Art with Wood

Kookaburra

Acrylic paint on structured pine pieces.

24cm wide x 30cm high x 7cm deep

Weight: 1.4kg.

Everyone loves the kookaburra. Their year-round laugh song advertises territorial ownership, as does their chuckle, which is also used to find missing family members. How wonderful it is to have kookaburras in the back yard. We have a family of three that love to sit in our tall palm trees and sing for us. In celebration of their adopting us, I decided to set myself an undertaking to make a free-standing 3D kookaburra.

Like any new endeavour, I first had to come up with a suitable design. Once I had achieved that, I then cut out all the individual pieces from a large piece of pine. These pieces were then shaped and sanded.

The most intricate and arduous part of the exercise was to place and secure all the pieces together. But this was finally achieved.

Then came the hand painting of the piece to bring my kookaburra to life. Whilst it was a very time-consuming exercise, I am quite happy with little guy.

He sits on a tree stump diligently looking for his next meal – insects or maybe a small lizard!

Old Man Emu

I’ve collected a supply of odd pieces in all shapes and sizes. So when I feel I need to take a break from painting I go to this box of timber and ferret around until I find a little nugget of wood that sparks an idea for a new piece of sculpture. My old man Emu is made from assembled recycled and driftwood timber. He has been sculpted and painted in acrylic then finished with a gloss finish for protection.

The emu is an important cultural icon of Australia, appearing on the coat of arms and various coins. The bird features prominently in Indigenous Australian mythology and hundreds of places are named after it. The emu is the largest bird native to Australia. The soft-feathered, brown, flightless birds reach up to 1.9 metres (6.2 ft) in height with long thin necks and legs.

My Old Man Emu is a proud and inquisitive guy.