Shelbyville

Back from Melbourne

So we just got back from a week in the great southern cultural haven that is Melbourne. And in true Melbourne style, it was grey, rainy, and utterly freezing cold - but that didn't inhibit this intrepid adventurer. My beloved Melbourne Design Guide received plenty of use, and is now looking very, very worn-in indeed. In comparison, my near-new Sydney Design Guide is yet to see such action (and oh, but it will)..!

    

These are just some of the highlights from the week (in no particular order):

Highlight #1 > The 3hr 'Walk to Art' tour where our guide, Bernie, introduced us to a whole raft of new arty spaces: a hidden gallery in the backstreets of Chinatown (an artist-run initiative called TCB); an upstairs artist's studio in Fitzroy; a wander through the enchanting Nicholson Building on Swanston St; a glimpse at a "gallery space" inside a row of old wooden mailboxes (see pic below); a drop-in to Craft Victoria to see a typography exhibition; down and through a myriad of laneways and subways glimpsing art installations and street art all the way; and finishing with a scrumptious platter of cheese and wine at the delightful Bar Lourinha.

    

Highlight #2 > The Rose Street Artists Market, held in a carpark/warehouse space down a backstreet in Fitzroy. Those lucky, lucky Melbourne people! In Sydney we get the Hope Street Markets once every 3 months, but in Melbourne they get an art + design market every week. And it's really good too. Lucky buggers.

    

Highlight #3 > The Medieval Imagination exhibition, currently showing at the State Library of Victoria. A whole room full of beautiful, sparkly, illuminated manuscripts. Has to be seen to be believed! And it's free!

Highlight #4 > An afternoon of badgemaking at Sticky in the very funky Degraves subway (impressively, Sticky is now open 6 days a week!), where I also got to meet some of the lovely girls who volunteer their services to keep the Sticky store running (hello to Miss Louisia - sorry, but your new badge dictates that there is now a second 'i' in your name). Oh, and the new badges I made will be available for purchase at the Hope Street Markets next weekend!...

    

Highlight #5 >  My first ever visit to the National Gallery of Victoria (coming straight from the ACCA - Australian Centre for Contemporary Art just around the corner). Wow, the NGV was incredible, architecturally and artistically. There's quite a mix of exhibitions too - I saw everything from breathtaking oil masterpieces (such as the dramatic painting pictured above), sculpture, decorative arts, contemporary Asian photography, and magical calligraphic ink paintings, right through to shocking WW2 etchings by Max Otto. Oh, and the gallery store is nearly as remarkable as the gallery.

    

Highlight #6 > bar crawling!! DD and I visited another few new bars - this time around we tried out the Gin Palace, the Order of Melbourne, Cookie, the Toff in Town, and Murmur. Almost went in to the Workshop bar, but heavy metal music ain't really my thing so we gave that one a miss. The Order of Melbourne (pic on the left) had the best vibe! Murmur offers some fantastic cocktails (pic on the right).

    

Highlight #7 > Finally, finally getting to see Pushka OPEN..! God knows I've been disappointed half a dozen times on previous visits, but finally I have now seen it open and enjoyed its alleyway ambience whilst sipping my 30th Melbourne latte chased down with a yummy Portugese tart (with chocolate inside!). Hooray! It's the little details that I like about Pushka - a grassy front-door mat, a cushy seat on the stair, little framed pictures adhered all along the alley wall, a miniature window 'gallery' called Twenty by Thirty (its dimensions in cm)... Good coffee too.

    

Highlight #8 > Ok, this might even have been my favourite find, if only because we just happened to stumble across it as a lovely little surprise whilst walking along Smith Street, Collingwood. Housed in what used to be a disco in a former life, it is now the wonderful Lost + Found Market, full of delightful secondhand vintage things just waiting to be rummaged through. I found myself a little Japanese recipe box and a wooden box of Conte crayons. Cool place - definitely drop by if you're into vintage things.

Well that's enough from me for now. I've a very busy week ahead - we are moving house next week, and I have a stall at the Hope Street markets to prepare stock for! Busy, busy...

More adventuring in Surry Hills...

Last week Tara and I ventured out (despite ominous rainy grey skies) to discover a whole new array of shops, galleries, and cafes around the southern end of Surry Hills and the northern end of Waterloo. Our adventure took us to one of my favourite and ever-so-magical places in Sydney: Doug up on Bourke.

