It is almost a shame to be leaving winter behind again for another year. No more leaves lying thick on soggy paths. No more evening picnics at Wategoes Beach where the sand is quiet due to the water being a little too cold to dip into. No more long nights and short days, no more hearty soups and socks and boots. At the most I'll probably only see a hundred winters in my life. Sorry to see it go, but glad for a spring and a summer. I'll be glad to see the Water Dragon that lives in our backyard wake from its long winter sleep. I'll be glad when the mangoes start to take shape on the tree at our neighbours place: which hangs over our fence. I'll be glad for long distance ocean swims, tan lines and sunglasses. I'll be glad that I probably have a hundred summers. Photos and text by me www.davehickson.net
I entered this piece, called "Barcelona", into the Border Art Prize at Tweed Regional Gallery this month and it won the Shirley Kennedy Award. Barcelona is a wooden assemblage - wall piece with acrylic paint and oil pastel. Shirley said she really liked the composition and colour choices. Great to win a prize!
You can find out more about the Border Art Prize and other shows, at the Tweed Regional Gallery's website at the following link: http://artgallery.tweed.nsw.gov.au I got this photo in Byron on Wednesday this week. I loved the contrast between the gentleman with his white collar buttoned up in the background and the young guy cruising past - it seemed to speak about the diversity of the Bay.
We are travelling to the Daintree north of Cairns tomorrow to help out planting trees on one of the Rainforest Rescue properties there. Rainforest Rescue has bought a number of properties in the Daintree World Heritage Rainforest over the years, to protect the endangered Cassowary and preserve an ecosystem that has been at risk of over development. You can read more about Rainforest Rescue and the amazing work they do, not only in the Daintree, but in Tasmania, Indonesia and Ecuador, on their website at http://www.rainforestrescue.org.au/ I'm still enjoying a bit of iphoneography, and after dropping the car at the local mechanics the other day I walked back over the Billinudgel overpass and got this shot. I love the repeating lines that become more emphasised in black and white: and the sun behind seems to add a bit of drama.
Also I'm working on a couple of sculptures to show at the latest Hammer and Hand exhibition opening June 20. Everyone is welcome and the opening night should be fun, with Kate Le Jam's brilliant Gypsy Moondogs playing a set or two. Hope to see you there. We were in Sydney last weekend and I managed to catch some of the Biennale and Sol Lewitt's retrospective at the Art Gallery of NSW. Sol Lewitt died in 2007, but a lot of this show includes recreated wall drawings that are made from specific detailed instructions Lewitt left for assistants and galleries to make these works. Lewitt explains this process in a 1967 essay where he wrote: 'In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work’ . The drawings are made with thousands of lines some creating planes of the most magnificent colour (as above). Sol Lewitt is showing at the the Gallery until August 3rd.
Wandering through Sydney after the gallery I was drawn to all things geometric in the city including the traditional giant chess game in Hyde Park. http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/media-office/sol-lewitt-exhibition/ I've been making a series of pastel drawings lately. Just experimenting with the medium. I usually use watercolour and ink for drawing, but I do like the sort of alive look the pastel seems to have after I have scratched back into it with a knife.
There are a few more pastels on the "Drawings" page on my website. The Lantern Parade festival is held in Lismore every year in June during the winter solstice. I visited their workshop yesterday to meet with the director of the festival about getting some TAFE students involved in making lanterns for this year's parade. The workshop is an incredibly surreal and creative place with massive figures and bright colours everywhere. The workshop has to move soon to another premises and they are fundraising at the moment to help that transition.
The Lantern parade group is available to make lanterns for other events too - and will have lanterns at the Byron Bay Blues Festival this weekend. http://www.lanternparade.com/ Attending the Byron Bay "March in March" a couple of weeks ago gave me renewed faith in the people of our shire, and country, to be willing to express disillusionment and a feeling of being misrepresented on a large number of issues. Whether it is CSG exploration and mining to the treatment of asylum seekers we have a community that is concerned that we may not be doing the right thing in these cases and others. When we look back through history or to international examples, we can see occasions when similar actions have been viewed in hindsight as massive mistakes, for example: Pollution of vast areas of farmland and water in the United States due to fracking, or the case of asylum seekers from Germany prior to WWII being turned away from many countries, even though they were escaping certain extermination (described in the book and movie The Voyage of the Damned).
It is encouraging that the people who wanted to express something in March were from all parts of our community. I took the photo above and it seemed to partly sum it up for me; the guy in the Korn t-shirt quietly reflecting for a second, the child - our next generation - being held up as our concern for the future in the foreground. I know there are arguments for both sides of any policy or decision, but most of the arguments put forward by the March in March were definitely worth reminding our governments and nation as a whole. The Byron Arts Classic opens this Friday 10th Jan at 6pm. I was helping to hang the show earlier in the week, and it looks like it will be really worth going. Over three hundred works on show from sculpture and photography to painting, drawing and printmaking. I have entered the small sculpture pictured. It's called "Your Voice - Make it Heard". There are two in the series so far, but I'm only putting one in this show. This piece is only about six inches high and is made from aluminium, wood and other media. The series was originally started as part of a Hammer and Hand challenge called 13 Boxes where members of the Hammer and Hand collective all worked with the same selection of materials to create sculpture and jewellery that represented their practice. http://www.byroncentre.com.au/whats-on/arts-classic/ http://www.hammerandhand.com.au/ We are in Sydney for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year. We are staying near the city but I have vowed to make a daily pilgrimage to one of the best ocean pools in NSW: Wylies Baths at Coogee. I took this photo this morning around 8.30 before the crowds arrived.
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