Nugey Art

“Give me fairy wings” she said. Not a tattoo, just a passing phase, like me.

Latest frog bowls, with ‘swamp’ glaze. (June 2014).

Frog bowl model, ready for mould building. Now I just have to make a plaster mould, pour slip in, get bowl out, fire, glaze and fire again. Tricky, but possible. Poppy, my chinchilla cat, assumes food is involved.

Years ago I carved a frog in wood, and made a latex mould to reproduce it in plaster. (The feet are hand size.) They are easy to break so I stopped making them. When I get around to it I’ll make another model and a plaster mould, pour some slip and fire some ceramic frogs in the kiln. That’ll make them harder to break.

Detail of another sandblasted glass oval, with Ornate Seahorse, about 6cm long, showing the detail achievable with Warwick Pascoe’s techniques. Note the ‘hair thin’ spines on the back. The photography does not do it justice. I’ll work on that.

Fixing broken toasters one evening, and this old one was past toasting bread, so I gave it new life, as a light. ‘Toast’ is perspex, rough-sanded to scatter light, and opening the ‘crumb tray’ underneath reveals the red fluoro lamp. Switch on the side still turns it on.

Ian rang to say his cat had killed a lizard and left it in the bathroom. I said wrap it in foil and freeze it, I’ll have that. After being covered in roofing silicone overnight I gave it a decent burial under the mullberry tree and made copies. With this one I coloured the plaster with food dye and painted the ‘wood’ brown.

Little pots, some raku fired.

I made several of these really cute frog bowls and gave them to friends. I like them enough to make more soon.

Carved from two layers of recycled medium density fibre board (MDF), about 60cm across, this is the first ‘wall frog’ I made. It’s big and bright, and a fun way to fill a wall.

Same bowl as above, fired with a clear glaze. Interesting lustre. Now I can eat breakfast on the deck from a bowl I made from the earth beneath me.

Digging foundations for the front deck I found clay and seived some into usefulness. Chocolate brown when raw, it fired into this salmon terracotta. Rings like a clay bell when struck. Blue stripe is underglaze.

Jean-Maree said they had green lizards in France, so I made him one in Fimo for his birthday.

Second pot I made when I learned to spin mud on the wheel, with, of course, a frog. It’s a chunky pot, and my work is finer now.

Irena Kirpichnikova at Byron Bay Art Studio says she can bring out the artist in anyone in one lesson, and she’s right. Greg and I dropped in one morning and had fun making art. Highly recommended. Next portrait I draw won’t look like she has so many ‘issues’. Irena’s number: 0404 093 919. Just do it.

Nice bit of wood, picked up on a walk on the farm so I stuck a frog on it and made it art. Needs more frogs.

Fimo frog on a log, made many years ago. Now I could do better, but it’s pretty and unusual.

The deck needed another coat of ‘deck finish’, and the lizard I’d sandblasted was fading, so I hand-sanded the River Red Gum back to beautiful and gave it a few coats of finish. Now it will always look different to the rest of the deck, when I get around to painting it. Maybe in a few weeks.

Make a plasticine frog, cover it in plaster of paris, pull out the plasticine and pour in molten lead. Tap the plaster with a hammer and out comes a frog. The dimpling is where oils from the plasticine boiled out of the plaster when the hot lead went in. Interesting effect. Now that I have access to a kiln, I plan to make (better looking) aluminium frogs in a reusable ceramic mould. While we had the furnace set up, practicing blacksmithing, I melted some car parts into aluminium ingots. I like the idea of a frog made from a Range Rover diff housing.

One evening I felt like drawing a portrait of a friend on the wall, in chalk. I kept it for a couple of weeks, fiddling with details, adding and subtracting years, then wiped it off. I enjoyed drawing on the wall, but now I have an easel, and there’s a big mirror on this wall behind the fire place. I used an old Dux Episcope to rough in the form, then played with it until I was over it.

Carved mirror frame, reflecting adjacent wall frogs. I twisted electrical extension cord and copied the shape onto the wood.

Carpart dragonfly, VW crank for body, Holden pushrod legs, Yamaha clutch pack wings, Holden fuel bowl eyes and Magna tail. Now it has a happy home in a well-kept garden.

We cut some slabs out of the fork of a fallen camphor laurel. The pic doesn’t do justice to the depth and colour of the grain. Sanded flat, the surface still looks rippled. There’s a routered and fibreglass-filled frog in the corner. Black-tinted fibreglass fills crevices.

I made a lathe from an old drill with a sanding disc on it, and cut a log of fresh camphor to play with. It smelled wonderful under the chisel. Coated in polyurethane, it dried slowly. If I made another I’d be braver and make it more delicate. This one’s chunky style.

Harry showed me pics of bush wood chairs he’s made so we took the saw and 4WD into the hills to gather sticks, and I made this. Four Acacia branches and a hessian bag. Very comfortable deck chair.

Small Fimo frog with crystal eyes, for Gary

Wings are Tshirt scraps sewn onto coat hanger wire, wet with PVA glue and hung upside down to dry before being reinforced with car bog.

Wire frame wound around with string and covered in car bog (panel-beaters body putty) is a work in progress. If I’m doing some car repair I’ll add some bog here and there. I’ll carve some scales onto it one day and declare it done. Meanwhile it sits in the shed, a cobweb-covered sentinel.

My friend Daria requested an ashtray, so I made her this in paper clay (very strong) with blue underglaze and ‘mist jade’ top glaze. Useful and beautiful.