London

While I am traveling I will try to keep in touch by posting photos and some commentary here. In the spirit of this being a blog about art, I’ll try to avoid straight holiday snaps, and keep to either: pictures of art, potential sources of future inspiration for work, or photos I have worked on in PS.

Unfortunately I think my photography skills are still pretty basic, but hopefully they might improve having this two month period to work on them. I can usually manage to make photos usable for inclusion in a mixed media art work, but they really aren’t of a standard where they can stand alone yet.

If you are interested in seeing some more photos of the trip, more in the line of snaps, I will be posting them on my Flickr page.

Although I am in St Davids in the far south-west of Wales, today I will post a couple of photos of our first stop in the UK in London (Twickenham). This was really just a “recovery” stop, but the Thames was across the road, and the park across from us was just lovely. I’ve hurriedly put together a 360 deg panorama I took while standing in the park. It’s pretty rough, and needs more work, but it’ll give you the idea.

This is a view of the local boys’ school, taken from the same park. You can see that even though it is the end of April, and lots of bulbs and fruit trees are flowering, there are still some trees without their new spring growth.

I hope to have some photos of Wales to post soon. I experimented with using “camera raw”, and am having a bit of a time working out how to open the files! Raw files, for those who don’t know, is apparently a better format to use unless you are an expert and can be sure of always getting the exposure etc absolutely correct. There is more capability to modify the file without losing information. Raw files are smaller than uncompressed tiffs, and have much more information than jpgs. I made the mistake of thinking that all I needed to do was to change the setting on my camera to “raw” and start shooting….silly me! Anyway, I’ll share what I learn, once I can get it all to work.

Studio Update

The last month before I left Australia was just mad as we tried to get organized for the trip and I also attempted to finish off my next artists book. I did not manage to make that much progress with the book, but I have at least made the porcelain pages. After I saw the test tiles, I decided to use the Imperial Porcelain . I prefer the slightly off-white colour of the clay for these particular images and the translucency is excellent.

I’ve also decided to fire the decals quite high (1100deg C) as the sepia colouring at this temperature is closer to my original digital images. I took a quick shot of some of them for you to see. It was so good to be working with clay again – I felt productive and competent, although it certainly is more physically demanding than some other work I do.

Tokyo

As some of you probably know, the flight from Australia to the UK can involve spending between 20- 26 hours in the air! Avoiding jetlag and just general exhaustion has been a major concern for me in planning the trip. This is especially important, not just because it might take me longer than most to recover, but because jetlag specifically affects the same area of the brain as is a problem in cfs, stuffing up circadian rhythms, sleep cycles etc.

The route we decided on was Brisbane to Tokyo, stay 2 nights and then Tokyo to London. I have to confess I was absolutely over the moon when I found out we’d be stopping in Japan. I have wanted to go there for years and in particular I wanted to see some Jomon pottery.

Jomon pottery is prehistoric Japanese functional ware and represents the birth of pottery in Asia. The first pieces date back to 10,000 BC but Jomon ware continues on for about 9,000 years and not surprisingly goes through various stages of development, becoming quite baroque in the middle stages before refining into simpler designs again. As well as cooking pots, religious pieces in the form of “dogu” (figures) and masks were made.

My very favourite types are the so-called “flame pots” and I was thrilled to see that the Tokyo National Museum had on display the very one I’ve admired for so long. Back when I was studying ceramics, I did an assignment on Jomon ware and I was amazed to find that I recognized almost all the pots and figures on display at the Museum of Archeology. To see these works of art dating from before history was recorded, made me feel incredibly lucky.

Jomon "Flame" pot

Jomon Dogu figure