Imagine a huge dimly-lit warehouse space crammed with all manner of intriguing antiquities, everything from old signs to school desks, pigeonhole shelves (which I adore!) to little wooden boxes, industrial furniture to assorted rustic bits and bobs, and you can begin to see why I find the place so charming. Too busy exploring the place for new market stall display ideas, I only took this one photo. Means you'll have to go there to experience it fully for yourself...

I was delighted to pick up a couple of new items to use for displaying products on my next few market stalls (Sydney Writers Festival zine fair and the Hope Street Markets both coming up in May!), including this little set of metal drawers and the envelope rack. The wooden 'religious' hand I found in the bargain bin at David Met Nicole, and the wonderful typesetters tray was a swap-deal with my boss who claims to have a whole lot of these in his garage!!

With these new goodies now ready to fill with lots of new handmade goodies, it's shaping up to be a very interesting newly-refurbished market stall next month..!

But back to the Surry Hills/Waterloo adventure... After Doug up on Bourke, Tara and I wandered around to a few of the cafes along Danks Street, stopping to explore the cluster of art gallery spaces in the PYD building. I discovered a lovely little jewellery gallery tucked up the back, and admired these 'married metal' rings by Melanie Ihnen.

I'd hoped to have lunch at Strangers With Candy, but alas it wasn't open. So Tara and I had tea and cake at the delightful Patisserie (yummy plum madeira cake and black vanilla tea!) before continuing on to Surry Hills via the designer furniture stores Anibou and FY2K.

Along Cleveland Street we stopped in at the Bargain Bazaar op shop before making our way to David Met Nicole (another shop of delights!) and then Bird textiles across the street. A quick detour down Crown St to visit the paper shop P2, and we were done - happy, but all adventured out for the day... :)

Life drawing and a glass of red

Recently I discovered that the Arthouse Hotel holds free life drawing classes on Monday evenings, so I thought I'd wander down after work on Monday and give the conte crayons and graphite sticks a bit of a whirl...

The classes are popular, make no doubt - both the Dome restaurant and the Gallery Bar were crowded, but it made for a great vibe. It's a fantastic venue, and the money saved on what would normally be a $10-$15 class can go towards the purchase of a glass of red (or two) to help loosen the drawing arm a little more. It's a win-win really.

I haven't been to life drawing for a while, so the warm-up sketches were exactly that - a warm-up. However, things were nicely warmed and improving by the end of the class, and these were the last 5 sketches of my evening:

Certainly was a fun, relaxing evening - I'm thinking it could become a semi-regular Monday night outing. Would also like to try the Arthouse's Tuesday night burlesque class too, the one with the wickedly intriguing name: Dr Sketchys. It's a bit pricey at $18, but how unique! I just have to give it a go...!

The fortnightly sketch

One of the goals I set myself this year was to keep pushing the bounds of my creativity and skills. To help this along, I decided to continue with the 'daily photo' (which I've been doing for 15 months now!), and to begin doing a 'fortnightly sketch/illustration' and a 'monthly painting' throughout 2008.

While slightly behind schedule, these are the first 5 sketches/illustrations for the year:

 

Most of these are the beginnings/parts of projects I'm currently working on, and some are the "practice" illustrations for the book alteration project I'm involved in (more about this in a future post!). As I complete each one I blu-tac it up on my studio wall, so I'm hoping that by the end of the year I'm going to have a wall full of drawings and lots of new illustrative techniques!

I have a few half-completed illustrations lying around my studio, and as I complete 5 or so sketches, I'll endeavour to post them up on Shelbyville (it helps me to have a bit of accountability to the general public!)...

Anyway, I must go and pack my bags for our weekend up in Woy Woy - tomorrow morning we're off on a kayaking + camping adventure!! :)

A 'creative adventure' through Surry Hills

On Thursday, by sheer happy twist of fate, my lovely friend Jay Dee was down in Sydney on the very day of her birthday. Having had a few weeks' notice of this, I decided to design her a 'creative adventure' as a special birthday treat. Knowing that Jay Dee likes all the things I do (art + design, jewellery, furniture + homewares, ceramics, funky clothes, photography, fine food, and inspirational places), it was easy enough for me to put together a day-trip that would encompass all these wonderful things in one easy-to-navigate locale: Surry Hills.

Using an accordion-fold Moleskine notebook as the basis for laying out the 'creative adventure' (and knowing it would become a lovely memento for Jay Dee to keep afterwards) I set about creating a timeline marked out with a number of possible stops. Beginning with breakfast at Toast at 8am and concluding at a store called Disrupt at 6pm, I filled the hours in between with 15 or so 'stops' that included a variety of shops + galleries, a restaurant, a cafe and even a silversmith studio, mapped out along a walkable route through Surry Hills.

