WINTERY WEATHER

On the south coast of Victoria it is very wintery at present. Two days ago the maximum temperature was only 7 degrees Celsius. I write this for the benefit of readers from the northern hemisphere who may think that Australia is perpetually sunny and that we all go to the beach every weekend. The nearby creek at Torquay has a small flow. It is really an intermittent creek because it has a small catchment area and the rainfall is fairly low.  Recently it has been blocked by a sandbar so that the water level came slightly over the boardwalk. In the photo below you can see the waves breaking beyond the sandbar.

Our shoes got slightly wet when we crossed the boardwalk.

Then there was rain overnight and the sandbar was washed away.

At the workshop of the Victorian Branch of the Sogetsu School last week the theme was to use corky Elm to make a framework to support other material, in a suiban. Below is the structure I made.

 I have posted a few other photos from the workshop that you can see on the Sogetsu website under the heading "Recent Workshops" (click on the blue text). A couple of days later I went to my teacher's class where our exercise was an arrangement with 'red and green'. It proved to be a good opportunity to re-work the materials more to my satisfaction. As you can see I have trimmed the branches, added a lot more cotoneaster berries to make a more dense mass and contrasted the straight lines with the soft curves of two sedge leaves.

I think this arrangement also suits the season of winter that we are enjoying(?) at the moment.

Greetings from Christopher
19th July 2014

P.S. My colleague, Emily Karanikolopoulos, who recently returned from Tokyo, will continue to post on her blog. There is a link on the righthand side of this blog.