On Friday night after work I headed into the city and went and had a look through the OPEN STUDIOS in the Nicholas building on flinders St….

THE NICHOLAS BUILDING has been the creative hub for all kinds of arts practices and businesses, in the Melbourne CBD for years.

With working artists studios and diverse creative community, it is the last remaining building of it’s type, not just in Melbourne, but all of Australia.

The building sadly is fading, runing into dangerous disrepair despite having high rent and the State’s highest heritage protection, and offers an uncertain future for tenants. On the corner of Flinders Lane and Swanston Street, the Nicholas Building is as central as one can get, to the numerous art galleries, fashion boutiques, cafe’s, and tourist zones of the busy cosmopolitan city of Melbourne.

Text by Garry Shepherd

It was fantastic to be in a building with so much fantastic creative history… There was alot of jewellers and fantastic milliners as well as visual artists….

This fantastic image is from Hellblazer!'s flikr photostream

Im finally going to be showing my series of Photogravure “Unlocking the Secrets of Flight” at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale in September…..
As part of the Fringe section of the Biennale I will have pride of place in the windows and inside the wonderful Jo Maxwells store The Elephant Patch in Creswick from the 4th September to the 4th October.

The Ballarat Foto Biennale [BIFB'09] runs from the 4th of September to 4th October 2009
The festival, which grew out of two similar events as the Daylesford Foto Biennale in 2005 and 2007, will present a huge program of photographic events over multiple venues throughout Ballarat and the adjoining Hepburn Shire.

BIFB’09 will present a Core Exhibition Program of 20 of the best photography from across Australia and the world, including exhibiting artists from China, Poland, Lithuania, Italy, Germany, Hong Kong, USA & Canada.

The Art Gallery of Ballarat, the Mining Exhange, Post Office Gallery, Trades Hall, Ballarat Contemporary Arts Space, Town Hall, Mechanics Institute and Gold Museum at Sovereign Hill will all be used as BIFB’09 Core Program venues, and almost all are situated within 5 minutes walk of each other. All the Core Program venues, with the exception of the Gold Museum will have free admission.

The Core Exhibition Program will be accompanied by a vibrant open entry Fringe Exhibition Program staged at venues such as community halls, pubs, restaurants cafes and commercial galleries throughout Ballarat and the Hepburn Shire. BIFB’09 expects to include upwards of 75 such shows in its 2009 program.

BIFB’09 will also present a series of 5 nights of theatre style audio visual screenings by some of the world’s best photo documentary photographers throughout the month.

The BIFB’09 exhibitions and projections will be backed up by a fantastic educational program of artist floor talks, seminars, lectures, portfolio reviews and workshops, affording the opportunity for all lovers of photography to gain insights into all aspects of the photographic idiom.

Independent photographic associations and organisations will also hold their own individual events within the festival structure.

BIFB’09 will be the largest photographic event in the southern hemisphere for 2009, an experience not to be missed by all fans of photography and photographic art.

I have always been interested in Printmaking, from selling it to finally creating my own work…..  I have been greatly inspired by many artists but a few local artists have influenced me more than other…..

Norman Lindsay

Lindsay was born in Creswick only15 minutes from where i grew up  and I have been a huge fan of his beautiful etching my whole life…

Norman and Rose LindsayNorman was one of ten children of Dr and Mrs Charles Lindsay, of Creswick, Victoria. Remarkably, five of their progeny became artists of distinction. He is widely regarded as one of Australia’s greatest artists.

From an early age, Norman showed an outstanding ability to draw. He became the principal cartoonist for the Bulletin magazine, fought many controversies against “wowsers”, particularly defending his right to paint the nude, wrote novels and children’s books including ‘The Magic Pudding‘ and also made ship models and garden sculptures.

His major work was, however, the torrent of pen drawings, etchings, watercolours and oil paintings, all of which are well represented at ‘Springwood’ (the Norman Lindsay Gallery & Museum). His artwork is widely collected and many works reside within private and corporate collections. His art continues to climb in value today. In 2002, a record price was attained by his oil painting, Spring’s Innocence, which sold to the National Gallery of Victoria for $AU333,900.

Robyn Rayner Is a Melbourne artist whose work has been of great inspiration to me….  I love the texture and the use of small plates to make up a larger image….

Another Melbourne artist who I love is David Frazer.  He is fantastic woodblock engraver…

I found this tree bed and I want one… it is sooooo beautiful and unique….

I got to finally see a friends band over the weekend and they where playing in teh fantastic Spiegeltent in the city…..

