25 December: Magic Revealed – Xmas Light Displays
Clown shape - Christmas Wonderland
Have you ever been enthrawlled by the sight of those amazing Xmas light displays that become such a feature of the Yuletide season? Darkness hides the ‘how it’s done’ and all you see is the vibrant colours and the shapes formed.
SEE MORE IMAGES IN THE BEHANCE FOLIO – CLICK HERE!
READ ABOUT THE “CHRISTMAS WONDERLAND” – CLICK HERE!
Two Angels
Spikey star
25 December: Lunch in the Park
We Hope You All Had a Great One Too ! !
Christmas lunch in Toowoomba’s Botanic Gardens
Toowoomba Botanic Gardens setting
Smoked trout, salad, fruits ad watermelon – A Christmas Dinner feast
A bull ant tucks in as well!
Lying back after lunch – looking skyward
Maybe Christmas is for the birds!
20+21 December: Heading Home
It always rains when we turn for home. The Newell Highway, rain and big B-Double truck rattling along the flood tortured bitumen is an experience that is full of tension.
Drivin' down the highway - Photo: Vicky
Another thing – Don’t check into motels that are too close to the highway. Sometimes, in the dead of night, it feels as if the truck is coming through the room …
The sun did shine @ Forbes …
Outside the Forbes Courthouse
Santa up a pole
19 December: Milawa Bread, Cheese and Wines
A Mt Buffalo snack - Olive breads, soft and hard cheeses and nuts
North-eastern Victoria is renown for fine foods and wines – While at Mt Buffalo we feasted on sour dough and olive breads made locally. The olive bread came from the Milawa Bakery and when we left the mountain we went in search of some more of the luscious bread. Milawa Bakery is situated in the Cheese Factory so we stocked up on some Christmas delicacies.
Just nearby Brown Brothers vineyards stretch across the landscape, and they have wine tastings at their cellar door – we went in …
Out the cellar door with a few bottles
For more on the Milawa foods:
15~18 December: Mt Buffalo National Park
Revisiting the mountain will require many posts. Here is a taster …
To see the FULL Mt Buffalo image package visit our ‘PLACES VISITED’ Blog – alongthetrack.wordpress.com
Victoria Cooper and Doug Spowart in the Mt Buffalo Chalet garden
Doug and Vicky at the Gorge lookout, Mt Buffalo National Park
Vicky photographing flowers at Mt Dunn, Mt Buffalo National Park
Doug photographing near The Horn, Mt Buffalo National Park
14 December: Hume Dam
View of water from the dam wall
We’ve visited the Hume Dam that block the flow of the Murray River near Albury – After all the recent rains the dam has filled.
Looking towards the dam
The water height has varied from the last time we saw it te years ago …
A comparison of dam water levels @ Bell Bridge 2000 ~ 2011
14 December: Dining lunch @ the Niagara Cafe Gundagai
Stepping back to the 1950s and 60s – Dining in a cafe with cubicles and the locals.
The phrase ‘when I was young’ is so cliché and yet as one grows older fragments of past memories emerge from everyday experience. The fragments trigger memories of simpler – less complex times and simple pleasures.
The town of Gundagai is part way along the Hume highway between Sydney and Albury. We stopped in town looking for a place to get some lunch – a takeaway maybe, the simple staple of the Australian traveller – a meat pie, tomato sauce and a can of Coke. Bakeries in the town looked closed, swish fine dining cafes looked too predictably up-market.Mid way along the main street was situated the quaint facade of curved glass, tiled step and menu taped to the window of the Niagara Cafe. We walked in to a 1950s bench-styed dark stained seating area. At each table salt and pepper shakers sat astride red-capped dark sauce bottles and a menu. The table tops were a pea green and walls covered in newspaper reports, horse racing photo finish pictures, paired Australian and Greek flags, annotated photos and other ephemera.We checked out the menu ….
