Kitchen Bench

 The old energy guzzling cafe fridge in the Junkyard Studio kitchen gave me a shock when I stuck my hand inside one day so we replaced it with a regular domestic upright unit. Its now in a shipping container with all the stuff collected by our mate Albert to send back to sell in his home country of Ghana

But the old stainless steel beast doubled as a cutting bench so we were stuck using a couple of cafe tables, not ideal. After a lot of procrastinating I made a heavy bench top on a base with a shelf underneath.

 

The top is 3 slabs of different Australian hardwoods, all extremely dense and hard. The centre piece is a stringer from a staircase, with slots where thestairs fitted, so it needed to be filled so I decided to use  some epoxy resin I'd bought  litres for a project last year and never used.

 

 

With the dam wall of ducttape and slats half removed. I'd screwed it on all around to containthe epoxy resin

 

 

 

Lit by a combination of my 390nm headlamp and the last fading rays of daylight. The resin has bits of the 6 dry UV pigments langridge sell mixed in. (blue, yellow, green, pink, orange and a deep magenta, from them you can ctreate a whole palette odf colours)

 

 

 

An approximation of the golden mean in wobbly hand poured epoxy.. The next morning a currawong tried to eat a bit - to our mutual dismay

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the bit the currawong tried to eat I think, and also brushed with its wing. The foil is a piece of silver leaf(genuine, not fake aluminium stuff) that I'd draped into a pool of epoxy resin some hours before and dripped some more colour ont.

 

The delicate silver has been shredded at one side, with some of it deposited 20cm away, and there's  a currawong footprint beside it, about where I found it hopping and fluttering as I came out to check out the commotion

 

The bird comes into the studio from time to time, once at least to pinch a rawhide workglove for winter insulation. For non-Australians, the currawong is the magpie's slightly chunkier rainforest cousin, opportunistic and very clever birds with a tiny hook at the end of the beak.

I was cranky and grabbed a piece of metal like a spanner and almost threw it directly at it where it flew off to a few metres away on top of the fork lift. I just pulled the throw and it clanked into the metal 20cm below the bird which then flew off.

It's attempted feed must have come as a shock because it had chucked up the contents of its crop and so I frantically attempted to remove it with tweezers. I couldn't get it all but it was much less disgusting than mammal spew.

So what's the currawong's breakfast? Whole pearl barley kernels,  starting to swell with moisture, and sweet smelling necary fragments of a red flower, bottlebrush?I should have left it at that but mixed the last yiny bit of the 2 part resin up that I had, but buggered up the ratio, and and I'm not sure it will set completely

 

 

 

 

Fluoro tabletop.

 

Below is exactly the same shot (which I used to set focus, as the AF struggles in the dark), except with a glary LED floodlight doing the illuminating

 

Ick, I've discovered a little patch of unhardened epoxy that I somehow created as I was learning about this stuff. I'll have to (properly) mix a bit more and see if I can successfully harden and cover it. Luckily its a small area where the resin is quite thin.

Ideally I'd like to pour a layer of uncoloured resin over the whole surface to create a limpid pool, but I don't have much left at the moment. And the kitchen is crying out for its new bench and then a makeover, but this stuff takes 3 days to touch dry, and longer to harden and cure. So its a bit frustrating to have to prop and level it - its now sitting on a slope, mix and apply epoxy and then have to wait another week

 

 

 

Another view of the fluoro  top

Here are the finished (as I thought) top and frame while I wait for the last varnish retouches/pick-ups to dry )on the underside of the top and on the frame). The top is balanced on the frame back to front and skewed, to make the brushwork a bit easier

 

 

 

Top filled and glowing under the ultraviolet lamp. I've got a stopframe movie of part of the filling process which I'll link to here once I've uploaded it to my youtube channel

 

and daylight

 

 

Rustic! the table assembled. A shelf will be going on top of the lower horizontal struts between the legs. The top and frame are separate to make it a bit easier to move around. The top weighs a ton, slabs of Australian hardwoods. and with the base attached it would be really awkward to move

 

 

 

Three great slabs of hardwood for the top. The cntre piece is a stringer(?) from a staircase. I've got a heap of clear moulding epoxy so I'll pour it over the surface to make it flat, with a little bit of stuff suspended for effet, a bit of silver and aluminium leaf, maybe some pigment here or there

 

 

Legs assembled by Baron Munchhausen's proxy, taking hold of their bootstraps, and lifting...

