Beautiful blossoms and visiting wallaby

 

Beautiful cool morning walk this morning. The warmer weather has resulted in so many blooming blossoms including the spectacular coloured one above.

A few more blossoms to bring joy follow.

That gorgeous visiting wallaby.

And a couple of orchids from G's house.

May we see fragments of beauty that remind us of hope.

Stone forms - cut but not ground

 

I was testing to see if I could cut hull forms into and out of raw hard stone using a diamond blade in my battery side grinder. The result you can see above - one form sitting in the other. The forms are 13cm long.

The work was done free hand with the stones resting on my sawing 'horse'. Dusty work; and the cuts are not really pretty as you can see from the photos below. Of course I had solid leather gloves, safety glasses and filter mask; and the work was done outdoors.

The outcomes were quite good.

I think I'm on to something and with slightly more regular stones and using a diamond grinding wheel I could get some nice forms . I'm thinking Scottish stones!!!

More garden sculptures

 

I have been putting the finishing touches to a few more garden sculptures including: Window..., Bending and Cube with rust.

The photo of Window... is above and some detail below. The piece is 95cm high and the base is 45cm wide. A heavily rust encrusted 10-12mm thick 90cm long and 30cm wide piece of iron set in a weathered piece of harrwood - lots of beautiful rust and the piece has gravitas. 

Bending has 7X20cm copper leaves on aluminium rods set in a weathered piece of rose gum timber.

Cube with rust is a 20cm cypress pine (termite resistant) cube with a continuous groove coloured with black Japanese ink; and attached pieces of found rust - mainly using copper nails. Below are a couple of photos of the preparation of the cube.

Below are a few images of the finished cube - shows all six faces I think. The blue on one face is where the supplier had written my name on a 3m length of timber. The square washers will rust quite quickly as they are untreated iron.

All these garden sculptural pieces will be for sale at 25% off at the DEP studio sale on Saturday 19 November.

Some quirky eclipse moonshots

 

Fiona and I enjoyed the eclipse of the moon on Tuesday night - an unexpected clear night after an afternoon rain shower. We thought there would be cloud for sure.

Just sharing a few photos from the iPhone (above - fully eclipsed and below - half eclipsed).

A a few by either Fiona or myself on the not so great Canon Powershot. First two - partial eclipse; and last two fully eclipsed.

The viewing was-is memorable.

Blue morning, mown fields and other fragments of beauty

 

No doubt the mornings are bright here. The sky this morning was just so blue - such a beautiful backdrop. The fields around our complex were mown yesterday - I almost thought I was back in Scotland looking at mown paddocks - but the difference in the sky gave it away.

We had light rain overnight rain so blossoms looked refreshed and encrusted with droplets.

I loved how the early sun was catching not only the blossoms but also the stone on rust near the front door.

Now that we are getting back into our routine I did a swing by G's orchid house on my walk back to our place.

A gorgeous uplifting day - hopefully this shared beauty might give folk hope.  Maybe the Jacaranda blossom held on the bark of the tree could be a  symbol of hope for today.

Playing with molten metal

 

I'm easing back into the workshop after our weeks away in Scotland. I did a bit of cement work on Friday and finished yesterday. I decided to melt some lead free pewter to see if the furnace held at a lower melting point and how well the metal poured. I chopped up a pewter tray and a tankard - see the chopped up tankard below.

The good news as you can see from the opening photo it worked well. A few photos of metal forms follow.

I wanted to see if I could replicate the rainbow colours I accidentally achieved quite some time ago in a metal melt-pour. I added some of the remnants of the earlier crystalline mix in with the pewter. I'm happy to say I have achieved a couple more good pieces and a few hearts. Not as vibrant as the original but still looking good.

The photo below shows just how crystalline the metal became - bits shattered as I was cutting the surplus metal off.

Art play can be quite restorative. Some of the metal forms will become mini sculptures called Poised - just in time for the studio sale.