Category Archives: History

WEST TO WINTON

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With the Studio to Studio Exhibition finished and a couple of other commitments out of the way, it was time to load up the truck and head west. I have a two day workshop in Winton, and will be judging the 2012 John Villers Winton Art Award. The plan after that is to explore the Diamantina basin before winding our way up to Mt Isa for another two day workshop. If the night time temperatures are still above freezing in Alice Springs we will stock up in Mt. Isa and head to Alice via the Plenty Highway and Eastern Macdonalds.

We drove through some incredible storms between Longreach and Winton. After four years of good rain the country is weirdly green, the cattle are fat and plentiful and the station owners are smiling.

The wild west – Main street Winton

After the workshop we celebrated Sash’s birthday in fine style at the Tatts Hotel

Big moon rising over suburban Winton

Willie Mar’s Chinese market garden operated in Winton from 1923 until it fell victim to the 2000 flood.

Jessica and Craig , who organised the John Villers Art Exhibition and Workshop in Winton, took us out to the Rangelands Escarpment for drinks as the sun set. What an awsome sight.

Nick Caves story “The Proposition” was filmed here at Ranglands and on nearby Bladensburg National Park

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We camped a night looking over Scammy’s Lookout – what a place to watch the sun go down – You can see all the way to India.

From Scammy’s Lookout

Plenty of grass means plenty of kangaroos bouncing through the landscape.

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After miles of nothing we stumbled across this water hole on our way down to the Diamantina.

At Larks Quarry an impressive building protects footprints made by stampeding dinosaurs 95 million years ago.

Strangely, the structure won a building award in 2004 but had to be closed in 2012 to demolish unstable rammed earth walls. We were lucky enough to arrive a couple of weeks after the building was re-opened (minus many of the rammed earth walls)

CHATEAU DE LA FLEUNIE

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After our stay in Aix en Provence we boarded a coach and made our way through the French country side to Chateau de la Fluenie. The Chateau was built in the 1300’s and extended in the 1600’s. It is a beautiful old building set on manicured, spacious grounds just outside the small village of  Condat in the Dordogne

The main dining room

After a hard days painting it was nice to relax and enjoy drinks on the terrace as the sun went down.

We were fortunate to have access to a large conference room,should the weather turn bad. Fortunately we had only one foggy morning where staying indoors made painting a lot more comfortable.

The Chateau had its own heard of deer and a collection of very small goats.

Further down the paddock were a pair of friendly pigs

The small village of Condat, just down the road from La Fleunie, was a great place to paint. There was a bar, coffee shop and restaurant in the village, so we were well looked after.

Lunch in Condat

Butterfly disguised as dandelion.

Hand hewn timber in the roof of an ancient Condat farm building.

Trees in the region were getting ready to loose their leaves – some were bare, some where still green and some had fantastic colors.

We visited the medieval town of Sarlat – beautiful old buildings, markets, shops and restaurants, plus a wealth of painting subjects. A great place to spend the day.

Behind the Cathedral we found a quiet spot with a great view of one of  the towns Medieval houses.

La Roque-Gageac was another medieval town tucked under a cliff on the bend of the Dordogne River. It seemed a strange location for a town, but looked spectacular reflected in the water. We spent most of the day painting there, then went to visit the Lascaux Caves. No photos due to copyright restrictions according to our guide?!

After the workshop we traveled to Bordeaux airport where everyone headed off in different directions.

Dianne and I stayed a couple of days in Bordeaux and after the luxurious accommodation we were used to, the view from our room came as a bit of a shock.

Bordeaux has some beautiful buildings, but not far from where we stayed was the building below. It must be the ugliest building in France, built from checker plate metal, freeway crash barriers and funny little windows.

Bordeaux fruit stand

HUNTING MUSEUM PARIS

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62, rue des Archives, Paris

The Hunting Museum in Paris (Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature) is a fantastic mixture of artifacts and art work relating to the killing, eating, stuffing and preserving of animals.


There is an incredible collection of elaborately decorated and beautifully engineered devices for hunting animals, and a trophy room chock full of just about everything that moves (or used to move)


These beautifully made timber cabinets display various hunted animals – from a stuffed example to bones and droppings in tiny pull out draws. A number of slide out drawings and a video peep show visible through a pair of brass binoculars complete the display.


The glass storage cases for guns sit on top of numerous drawers crammed full of related hunting paraphernalia …


…even knives and forks for eating your kill.


Unlucky rabbit


Even unluckier Fox


Handsomely stuffed leopards


Hunting dogs and Wolf


Stuffed fox still looks cautious


Stuffed hunting dog with poorly fitted false teeth

Heavy duty iron hunting dog collar.

The Museum is housed in a beautiful 17th century building renovated and decorated without compromise. The more you look the more magnificent detail you will find.

PARIS

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We arrived in Paris with a week to explore the city before our workshop starts in Aix en Provence. Our apartment in Montmartre is great – close to some great bars and cafes, and just down the hill from Sacré Cœur.  A 6 day metro pass costs around 25 Euro and makes traveling around the city so easy – it is rare to wait more than a couple of minutes for a metro and the system is well signed and easy to follow – even for a pair of non French speaking Australians.


From a little bar at the top of Rue Tholoze – good beer and great view


Montmartre rooftops


Path to Sacré Cœur


Montmatre backstreets


At the top of Montmatre near Sacré Cœur is the busy tourist area where artists crowd the square and sell their wares.


Two people trying to walk past a crepe shop.


Rooftops from Sacré Cœur


Our apartment has a beautiful old oak floor and staircase. when you walk into the building you can smell the linseed oil someone lovingly rubs into it.


