Eyeing the future

School starts on Monday, National Art School in Sydney. New school, new life, same eyes.

Houses needing rowboats

There are a row of houses in Patonga whose only access is by boat. If you want this view...
you have to be prepared to ladle water out of your dingy and row across the inlet.

Climate change

I am back from the Land of the Long White Cloud to the Land of Humid Februaries. My route was circuitous, Dunedin to Sydney via Brisbane as there are currently no direct flights. It is only three hours flying time between Dunedin and Sydney but it feels like 1000km closer to the equator.

Mirror mirror on the wall

This mirror was in the wonderful 'whiskey' building in Oamaru that went into receivership the week after my visit.

Please and thank you

In Dunedin everyone thanks the bus drivers. The elderly, children in school uniforms, adolescents. Sometimes the bus driver thanks the passengers as well.

Modaks in Dunedin

Modaks has the world's best coffee: you get a good cup regardless of which staff member is making it. That is pretty special and the result of the owner's former job teaching coffee-making at the Polytech.
Modaks is also very supportive of local artists and features a revolving exhibition of local work on it walls.

Modaks Cafe is for sale in case you are interested. If it is sold, I am hoping the new owners are just as committed to good coffee (and art).

Dunedin sketches

Cats, Cafes and Landscapes. This sketch of the hills in NE Valley and other new drawings made around Dunedin are online at www.artsmitten.com

On Brighton Beach

Brighton Beach is just south of Dunedin. A southern Dunedin suburb. YouTube tells me this video is blocked from viewers in Germany because the music on the video is copyrighted there. Sorry!

Nature takes over

The honeysuckle is taking over the house next door. It looks as if someone walked out one day and never returned. Honeysuckle tendrils reach forward and are slowly consuming the house and car. The flowers are so sweet smelling though that you forget the dereliction of the house.

Oamaru

Oamaru has a population of 20,700 and buildings to rival Berlin. Locally quarried limestone Oamaru Stone is known around New Zealand as a beautiful building material, especially where ornate moulding is required. It was used here in Oamaru in the 1880s when Oamaru had a reputation for the best built and most mortgaged town in New Zealand.

The bigger building with Bank of New South Wales carved into the top now houses the Forrester Gallery, one of many galleries and craft establishments that make the town worth a lengthy visit. The smaller building is a coffee shop, one that made me miss the coffee at Modaks in Dunedin.

Dunedin Shop Window

The endless summer comes to an end. Yesterday felt like 28C. Today they forecast 17C but the thermometer said 12C.

Frankie and Tasman

This is Frankie. She lives in Melbourne. Purrs as she jumps uninvited onto your lap. Was rescued from the pet pound and has become her owner's joy.
Tasman lives in Dunedin on the other side of the Tasman Sea. She too is her owner's joy, but nips at strangers if they irritate her. Here she is eying up a nip-candidate.

Student city

Dunedin is a university town and many houses in the northern end of town are student accommodation. The new year is about to start and students are moving in ... pushing furniture along the streets on shopping trolleys.

Cooper's Freud

Dunedin and nearby Port Chalmers are full of such wonderful art. How could I have forgotten? It is such a pleasure to be in a city where citizens buy local art because they love it. The result is a plethora of art which is every bit as good the art on show in Berlin, Cologne and Zurich.
This is ceramic artist Jim Cooper's Freud. He stands in the garden of a gallery in Port Chalmers. Freud has lost is arms, but is still charming none-the-less.

Flax

The Ralph Hotere park overlooking a milk blue Otago Harbour is a wonderful native garden. In it there are several different types of flax, a plant I love. New Zealand flax (Phormium) is not at all like the northern hemisphere flax (Linum) but the fibres of both can be used.

Dunedin's Botanic Gardens

Antipodean houses ...

These houses are .... guess where...





The first, third and last are in Dunedin's North East Valley. The second is in Melbourne's Brunswick.

Sulphur crested cockatoos

Cockatoos are wonderful to draw, especially when they are tame and sit around on balcony furniture like model subjects. I have just put a series of cockatoo drawings online
at artsmitten.com

Melbourne Dress Shop

Ceres .... art and nature

I just discovered what must be the best use of land under high tension wires that I have ever seen. Ceres is a community based garden in Melbourne's Brunswick, a garden with a difference. Amongst the vegetable gardens and fruit trees there is a lily pond. Walk a little further and you see whimsical sculptures with chooks scratching around them.
A notice on a fence describes the work involved with the free range chickens and invites people to take part. There is a green technology workshop, a solar paneled ablutions block, various descriptive projects that show you how water and electricity is used, a bicycle shop and a cafe selling local organic products that is very hard to walk past. Beside the cafe is a big "350" sign made of cut-outs. It is a sign that unites people around the world who are fighting to make our governments commit to 350 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere