Out of Hospital

Well, I am back home from hospital, but still laid up and feeling battered! Thanks Alice for being a Bastion of Awesomeness. 

I was given an opiate pain-killer called Endone ( or as Ive affectionately called it, Ken Done) which works great but Im off it now and I find myself uncharacteristically sad- is this a bad comedown? 

This tune might make me feel better... 

Its is a pop song I guess, but everytime I listen to it, I think how amazing it is...

What a price to payeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehayyyyyyeeeeeeeeehay!

In Hospital :-(

So! It happened again; I'm in hospital with a collapsed lung. The cause is unknown at this stage. I've got so many tubes and needles poking out/in, I feel like St.Sebastian. Thanks to Jesse for the movies. I was thinking Kurosawa's Castle of Spiderwebs would be fitting (Mifune gets arrows aplenty!)

Esmazing gave me an inspiring picture where I have big muscles (be strong!) and a Flat-Weed flower- which is more to me than a whole florist.

In hospital!

If you were enrolled in my silversmithing class for today-
it has been cancellled because I am in hospital!
More on this later, my humble apologies for letting you down-
it was an emergency!
Sent from my iPhone...

Cottage

Cook's Cottage, Melbourne.

Great herringbone masonry and swirly tiles. 

Dying to make my own tiles soonish. 

Plans to cut the clay from the ground and raku-fire. 

Mudbrick amazingness, China. Note how each vault is different. The bricolage vs. engineered approach to architecture seems to be a universal feature of adobe/ mudbrick building. 

Corb. in his Cab. 

Particularly amused by distinctly Un-Modernist vase/carnations/tablecloth.

A woman's touch. (Just not Eileen Gray's...)

And tatty paintings just pinned to lining- I like them too.

Seems lively and livable...

O'Brien

Once I was at a dinner party with the jeweller Otto Künzli and some others. For some reason the conversation was about the stars in the night sky.

Me:    ...my little sister...

Otto:  I dont care what you have to say!

Me:    err...?

                  *         *         *

What I was going to say was that my little sister thinks that the constellation of Orion is called O'Brien.

So that's what I call him, too.

I've decided that he's a blacksmith, beating a sword into a plowshare.

Much more inspiring than some dufus hunter.

Speaking of O'Brien...

M.Ward is coming to Melbourne soon.

   Poster by good egg  Beci Orpin.

M. is a favorite in our house- even if we're listening to Django Reinhardt...

 ... Joe doing air-Django, me doing air-Stephane; and we are the Quintette du Hot Club de Surrey Hills- really getting into a swing...But even so... Esmé comes over, flips the track and says;

"This is not M.Ward!!"

(vexation on all faces)

"Umm... I'm pretty sure M.Ward would like Django Reinhardt, Ez."

"I DONT CARE- I want the mermaid song!"

( she means 'Vincent O'Brien')

"What about She & Him?"

"Nope- that is a girl singing"

"Yeah, but she looks like a princess- and M.Ward is playing the guitar"

"hmmm... no"

(looks like we have a purist)

...So... if the aunties are reading this- how about babysitting that night so's I can take Alice to see M.Ward?

*          *          *

And this face is for Otto: 

( Its a brooch by Otto, if you didnt know. I do really like this one. )

Entropy

                                           

Yesterday's post made me think of this Richard Scarry drawing- little things on a field.
E and I scored a set of old Scarrys from the market awhile back- the kids love them and pore over them.
 I noticed a whole lot of amusing entropy in The Best Word Book Ever. Like a Beck song.
These were my personal favorites:

Louvre

More of those dusty, hazy slides from 1997. These things are mainly carved bone and horn inlaid with silver or aluminium. I guess they're sort of like buttons or toggles or something. There is even a little bone open-work cube in there. At the time, my oldest sister wrote me a letter, posing as a curator from the Louvre, saying;

Dear Davîd,

 We 'ave 'eard about your "doo-dads",

 and want to buy them all for our collec-shi-ong,

 signed,

 Pierre LaFarge

...or something to that effect. The letterhead, with an Eiffel Tower logo did have a certain...I-dont-know- what... ( hohng-hohng-hohng!)

Siblings can be cruel.

Actually, none of these things were ever for sale- so I possibly might still have them someplace, in the bottom of some box full of crazy stuff from the past. I may try to dig them up. And offer them to the Louvre. And get paid. Yeah.

Update:

Le Louvre, 17/1/2011

Cher Monsieur "David Neale",

Merci pour vot re présentation de "bidules" -
nous vous suggérons d'essayer le Musée d'Arts Décoratifs.
Ils peuvent être plus enclins?
signé
Pierre Lafarge

Launch

How do we steer this thing?

The Golden Smith Online Shop... launched!

Please visit, there will be more items added regularly- particularly jewellery and objects featured on this blog, made by David Neale. 

Little Wooden Constructions c.'98

I was doing more tiding up ( ie procrastinating) and found some slides of my student work (remember slides?) I had a go at photographing the images on these slides by holding them up to the sun. Tricky. Bit blurry/ dusty. Still...

These were some kind of jewellery objects I made around about 1997-98. Painted wood. The wooden background was Janet Watts' ironing board! It seemed to have a resonant sculptural quality at the time?

My work took an apparently different turn soon after this.

But, Ive been continuing this interest in wood / units / colour behind the scenes though,  ie here

Two

Thwock!

There are over 2100 listings for "arrow" in the Peabody online museum.

Each photo has an average of 5 arrows I'd reckon. So Ive just looked at about 10 thousand arrows. At least they weren't aimed at me. 

These were the ones I thought were interesting;

The Sioux ones (bottom) tend to have very long fletching and long heads. 

The yellowish ones were labeled "tree hunting arrows" -doesnt sound like much of a hunt now does it? Maybe they're boy's arrows? Although some trees are pretty elusive. I was hoping to see "apple-shooting arrows"- but found other amusing Peabody descriptions anyway such as; "probably not poison". About half of all the arrows in the collection were poisoned, so, I guess there's an awful lot of poison lying around at The Peabody. 

Intern "ow! hey- watch that"

Other Intern "Whoops! Its ok dude, says here..."probably not poison""

More amusing Peabodyism here

1988

Joe + self:Air Guitars
Esmé: Twirling
Lee Mavers: Tracksuited awesome-pop

Lapstrake!?

Snooping around my geepee's (grand-parents) house again. This time, I found, in a dusty old box, untouched for about 20 years, a project that my Grandpa (aka Ralph) and I had started when I was about 12 years old. I had said;

"Can we make a viking ship? It has to be lap-strake too..." 

(Lapstrake?- you know... Lapstrake)

I 'd say the lapstrake was our undoing. Looks like we got about five planks of balsa lapstraking on the sides and called it macaroni. Note old Dala horse., casting a doubtful scandinavian eye over our workmanship...

('Lapstrake' could be a good dog's name? I'll just test that:

"Lapstrake, h-e-r-e Lapstrake..." 

"Lapstrake?" 

"Lapstrake!!" 

"Hey...Lapstrake... get. off. me. What is that smell?? Ew Lapstrake")

Bahahaha! Yes I think that works.

Other teen boatbuilding/ viking epidsode here

Holiday Reading

Suze gave me a Donald Duck in danish that she bought at flea market in Iceland. Forget ebay- inlaws are the new source of obscura.

Any how, more treasure-seeking hi-jinks.

Repas Imaginaire

Le lard! Ohng hohng hohng!

The Neales get cultured at the NGV