“Me and the grown ups” where fantastic and suited the venue to a tee…

I also finally got to do something else I had been waiting to do and that is go to the drivein…. yep my first trip as an adult…. the only other time I can remember is when i was a very young girl and we saw “The dark crystal” and an indiana Jones… I was young enough to be snuck in under a blanket soI thinkit is well past my time to return…  We set ourselves up int eh back of hte hatch and watched “Australia” under the stars…. the drivein experience was fantastic but hte move was TOTALLY TERRRRRIBLE….. what a waste of money and yet another movieto make Australians look stupid….

Over the weekend Shane and I went to Chiltern to visit his folks… Chiltern is a very small country town in a huge wine region so I got not only the tour of Shanes old high school and kinda but I got to sample teh awesome wines of the region…

we visited… “Campbells” and tried there fantastic bobby burns shiraz…mm  We had a fantastic lunch at AllSaints and sampled there fortifieds… more mmm’s…   Buller had great ports and muscats and we got to try 6 vintages of there port (2004 was much better than there 1996)  and there was a few more….  The next day we went and had award winning pies and then found my favorite of all the “Scion Vinyard” it was a very small boutique vinyard with awesome very modern fortifieds… mmm mmm mmm

I have found that the more I type the more I get wrong…. My mind goes far to quickly for my hands and therefore i type VERY VERY VERY VERY badly ( as you may have noticed, and lets not talk about my TERRIBLE spelling) but I have found that im not the only one when it comes to “the”…. I am always getting “the” wrong… I seem to type “the” as “teh” more often than not now days and I thought this is crazy and as we do with all things that need an answer I goggled it…. well it seems im not the only one who does it and there is a whole wikipedia page about it…. TEH it seems Im not daft i just have an Overcompensating right hand…”PHEW”

“Teh is one of the words in the auto-correct lists of spellcheckers in word processing applications such as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org Writer, Pages, and Corel WordPerfect. T and E are typed by the left hand on adjacent fingers in Qwerty, while the H is typed by the right, and in rapid typing, the T and E are often typed by the left hand in a drumming motion before the right can get the H in between the two. Overcompensating with the right hand can result in the misspelling hte, which is also found in auto-correct lists.”

I have also started to crazy by the overuse of what used to be my favorite font….. “P22 Cezanne” It is a beautiful font which is based on Paul Cezannes handwriting…. stunning and you may notice it on my bannerhead, This is the only font that I have ever purchased costing me a whole $29.95 but I thought it would be perfect for my website and business card…. I thought that it being a font you have to buy that it would be a bit more special and less common…. I was very very wrong it seems that P22 Cezanne is taking over teh text world … it is appearing on everything… I saw it so many time on my OS trip and even took photos so I could prove its world domination….

its used in film titles..

(ok they are both beer labels but we did drink alot of beer)

One more fantastic design thing I have recently procured is the Juxtapoz Tattoo book…. it is from the publishers of the Juxtapoz magazine and it is wonderful… Im always blown away by awesome designers but to see such fantastic designs tattooed onto skin is another level of skill i just cant imagine…. It is getting me and Shane very excited about more tattoos for ourselves and you will have to see what happens in the future for our skin….

I fell in love with this artist in particular….. “Scott Campbell” His work is so beautiful and detailed and he is a softy too….

I was lucky enough to be able to do a special “walk to art” organized by Jo Obrien at RedBubble. It was hosted by the fantastic Bernadette who took us around melbourne showing us fantastic little hidden galleries and telling us all about wht we should do when we are ready to exhibit our work.  We saw some of the laneway commissions , a breathing building and stairways to nowhere…. it is fantastic to see what people do with public space…

As part of the Melbourne Arts festival I was lucky enough to see Shane’s friend as the drummer in Pikelet at the fantastic Spiegeltent

I totally love these sites……

AWESOME text…(its a site from the Ukraine, I think, but its still fantastic)

http://www.sgr.kiev.ua/

Si Scott is an amasing illustrator….. hand drawing is not dead….

Also I watch ed theis fantastic doco on the font Helvetica… I know I know but it was fantastic and so interesting and insperational…

And for a bit of mac vs pc geeky font fun checkout Helvetica VS Arial

After our HUGe trip earlier int eh year we didnt think we would get more fun in  the sun overseas but I will say a big THANK YOU to Marc and Laura for getting married in Thailand… the ceremony was at the fantastic Rockys resort on koh samui and we took over the place with 30 of us lounging around the pool and drinking cocktails in coconuts at the bar….

After the wedding we went back to the beautiful Island of Koh Phangan to where Shane and I got engaged.  we went back to our beautiful bungalow 17 and it was just as fantastic as before and this time we got to go with 8 great friends…..  we swam in brilliant blue warm waters and drank Thai buckets (thanks to Marc and Laura) and ate fantastic Thai food (Lee did eat 2 of the smallest hotist looking chillies i have ever seen and when he regained his site and could swallow again he was boasting) ….