is, not every morning is like this one.
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May 24, 2015

moments of sunshine

The poodle walks blog is now a part of my new thoughtfactory website and over time it will change from being hosted by WordPress to being hosted by my hosting company. It’s part of the consolidation of my various bodies of online work and a more professional look.

Thought Factory will continue to be slowly built over the coming months, and I’ll provide the new url when this modest blog becomes a part of Thought Factory. I don’t want to let it die.The bog that is the public face of Thoughtfactory is based on is the Encounter Studio blog which will be allowed to die.

In the meantime we–Ari, Kayla and myself— have returned to the walking the beach in the early morning now that the weather has improved.

The rains have gone for the moment, and there are brief moments of sun in the morning before it disappears behind the early morning cloud cover.

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May 19, 2015

taking it easy

During the recent week of rain and wind we mostly walked around the Victor Harbor township in the morning and along back country roads in the afternoon. I’d badly damaged my back when walking around Wellington and I had great difficulty in walking, due to the pain.

I needed easy walking terrain whilst my back was slowly beginning to heal. So no stairs or steps and no climbing over rocks on the foreshore.

I couldn’t walk for that long so I just explored the afternoon light on the roadside vegetation. Maybe I could use my limited mobility to uncover some photographic possibilities amongst a landscape of pasture and scrubland left after the clearing during the white settlement.Maybe I could reconnect with this body of work.
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May 14, 2015

a fading autumn

Winter is fast closing in. The clear, still, sunny autumn mornings are fast becoming a memory.

We have had a week or so of strong winds, storms, on and off showers throughout the day, lots of cloud cover and the occasional sunny period. So we have increasingly avoided the southern beaches in our morning and evening walks in order to seek shelter from the incessant wind.

The poodles love the bush for it is full of fresh animal smells, but I find it extremely difficult to photograph the chaotic messiness of the bush or woodlands whilst we are walking through it. It is almost impossible to try and impose strict visual order upon this subject matter since the clear visual patterns are not really there.

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May 1, 2015

cruising along

Most of the early morning walks these late autumn days are with Ari and Kayla and are are in and around the Victor Harbor Beach area or along the Hayborough beach. It’s easy. There are few people around, there is very little junk food, dead birds or decaying fish, the wind is low and the sun rises onto the beaches at sunrise.

There is not much photography taking place on these walks. Only a few pictures of the ongoing version of the sand dunes around Hayborough, but this does not effect any of the holiday homes as they are on the cliffs above the beach, and there is a railway line between the beach and the base of the cliffs.
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