Blog

Hi everyone!

Finally have a chance to update you on all that's been happening. It's been a very busy and active few weeks since I last posted--including of course Christmas, New Year's and long flight down under on New Year's Day. It seemed like I hardly hit Melbourne & started travelling on the long-ish drive to Bellingen for an amazing print-making course with Serafina Martin at Camp Creative.

Here's some of the highlights along the way:

Spent one night on beautiful Sydney Harbour--at old landlords that became friends over the year. It was fantastic to wake up on a beautiful summer day and see the Spit Bridge and Beauty Point ( below) from the balcony.

Then after stopping for lunch with an old friend in Terrigal I headed to Mitchell's Island where cousins & friends also doing the week at Camp Creative live. They have a beautiful house on a few acres in the country--very peaceful and idyllic for a retirement place! Inspiring to see what they've created together, and the beautiful gardens around their complex.

Next was hitting the road to Urunga where we all stayed at one of my favourite people's places for the week. Di has just moved into her new retirement home after living nomadically for almost a year, finding it and getting it renovated...just in time for 6 of us to invade her space! She made us all welcome & found a place for us all to sleep for a week--having just moved in 3 weeks before!

On the road north we had a typical Australia snake sighting...we stopped at the world-famous Freddo's Pies (the Aussies love their meat pies & this place, just north of Kempsey) has an amazing variety of prize-winning pies--crocodile, emu, mongolian lamb, beef or lamb or chicken curry--all yummy! We stopped to gather our caravan of cars at the outside deck between Freddo's and the coffee shop next door, and when I went to the next table to get another chair the fellow there said "Don't take that chair there there's a snake there...something something (I didn't catch) " so I jumped away and started looking on the ground at the edge of the deck. No, it turned out he had a snake in a bag on the table!!

Only in Australia, of course. He was travelling on a motorcycle with a snake in a bag!! So after we got over our initial shock we asked if it was dangerous and he brought it out of the bag (after looking around to see if anyone from the eateries would take offense...I think! A metre long (3 1/2 foot) Coastal Python...

Not dangerous...but both of them together looked a little scary! We quickly ate up & headed away laughing at the little dachshund at a nearby table who could have been the snake's next meal, if he didn't watch out!

Now on to the art...the Camp Creative experience was the best ever--the weather was lovely, not too hot or muggy except for the first day. Great company (in my printmaking class was one of my cousin's housemates who is an amazing yoga teacher. I'll put her link onto my website so you can check out her work, yoga cards, etc). Each day we discovered another type of printmaking--we started with drypoint etching onto perspex (a form of light plexiglass). I did 6 different plates of that, and we started printing them in the afternoon. The next day we made plates using the collograph technique which uses stiff cardboard bases, covered with a few layers of varnish. We cut out shapes to remove levels, then added levels with various materials including paper--textured, self-sticking, plastics, flat and dried leaves and flowers, muslin and other cloth, to create shapes,both abstract and realistic.

This is one of the first ones I did with the drypoint technique. I love the gum trees in Australia and they lend themselves readily to lots of art.

With this print (and others) I deliberately did some in plain black or sepia ink, so I can colour them later with watercolour paint.

I also did another rhino etching from a photo of the rhino head I told you about last time (photo left--isn't it amazing?)

After the first day of very neutral inks being used, we moved into other colours, and experimented with using rollers on top with rainbowed colours across the print, and another type of colouring where the inks were different viscosities. This form of colouring one ink repels another, instead of layering the colour. It is only applied to some parts of the plate, by masking off some of the plate with paper, or other materials. When you put the 3rd type of in on by rolling, the last set of ink forms very psychadelic colours on the remainder of the plate and onto the paper.

The "New Moon" is a collograph plate.

Below I've put an example of the last type of printmaking we did--solar-etching onto a metal photographic plate.

This was the most exciting type of printmaking for most people as you can get a very realistic look, and capture very fine textures, on this type of plate. In fact, many people used old photographs to create a plate, then added botanicals when they came to print.

You can see more of my prints in the galleries...I'll try to get some more up next time.

Right now I'm a bit limited for internet time so this is just a quick sampling!

I'd highly recommend taking lessons from Seraphine Martin, if you ever get the chance. She led 12 of us through an amazing week, calmly guiding us, soothing our worries about how this or that would turn out, rolling the ink out beautifully onto our plates, and keeping us on track.

I'll try to get a link to her facebook page on my website so you can see her work too!

Tomorrow (after one day's rest!) I'm off to the Gold Coast (just north of Surfer's Paradise) for a few days with friends. Hopefully I'll get some chances to swim as the only paddle I've had so far has been on Mitchell Island! That after 12 days in the country--very unusual for me in the summertime. And I'm missing my pool buddies and exercise. Got an email from the company doing our Grand Traverse hike (6 days in New Zealand in late February) reminding us that there's only 6 weeks left and we should be walking every day! My time has been spent doing lots of things but that wasn't one of them! So, I'd better get my legs going, my lungs going, and be ready for that big hike which is only preparation for Mt. Kilimanjero in early May.

Until next time, hope your year started off as well as mine!!