From our apartment window we look down on one of the busiest bars in Montmatre. I’m sure Picasso and Henry Miller and Alfred Jarry all drank here. Every night sees dozens of people spilling out onto the streets.


Sacré Cœur

The Romans lay claim to the arch, but I think the French must have invented the spiral staircase. We have been up and down so many in the last few days – thankfully Sacré Cœur has a clockwise one going up and an anti clockwise one coming down.


Spectacular views of Paris from the dome of Sacré Cœur


At night Sacré Cœur is a pretty scary sight.


Not near as scary as this strange grave in the Montmatre Cemetry…


…or the walls of bones lining the catacombs under the streets of Paris

The French are right up there with the Italians when it comes to decorative ornamentation

All through Paris are statues, ornamental gates, arches and fences and everywhere you look, beautifully decorated buildings. This all forms a backdrop to some of the most spectacularly presented humans on earth. The whole decoration thing went haywire back in the 1700’s and the Palace of Versailles  is a grand example of decorative excess. Unfortunately it was all carried out with tax payers money, bleeding the country into poverty, so the tax payers revolted and chopped off all the offending heads.


Hall of Mirrors, Palace of Versailles 


Chapel, Palace of Versailles


The Palace of Versailles has amazing gardens covering 100’s of hectares. This is the view Louis XIV would have enjoyed as he sat to gaze out his window.


This would have been Louis’ bedroom – complete with everything except a flushing toilet

This room was used by Marie Antoinette when the disgruntled taxpayers came searching for her.

These elegant ladies in all their decorative finery were apparently riddled with nits and lice, had bad breath and didn’t smell too good, as it was believed at the time, that washing with water put germs into the pores of your skin causing nasty diseases.

This little abode was built to house the mistresses of the then rulers.


Busking with Tuba

How not to sell glasses

LEONARDO VIA IPHONE

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Back in the early 1500’s Leonardo Da Vinci was busy filling notebook after notebook with all his accumulated knowledge on painting, anatomy, mechanics, hydraulics and pretty well everything he observed.  One of the greatest thinkers of the renaissance, Leonardo probably never imagined his notes would be translated, digitized and made freely available to artists in the 21st Century. Yesterday I downloaded iBooks to my iPhone, and there for free, in the iBooks download section, was “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci – Complete” thanks to the efforts of Project Gutenberg.

It makes fascinating reading and is packed with practical methods and techniques used by Da Vinci’s in his paintings and drawings.

Here is his technique for checking that a painted shadow is the right color.

“When you draw a figure and you wish to see whether the shadow is the proper complement to the light, and neither redder nor yellower than is the nature of the colour you wish to represent in shade, proceed thus. Cast a shadow with your finger on the illuminated portion, and if the accidental shadow that you have made is like the natural shadow cast by your finger on your work, well and good; and by putting your finger nearer or farther off, you can make darker or lighter shadows, which you must compare with your own.”

The complete Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci are freely available through the Project Gutenberg website.  Downloadable in a number of formats all under 1.5MB

TAORMINA WALLS

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Arriving home means sifting through thousands of photos. Some are rubbish and should be discarded, but rarely are, others are really interesting.

While wandering around the streets of Taormina I couldn’t help photographing some of the incredible old stone work. Not scenic and spectacular, but amazing just the same. I didn’t notice when I took the photographs, just how interesting and varied the walls were.

Looking at them, one after another, on a computer screen shows just how unique the stone work is.  Layers of broken roof tiles and terracotta paving blocks are woven between the large pale stones which are occasionally punctuated by black lava rocks from Mt Etna.

The ancient binary data hidden in the layers of this wall is surely the basis for a best selling novel. Possibly called “The Sicilian Code”.

VIA HONG KONG

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After the busy pace of the workshop, we figured a week relaxing in Hong Kong would be a good idea. The idea of relaxing in a city that only seems to run at full speed, was probably misguided.  So, rather than relax, we went for the full on shopping, galleries, bars, tours type of recreation.

Hong Kong seems to run full paced 24 hours a day.

The Harbour is spectacular, serving as a transport route and recreation area at the same time.

The citys heart is buzzing with lights and color, while above street level is the patchwork of balconys, windows and washing that make up the high rise appartments of the inner city dwellers.

The shops are interesting but some of the names don’t translate too well to English.

Across the boarder into Shenzhen, pressure from street vendors increases as does the number of taxis waiting at the local rank.

The Rickshaw may have disappeared, but the chicken delivery cycle has sure taken off.

The humble push bike in China has resisted the temptation to switch to light weight aluminium and carbon fibre construction. Instead, preferring the solid reliability of braced and reinforced steel.

For me, the most fascinating area of the city is the food markets, which in the Mon Kok district seem to blend with the bird, goldfish and pet markets. These live sea snakes fall into the food category.

This bag of tasty live toads are also classed as food (and delicious according to the store owner).

These weird, distorted goldfish are from the pet market…

…as is this strange little kitten.

Strangely distorted rabbits are also available from the pet market

At the bird markets you can pick up birds from all over the world. There are bags of live grass hoppers and packets of writhing grubs available to keep your bird in top condition.

The food markets not only sell live produce, but will chop up almost anything for you to take home and barbecue.

Store holders engaged in a game of some kind of checkers.

This man, sitting on a tiny stool with a handful of tools, will fix up your worn out shoes in next to no time for a couple of dollars.

In the half light through our hotel window,  primitive bamboo scaffolding contrasts starkly with the modern high rise construction. It seems to sum up the strange, diverse character of Hong Kong.