Desert island...

Spell Spring Summer 12/13 

Photography: Johnny Abegg
Model: Matilda Price
Art direction and styling: Isabella and Elizabeth Briedis of Spell
Hair and makeup: Luciana Briedis

Sometimes -- when I'm falling asleep or driving a really familiar road or sitting on the train in the morning -- I daydream about the endless list of projects I'd love to get started on. Not the least of which has always been silversmithing, and so that leads to thinking about what I'd put into the perfect jewellery collection. 

It goes a bit like this: raw and metal-cast quartz, brass and silver, somehow incorporate some heavy, decorative linework etched into primal warrior plating... and other aesthetic things I like -- maybe some cacti, a hint of the desert and the rays of a rising sun, scarab/thunderbird-esque spread wings, feathers, bones, leather, turquoise, dusty boots... 

But, with no hope of me learning to work metal anytime soon, it's a spectacular-good-thing that Spell and the Gypsy Collective is out there doing the hard yards for daydreamers like me. And when I saw this ring, I was floored -- how did they come up with something so perfect? It's exactly all the things I'd love to put together in a ring, but wouldn't have the first idea about how to tie them all together. 

So, quite obviously, I'm just excited about the whole thing. Naturally, in response to my excitement, I drew a picture (and used the dodgy scanner -- sorry about the image quality). 

And here we are.

Each the other's world entire

Still more totem thoughts. 

I've been up to quite a few things that I can't wait to share. But for now... you'll have to settle for my distracted Photoshop fidgeting.

Bleached I & II

Welcoming summer in the southern hemisphere... nearly...

Suburban secret garden

Harley Davidson boots via Ebay; op shop shirt; Edge of Urge Junkie leggings; op shop glasses; market/pawnshop rings. 

 It's nice living in a new-ish place. I was sad when I left my last home, because we had all the good places on lock, and I wasn't scared of driving in the city anymore. Now we're working on figuring all that out again, which means exploring and making some awesome discoveries... Not limited to the manmade kind. S

o Bay and I were pretty impressed when we found this prickly pear patch down the road from our house, on an empty riverside block. We even took a piece of it home with us, to transplant. 

 As for the get up, this may serve as photographic evidence of the last hurrah of my favourite shirt. I found it in an op-shop in the valley and, for the second half of it's life, I've worn it to absolute, undeniable, unavoidable death. Which just makes the super-comfy, super-bright Edge of Urge leggings look all the more fresh...

Sunbleach

All about curls, freckles, long moonlit nights and the start of the Australian summer.

And slightly dodgy tattoos, as usual.

I'll post some actual scans of my sketchbook soon, not just dodgy Instagram pics.

Tonic of Wildness

“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

I love that Sugarhigh + Lovestoned have accompanied their latest shoot with such a beautiful quote and notion... It's the kind of thought that feeds into my artwork, and that I've been thinking about a lot lately.

And, when you top it off with some beautiful images, I just want to go back to the farm and think about it for a while.

Sugarhigh and Lovestoned

Model: Sequoia Annamarie Nelson
Photograhper: J.R. Furbush
Make up: Lauren Reed
Styling: Tovah Olmo of Spring Fever Vintage + Sequoia

via Sugarhigh + Lovestoned

Summons

Girl of the Golden West

I love the feeling of discovering something -- a new artist, a fresh set of photos, a heart-sinkingly rad piece of clothing -- and just thinking, there is so much remarkable, creative action going on out there, and we live in fortunate, crazy times; to be able to see it, as it's breaking and happening, even if it is halfway across the globe.

And damn, did I get that feeling when I saw this collab piece between Spanish Moss and Oracle Fox, for American Gold's SS13 -- Girl of the Golden West. Of course, the photography, editing and the clothing itself are beautiful too, but I'm just head over heels with that first image.
And now, of course, I want daisy-print everything.