2023 Brisbane Portrait Prize

While in Brisbane on the weekend, I visited the Powerhouse to see the exhibition of finalists in the 2023 Brisbane Portrait Prize. 

This year's exhibition included 70 finalists in the Main Competition and 14 Next Gen entries. Any artist with a connection to Brisbane is eligible to enter. The sitter must also have a connection with Brisbane. In 2023, prizes totalled $90,000.

Entries included both conventional painting and digitally produced work - the Brisbane Portrait Prize website has all the details. And there's a full gallery of finalists online too. I loved the documentation posted with each portrait, which made my viewing a richer experience. Here's an example: the label that accompanies the portrait above - "Brothers", a digital artwork by Marco Eychenne. All of this information is also available online for each of the finalists,

I don't pretend to have any expertise in judging art. But I was blown away by the quality and variety in this exhibition. The friends I was with considered this selection as exciting as the recent show they'd visited celebrating 100 years of the Archibald Prize. I suspect this has something to do with vitality - there were quite a few works by young artists here, as well as many that had also been Archibald finalists themselves.

Anyone wanting to see the exhibition will have to be quick, as tomorrow's the last day (29 October). 

Springtime puffs of white

This white hydrangea is always the first hydrangea to come into flower in Spring. My garden has more than a dozen beautiful hydrangeas, but only one that is white. When I bought the house it was midwinter and these plants had been given their winter trim so they were not much to look at. I actually thought I might remove them once I'd moved in, since I associate them with cool climates and don't usually grow anything that I think is wrong for this climate. For example, I know I'd never be able to grow them as beautifully as I did in Tasmania. 

Luckily, I didn't move into this house until early summer, months later, because I went overseas on assignment right after I signed the contract. When I finally did move in, I was blown away by the beauty of the hydrangeas in full flower. Most of them are planted along a south-facing wall, and get no sun at all in the hottest months and only weak morning sun in winter. They are also planted up close to the house, and the roof's overhanging eaves shelter them from getting too drenched in our tropical summer downpours. Hydrangeas don't like hot sun or wet feet and mine are protected from both. 

Among the predominantly blue hydrangeas, few of which are yet in bloom, I have this one white-flowering one. I don't know if it flowers first because it's white or because it happens to get an hour or two of sun - the only hydrangea that does in Spring. 

White hydrangeas, as any gardener knows, always stay white. And they're prized for that, so my Garden Club friends are always pleased to get cuttings when I prune. Blue-flowering plants, on the other hand, will be blue, pink or some mixture of both, including shades of mauve, depending on soil ph. Red or pink blooms result from neutral or basic soil (pH 7 and above), whereas blue blooms indicate acidic soil condition (pH less than 7). Apparently the color is not determined by the pH itself, but by the amount of aluminium a plant can access in the soil - and that is what is determined by pH and phosphorus levels. 

In one of my first years here, my grand-child and I tried an experiment. My hydrangeas then were mainly blue (except for the white one, of course.) So Charlie and I gave every second blue-flowering plant a good dose of garden lime. That should have produced pink flowers. It wasn't a great success in the that year, but ever since then I have had a nice variety of colours, including different shades of blue and some mauve streaks. 

I like the blue ones best, though, so this year I'm going to give them a liquid fertiliser called Hydrangea Blue (which probably contains aluminium sulfate). That's on my shopping list for the next visit to Bunnings! However, I've already given them all a good dose of mushroom compost, which I suspect is a bit acidic. So anything could happen. 

These photos show the hydrangeas some years ago, before we tried making some turn pink. The two close-up photos feature a few of our pink results a couple of years later. It will be interesting to see what turns up this year!

I did it (but it almost did me!)

Here's where my troubles began! Well, recent back troubles anyway. I should have tried harder to find someone to take on the job of moving aside all the little stones covering this messy parking space alongside my garage. Previous owners used it to park their caravan; I used to keep my trailer there before I gave it away. For the past few years the car-size space has just been a throughway from the front of the house to the back garden - not used for much except a few pots of plants. 