Each 'stop' was allocated a spread in the Moleskine book, rubberstamped with the time of arrival, and collaged with pictures and cutouts to illustrate the location. In addition, each stop had its own 'creative challenge' to be undertaken by Jay Dee - some required drawing or photographing, some were intended for idea-collecting, others were simply about choosing a flavour, or writing down what was selected from the menu...

Here are a few of the spreads from the Moleskine, these photos taken before Jay Dee added her own embellishments during the adventure:

^ (1) 8am start at Toast cafe, which has the most spectacularly yummy food, and lots of quaint little details if you look about the room. Oh, and the morning sunlight is superb! This was where I gave Jay Dee the Moleskine and explained the workings of the adventure. (2) After a long and lazy breakfast and lots of catch-up chatter, we set off on our adventure at about the time most stores were opening their doors. Sabbia Gallery was one of our early stops, and delighted us with lots of beautiful ceramics and glassware.

^ Beyond Japan is a fairly new store on Albion St, and the proprietor was keen to know about our adventure. He even gifted us with our choice of origami cranes (usually reserved for the kiddies...). Sweet.

^ (1) Metalab is tucked down a little sidestreet off of Crown St, and its current exhibition featured metalsmithed hearts (hence the love heart). It's a gorgeous little gallery, and also hosts jewellery workshops in their cute little work area. Chat to Cesar when you visit - he's super lovely! (2) Somedays and Coco Repose were next on the trail...

^ (1) Lunch, if you can't guess from the pictures, was at a restaurant called Bird Cow Fish. We were a little late for the lunch menu, but solaced ourselves with a cheese platter and red wine - delightful, and particularly appropriate because cheese is Jay Dee's most cherished food... (2) An afternoon snack was scheduled for 4pm at a lovely cafe called Coffee, Tea or Me? because I just had to offer Jay Dee the experience of a Pat & Stick icecream cookie. Divine.

^ (1) Orson + Blake. (2) Cloth. Jay Dee's challenge in this store was to buy as many favourite fabric offcuts as she liked (Cloth has a whole table of beautiful, beautiful offcuts from Julie Patterson's range of screenprinted fabrics).

And some photos from the adventure itself:

^ Straight into it! She's had the Moleskine for 5 minutes, and she's already sketching in it - that's why I like this girl so much!!

^ Red doors, cute fabrics, a palette of greens...

^ An exhibition of naturally dyed fabrics in Planet; a ceramic creation in Sabbia Gallery; Jay Dee sketching in Beyond Japan.

^ Admiring the street art; easy signage; a mushroom detail in Somedays.

^ Inspiring things to see in Pain de Quotidien, Metalab, and Cloth.

So much fun, I can't wait to do it again with a whole swag of new 'stops' and inspirational places. If anyone's keen to participate in the next adventure, email me and let's see what we can organise... (I can't promise you'll get a handmade Moleskine keepsake though) ;)

And if you're keen on designing your own adventure, I found the Urban Walkabout maps, Timeout magazine, the Slow Guide to Sydney, and the Sydney Design Guide all utterly indispensible in helping me plan the day. Well worth checking out each and every one of these wonderful things!

Out and about in Sydney

One of my favourite things to do on my days off is to snuggle up into a corner of the couch with my latest copy of Sydney's Time Out magazine -  an absolute bible of things to do and see in this town, and an entertaining read as well.

 

Which was why I was so damn pleased to score a year's subscription when they published a photo I submitted to the magazine's 'City Snaps' section in December last year.

(If you've got some interesting Sydney-ish photos lying around, I'd certainly encourage you to submit them. Everyone loves to win a free subscription!)

Gleaning much from my Time Out magazines, DD and I have been doing + seeing plenty over the last few weekends.

On Saturday we spent the day on an architectural tour of The Rocks (hosted by the Historic Houses Trust) which also included entry to the Susannah Place museum. It threatened rain, but thankfully didn't, although the rain clouds added some nice drama to our early-morning snaps of an arriving cruise liner:

The walking tour of The Rocks was pretty good, but I found the couple of hours we spent in the Susannah Place museum were even better. For a museum, it's so unique - a row of four terrace houses (built in the mid 1800s) incorporating a re-created 1915 corner store. Parts of the museum are maintained in "original" condition (with all their layers of past interiors + occupants), while other parts re-create distinct eras of domestic working class life. I was fascinated by the details, the textures and the layered histories of the place. Worth a visit if you're into that kind of thing.