 

 

offcut from one leg

 

 

The stand. I'll add a  shelf below

Hop leaves

 

 

I've got a hop vine growing on the wire fence in front of the studio which is a great screen between us and the carpark next door, as well as providing an essential ingredient for the beer I brew. Its a Saaz, essential for Pilsner, and great in many styles. 

The plant is the closest known relative of weed - marijuana - and while its a perennial vine rather than christmas tree shaped annual, it has a lot in common with its relative. This is a female. The actual hops are seedless female seed pods, equivalent to dope heads. Instead of THC and cannabinoids, the hops exude a yellow oily resin. with the extremely strong bitter flavour of concentrated beer

 

 

Waiting to leave the vaccination clinic

 

I got my first dose of COVID vaccine a week or so ago, and you have to wait a little while after in case of some catastrophic reaction(I was fine)

 

Sketch of Xanthe and some other drawings

 

 

With the creek and tree trunks behind her.

 

These drawings are from my short trip up the coast earlier in the year, and just after - the Parramatta Road drawing at the bottom

 

 

Trees behind the Carpark in Coffs Harbour

 

Clouds over a hint of the traffic on Parramatta Road

 

3D gallery

 

A spin around a demo of the Art Ga;llery of NSW that I've been putting together in blender (blender.org - a very cool community software, for full featured 3D animation)

Bushels and the Mudflat

 

 

I went out to Concord to visit Robert Smith and then work on this painting after I stayed overnight.

 

I had a chat with Anna, an 84 year old fashion designer who told me its planned to knock down the old Bushels factory in the centre of the view, so it was a good thing I'd come to paint it, and now. I return I showed the materials I was using - a bunch of tube oilpaints as well as a little bottle of gum turps and another with gum turps mixed with a tiny bit of stand linseed oil which I use to thin the paint. The stand oil makes the paint lush and easier to apply and work, and also dry faster. But don't overdo it, the paint can do stuff like dry shiny in places(or crazed if you put lean paint over it)

 

 

The canvas before I started today in Prince Edward park in Cabarita Bay with Bushels across the water and regenerating mangroves in the foreground, which are being allowed to regenerate in this part of the harbour

 

 

This is what it looked like at the start of today, which I painted a few months ago the last time I came out here

 

Garden and Flowers

 

 

There are earlier versions of this picture of my mothers kitchen garden in Newcastle here.

 

I've been there for the last few days, spending a bit of time with her and in her garden, doing a bit of weeding, as well as painting and taking a few photos of the flowers blooming at the moment

 

 

A few geranium flowers and leaves and a bit of the terracotta pot the plant grows in: I started this with leftover paint when I was about to head home

 

 

 

A camelia flower opening with some leaves and another bud.

 

I don't usually put straight photography up on this site, here's some flowers(mostly) from the garden. Mum's not so mobile so I took them to show her some flowers she might not otherwise see

 

 

I'm not sure what this weedy tree is, the yellow bell flowers look cool tho.

 

 

Another shrub whos name I don't know

 

 

This wandering dew has a cute little blue flower

 

 

Among the rain lilies

 

 

native violets

 

 

this lurid azalea reminds me of photos of sea slugs with their crazy frills

 

 

shooting with a fairly large aperture(f3.2) and single point autofocus really brings out whatever is in the shallow field of focus.

 

Here's a spray of flowers on a purple weed with focus at slightly different distances.

 

AF on phones (and point and click cameras) gives me the willies, its hopeless if there's any clutter . Then there's the tiny CCD and lens. A $200 android and a DSLR and a couple of lenses doesn't cost any more than a current iphone, less in fact. If taking photos is important get a camera. With an app to control it it is integrated with your phone anyway

 

 

camelias...

 

 

The garanium I started painting above

 

 

A dragonfly in silhouette - it stayed there for a while, so we were wondering if it just oulted and was waiting for its carapace and wings to harden

Old highway helipad

TSandstone is a big part of the series of Sydney landscapes I've been painting the last few years ,'Urban pastoral, so I've been looking for a good place to paint the stone in the surrounding landscape.

 The Newcastle freeway cuts between cliffs  blasted into  the sandstone between the edge of Sydney around Wahroonga and just past Brooklyn on the Hawkesbury River. I remember how impressed my father, a civil engineer, was when we drove along for the first time.

My friend Rachel offered to drive up to look around and have a picnic. This spot is on the old Pacific Highway. I took a medium sized canvas along

 After a second visit

Thanks to Rachel for driving and keeping company for a picnic and painting. We found this spot on the old highwy where we could park, that's marked as a helipad(I think) with a good view of this cutting on the freeway, as well as the river