Palm Tree Hairdo

 A terrace house in Marrickville, qith a mad hair style when viewed from the correct angle

Vaccination

I got my second dose of Astrazeneca vaccine yesterday out in Belmore so I'll be fully vaccinated soon

 

 

 

 

In the post vaccination room with a  couple who had also just had the COVID shot.

 

 

Bits and pieces of the room where I waited to convince the nurse to let me have my 2nd dose of Astrazeneca after 6 weeks rather than wait 12.

Mum's vaccinated herself now but she's pretty old and the government and ATAGI had just destroyed confidence in the Astrazeneca vaccine in the depth of winter with a replacement  only on the distant horizon. (Is this for the political benefit it gives the LNP federal government, to drag out the emergency  and give them a chance to win an election after they smooth over a few difficulties with the ladies?). That had to mean they had spare doses.

It wasn't too hard to convince the nurse and the team there, there were only a few elderly people getting their 2nd dose. No Pfizer at all will be available for weeks yet, so it must be frustrating. One guy who looked to be in his 60s was escorting his mum for her 2nd dose and said he'd be waiting for the Pfizer. (Hey mate, one in 10 infected are hospitalised, with half of them in intensive care)

 

Now there's an outbreak that looks to be exploding across Sydney which has exposed the risk assessment done when ATAGI binned AZ to be totally ill-conceived and insane. Only 1 person had died (in Australia) from COVID since January and 2 had died  from vaccine sideeffects. But that was summer and now its winter and there's a hotel quarantine outbreak every week of increasingly infectious variants. And millions have died from COVID this year. 

Madness

 

Fig Tree in Victoria Park

 

 

 

When some dry weather returned 
I got back to the fig tree in Victoria Park to sit in the space created by its curtains of aerial roots to paint a bit more of its portrait

 

 

The room uynder the tree. I've always had a fantasy of growing a house by training a fig

 

 

 

A painting I started a couple of weeks ago but haven't got back to yet as the weather's been miserable

 

Mr Cat

Thecat who moved in.

 

 

 

 

Happiness is a warm amplifier for Mr Cat. Here's some drawings of him in the same spot.

 

winter hop leaves

 

 

A little fluoro painting of the hop vine on the fence dropping its leaves, this photo is under daylight though

 

Mr Cat

 Mr Cat - aka Boots - was hanging out in the wood stacks out back since before I got here about 4 years ago. He was always well fed and too fussy to take anything we offered so we didn't need to feed him at all, and I've never seen the telltale feathers and pair of wings  that cats leave behind when they kill birds so it was good to have him around, just to keep the rats wary.

Last year he hurt himself. Maybe a piece of timber rolled onto his foreleg and he couldn't walk on it at all. After maybe a day I realised he couldn't get home and must be starving, wherever it was, so I found something he would eat, some raw meat.

I started researching to find his owner, after a day or 2 my friend Jules found out via a Cat Ladies facebook page, it was very close too the back yard, but upstairs. I didn't meet the lady but left her a note explaining the situation, saying Mr Cat was being fed but she could come and get him, take him home/to her vet.

She never showed up and as days went by Boots foot was healing,after a week or so he started to put it on the ground again and as another went by  he wasn't quite so ginger on it.

By turns he recovered, seemingly without lasting effects, the leg isn't deformed and he doesn't tfavour  it so maybe it was just badly bruised rather than broken at all.

I think his owner has now got another desexed(?) tomcat, who followed him home when he was stuck outside for a couple of days while a neurotic elderly Jack Russell was staying. He got bite wounds on his face and bum, and for a while looked like he might do himself in with obsessive grooming so we had to feed him a tiny bit of valium with his food for a few weeks so they could heal. 

Thankfully he's mended, and having realised he can make himself at home, he's acting like lord of the manor. On top of the amplifier is a favourite spot, it's always comfortably warm, and is a good protected vantage point at the doorway, where the average dim doggy doesn't notice him.

So it's time to put him to work, doing what he does best as a model. having a kip in a nice warm spot.

 

 

A couple of drawings, the one at bottom also accompanies the evil geniuses in the post below.  I've also started a little painting which I'll add shortly

shifty politicians, and Mr Cat

 

 

Christian Porter, former attorney general. and WA's gift to the Ladies - a picture of empathy, as ever

 

 

Rudy Giuliani

 

These drawings will also land on my neglected Political Geometry blog, which I aim to make active again

 

 

Every evil genius needs a cat asleep on a warm amplifier by their tapping, bejewelled fingers

 

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