Archive for the ‘water’ Category

Sunrise On The Beach

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

This is not the Nut at Stanley, Tasmania, nor is it Capetown, South Africa – it is a cloud formation observed from  my usual beach here in Montevideo last week as I arrived on the beach just before sunrise .  That may sound impressive, but here in the southern hemisphere a third of the year’s gone already! and we’re well on the way to the winter solstice, 21/6, and so the days are getting shorter.  Frankly it is much easier to be on the beach to see the sun rise at 6-45 am than at 5am in the middle of the summer!  Today at mahjong a friend I often meet when walking there commented she hadn’t seen me on the beach in a while – that is partly because she has been going later! and partly because since our car’s been in the shop a few day this week I have been walking closer to home – it’s a good step just to get there from our place.  So, I thought I’d show you pics from about 10 days ago,  taken just before 7am with hardly a soul there…..  

About half an hour after sun-up, on my way back along the beach the  plovers were making a racket at the water’s edge.  I do love them.  They are so noisy, strident and insistent, quite bossy.

Inspiring – and yes, I am doing something about it; there is a new piece in reds and oranges now under way, non pictorial in just those colours.  It’s very red, and I’m off upstairs to work more on it right now.

A Bird’s Eye View

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008

Silhouetted against the view from the Q1 Building, Surfers’ Paradise, from the 77th floor to be exact – is one of my sisters, who lives nearby at Nerang. Her transport department job gives her an intimate working knowledge of routes through the area and people-moving problems, and there’s no better place from which to view the region than up this tallest building on the coast, probably Queensland. It’s amazing how widespread and important waterway development is there, where to be able to say ‘water frontage’ adds value to any property. And looking south to Tweed Heads in the far distance is just this ongoing coastal development strip. Looking in the opposite direction it is the same – up to well past Brisbane. Despite the very mild, ie for Queensland ‘cold’ weather, there were people swimming and surfing, like the tiniest ants below us as we gazed down… a cluster of people with blue and yellow surfboards are way down on the sand below, indicated surfing school was ‘in’ that day.

For some reason the toilet facilities were further up on the 78th floor, and naturally I had to go try them out. No bathrooms with a view, though you could actually access an outside verandah area and enjoy the rather cold wind whistling by.

Our next move was lunch and then to a nearby arts centre where we realy enjoyed the movie “Children of The Silk Road” and popped in to see a Brett Whitely exhibition in the same centre – joy oh joy, my favourite, Self Portrait in Studio was there – it was the controversial 1976 Archibald Prize winner – I’ve always thought it very clever, really witty. And actually the self portait part of it was himself to a ‘T’, too. There were several other marvellous paintings and drawings, and a 50 minute doco of BW talking about his work, paintings, drawings and sculptures. What an articulate interesting person he was talking about his own work – we had to watch the whole thing, spellbound, and so left ourselves no time for the sculpture walk outside, but had to leave it for next time.

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Another Earthy Site

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

Another site I wandered into this morning while browing in the southproject links list, is this one, at first glance cute and crafty, but the message is anything but a cute commentary on the state of the world today: Las Piedras Rodantes Parlantes or to put it in english, The Talking Rolling Stones. With global climate change and the politics of water I find myself marvelling at the foresight of whoever it was who predicted that any Third World War would one day be fought over water.

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