After Susannah Place, we wandered down to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) to see the Tim Hawkinson exhibition, which was just fantastic. Unfortunately photography wasn't allowed :( but I'd definitely recommend seeing it for yourself before it finishes in early March. Tim's art is very unique - a mix of the kinetic, mechanical, aural, and organic, if you can possibly imagine such a thing. I was very excited by his highly inventive use of unusual materials, and particularly like this 'picture' he created from a canvas and 2 pieces of old clothing:

The weekend before, DD and I did a "trifecta" of museums... started at the Justice and Police Museum, then over to the Australian Museum, and finishing up at the Powerhouse Museum.

^ This was the 'dark and scary' room in the J&P Museum, a vault full of murder weapons and haunting photos of criminals. Creepy.

While we only just caught the last day of the J&P Museum's 'Tough Men, Hard Times' exhibition, the Australian Museum has a couple of brilliant exhibitions on right now that are continuing for another month or two:

^ Downstairs is the Face to Face exhibition, an incredibly evokative display of ape portraits taken by a world-class photographer with a message to communicate. A must-see.

^ Upstairs on the top floor, is the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, and while it mightn't sound terribly exciting, it'll surprise you with its brilliance. I loved it, and others must have too, because there were A LOT of people milling around, to the point where some pictures had waiting times if you wanted a closer look. But despite the crowding, there's some very impressive photography on show.

Elsewhere in the Musuem, we delighted in the Skeleton Room (as did many excited children). A whole room full of a vast array of skeletal forms and low-lighting - it was a photography bonanza!!!

I especially loved the skeleton bird in its cage:

Of course there was also the mezzanine floor of minerals and insects to explore + photograph, particularly the cases of moths and butterflies (I have a real thing for those framed cases of mounted butterflies):

It was a bit of a whirlwind visit to the Australian Museum, so I'd love to go back again sometime in the next few months, even if only to photograph and sketch/paint some more of these things (I'm really quite cheap to entertain...). I find that going to a Museum is like stepping into a little self-contained world where your attention is focused exclusively on the miniature one minute, and the infinite the next. And there's something quite alluring about that, especially to an artist!

Anyone want to join me next time on a visit to the Skeleton Room? ;)

Tagged!

I just discovered that Ms Dudley Redhead has tagged me for the You Make My Day award...! I hadn't a clue what she was going on about, until I did a little research and discovered that the You Make My Day award works thus:

1. Write a post with links to 5 blogs that make your day.
2. Acknowledge the post of the award giver.
3. Tell the award winners that they've won by commenting on their blogs.

And so, to fulfill my duty in passing on the aforementioned award, I wish to nominate:

The Matchbox Project  - because I applaud such a wonderfully delightful urban experiment as this. The Matchbox Project entails leaving creatively filled and decorated matchboxes in secret locations around the city to be randomly discovered by unsuspecting members of the general population. This well-written blog documents the matchboxes made, their 'drop-off' locations, and sometimes even the happy results of a found matchbox...

Keri Smith's Wish Jar  -  because Keri Smith is my hero. She's equal parts author, illustrator and guerilla artist, and she has dedicated her life and career to the pursuit of creativity. And for this I love her immensely.

Sacred Heart Arts  -  because I've followed Shell's blog ever since I started blogging, and I've been witness to her incredible artistic journey. She's a girl following her dreams to be an artist, and she documents it all so openly and honestly through her blog. (Sidenote: it's a bit of an oddity, but Shell and I share the same name, age, hometown, relationship status, home ownership, and have even attended the same university).

MadeIt blog / Indie Art & Design blog  -  This is a joint winner, because these two blogs provide an amazing PR service and platform for indendent creators across Australia, and that deserves acknowledgement!

Moleskinerie  -  because this is a firm favourite in my Bookmarks folder, and one which I've tellingly re-labelled as 'Moleskine porn'. While technically not a blog, it is however a hugely inspiring site with lots of photos of the wonderful things that creative people do with their Moleskines.

Now, as part two of the Award ceremony, I'd like to offer my sincerest thanks to Dudley Redhead for her nomination and kind words about Shelbyville. When I was still very new to Sydney, it was such a thrill to meet Tara (she bought one of my zines at the Sydney Writer's Festival) and to later discover that we shared a great deal of arty/designerly sensibility. Definitely check out her blog if you haven't already - she's much more diligent with her posting than I am, and she's witty too :)

Must run. Time now to leave those comments on my nominees blog-sites just like I'm supposed to...