Here are a few images – SEE THE BEHANCE FOLIO – Click Here
The front door of the Niagara Cafe
A couple of patrons
13 December: James Turrell – Skyspace ‘Within without’
On three occasions we have visited the Turrell Skyspace artwork @ the National Gallery of Australia during our time in Canberra. Turrell states that:
My work is about space and the light that inhabits it. It is about how you confront that space and plumb it with vision. It is about your seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking into fire.
For us the Skyspace was like visiting a physical and visual phenomenon. The images that follow record our experience of the artwork – and some of the fun.
An external view of the Skyspace installation
Inside the Skyspace installation – standing before the stupa
Vicky looking up towards the sky opening
4 views of the Skyspace opening
Sitting in the sun spot – two separate views
A wedding photographed in Skyspace
Vicky photographs fellow visitor
Sun circle projection
Inside Turrell’s Skyspace with friends doing selfies
The two of us before the stupa at the end of our visit
A wedding photographed in Skyspace
12 December: Meetings – John Reid + Maurice O’Riordan
Vicky meets with external supervisor John Reid in our accommodations in the artists’ flat at the Australian National University’s Art School. Their meeting strategised the final refinement and structure of her PhD exegesis.
Doug meets with the editor of Art Monthly Australia Maurice O’Riordan. The office for AMA is situated in the garrett-like clocktower of the School of Art @ the Australian National University. Access is gained by climbing a narrow set of stairs that seem as if they are piled upon the boxes of past issues. My interest in meeting with Mauice is that AMA has just published my review of the 2011 Olive Cotton Photographic Award. SEE Current Issue
The stairs to the AMA office
Maurice with the latest issue of AMA
Maurice and I spoke about different aspects of the critical review of art and artists in Australia, the problems of the regional artist, the important role that journals such as AMA play in the discussion about art and practice, changes in photography as art over the last 20 years and the demise of Photofile.
Photos and words: Doug
11 December: Visiting the National Gallery of Australia
Visiting the National Gallery for the first time in 14 months gave an opportunity to see the new Entrance and Foyer as well as, in another post – the James Turrell ‘Within without’ work.
The new extensions add a new box to the front of the building certainly provides an entrance way to the building that adds impact to the visitor’s first encounter with the space. Gone is the revolving door and the feeling of coming in a side entrance. Gallery staff welcome you and direct you to get your tickets for the Renaissance show, or to drop your excess gear at the cloakroom or see arty stuff in the bookshop.
As if to be uplifted to the space where the art is an escalator beckons, when we were there it squeaked disconcertedly, and gradually your anticipation for being drawn into art Nirvana is met by …
THE LIFT LOBBY!! A side-step to the right placed us on track to the exhibition galleries – It is as if the floor plan needed to be shifted 4 metres for the two buildings to line up.
Anyway there were some great shows and art to see and some favourite artworks to re-connect with.
In the PHOTOSPACE Gallery area the exhibition Upstairs downstairs: Photographs of Britain 1874-1990 presented a selection of classic documentary works from familiar names including Julia Margaret Cameron, John Thomson, Cecil Beaton, Felix H. Man, Humphrey Spender, Edith Tudor Hart, Bill Brandt, Grace Robertson, Bert Hardy, David Moore, David Potts, Roger Mayne, Lewis Morley, Chris Killip, Martin Parr and Nick Waplington.
Photography has long served the rich, the famous and the infamous. It has also had many practitioners who have championed the lives of those whose names history has never known. The social documentary tradition, focusing on the lives of ordinary people – usually those powerless to tell their story – has been a driving force in British photography. This is hardly a surprise in a society traditionally marked by class divisions and prejudices. (From the exhibition blurb)
This little gallery space in what was once the bookshop houses the NGA’s photography exhibition presence and while other media ancient and new get large prominent acreage this what we, as the photography interested public, have for the moment as an exhibition space.
Later we visited the big ‘blockbuster’ Renaissance show and, as part of any NGA visit, the Members Lounge to sit and ponder the art seen and experienced over a coffee and friand.
One other new building activity underway at the National Gallery is a bird busily making a nest home in Neil Dawson’s suspended orb sculpture ‘Diamonds’. Interesting …
Neil Dawson’s ‘Diamonds’
wotwedid 