The whole area consisted of river gravel laid down over sheets of black plastic. Trouble is, the layer of stones wasn't thick enough to prevent the weathering of the plastic, which had never been secured to the ground beneath. Round stones never settle on slippery plastic. And dirt from areas where the plastic lifted had mixed with stones - it was an unsightly mess. 

The only solution: move aside the stones, rip up the old plastic piece by piece, lay down and fasten in place proper weed matting, then clean the stones of accumulated dirt and put them down over the new matting, maybe topping up with extra stones to make a good thick covering.

I thought about leaving some areas of soil exposed for planting ground cover plants, since I don't use this area for vehicles. And on the very rare occasion when I might need to let a service vehicle through to the back yard for some reason, it's easy enough to dodge ground covers (or move pots). But as soon as I began the work, I realised that the whole area has a vigorous set of roots criss-crossing the ground, coming from the neighbour's very healthy row of small trees planted as a hedge along the fenceline on his side. So rather than compete with all the roots, it made sense to create a weed-free surface and plant things in large pots here and there. (The neighbour and I did remove the largest of these surface roots though, and so far at least his hedge plants haven't seemed to mind.)

I had contacted a few handymen to quote for this work, but I no one wanted to do it. (I should have realised then what a slog it would be.) No doubt a landscape company would have taken it on - but at what cost! And I could well imagine the mess they might make of it - they'd want to strip the whole area clean to start with, which meant moving all the stones and piling them up somewhere. But where? I would have stones scattered in nearby lawn for months. So I decided if I could get it done before the hotter weather arrived to make outdoor work too onerous, I would do the job myself. 

And so I did - section by section, one barrowload of stones at a time. It took me four weeks, working 4 or 5 days a week, 5 or 6 hours each day. About halfway through I began to think it was all just too difficult. And I made another attempt to employ someone to help. But I couldn't find anyone. So I pressed on. 

At the end of it all I did hire a nice young man with a truck (thank you, Airtasker!) to pick up, deliver and unload a trailer-load of additional stones to finish the job. 

I'm very happy with the result, but can hardly believe I got through it. It's taken weeks for my body to recover. Not surprised that I came down with a terrible bout of winter flu shortly after finishing. I think I had no reserved energy to fight off germs. But I've learned one thing: my days of heavy labour are over. This Amazon lady is hanging up the workboots. Only garden-variety stuff for me from here on. 

The grass is greener (or at least shorter)

I am struggling to work with this blog software after a long absence. Formatting seems more difficult than I remember. But I would like to get back to talking about my garden and other topics now and then - after years of silence (at least on this medium). So let's see how we go! 

Today I mowed the lawn, so that's what that expanse of green is celebrating. Since moving to this smaller property almost eight years ago, I've been paying someone else to mow and trim the lawn. But a few months ago, I decided I would try and do it myself. After all, I'd bought a battery-operated mower when I moved here but have rarely used it. For the first five or six years that made sense, as I was lucky to have resumed work as a consultant and was overseas for some months of each year. But I called a halt on work just before Covid - if I hadn't, Covid would have done it for me since Australia closed up tightly for more than a year. And even now, overseas travel is not as easy or carefree as it used to be. So really, there's no reason why I shouldn't care for the grass myself, since I'm caring for the rest of the garden. It's good exercise, it's better for my budget, and it prevents someone bringing in weed seeds and other things with their equipment. 

It's Spring here, however. It was autumn when I made the decision to take care of the lawn myself. Over autumn and winter, even though this is a subtropical climate, grass doesn't grow too fast. But as the weather warms up, the grass grows faster. Soon it will need to be cut at least once a fortnight and the weather will be too hot to do that for much of the day - for me, at least. So either I will have to start getting up earlier, or resign myself to mowing late in the afternoon, when I'd prefer to be sitting down with a whisky! So we shall see. 

For the moment, anyway, I'm managing it pretty well. But I don't have a whipper-snipper for trimming the edges. And I don't dare to buy one because I think I'd be too likely to do myself damage in trying to use it. I can ask my son-in-law to bring his whipper-snipper along the next time they come for a weekend visit - and he might do some trimming for me (as long as we agree he can go fishing the rest of the weekend!) Until then I will just have to do a bit of selective trimming by hand.