matteliason.com

Shortcuts: Read about me as SPOONGUY,  |  Spoon Carving Workshops  | Writing | Photography for sale

 

Hello, I am Matt, a creative in various mediums who lives in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia.

I have started to consolidate my creative outputs here.

For some people, being creative is painting, or creating a wonderful garden or tatting….for me I enjoy photography, whittling and writing, though I find the latter quite hard work!

Also follow me on social media: Twitter  (photography) | Facebook (spoons) | Instagram (spoons) | Instagram (Photography) |

Photography

For me, photography is a recurring passion. I started on my photographic journey in my early 20s, capturing the scenes of the Brindabella Mountains to the west of Canberra, Australia. Those days of photography as a hobby were of close-up and some moderate landscape work. I enjoyed the simple pleasure of capturing images on film using a simple (by today’s standards) SLR camera.

Knowing how to use a camera, to frame a scene and make an image interesting proved useful during the time when I was writing freelance articles for various national magazines. The editors wanted the complete package of words and images, and each was valueless without the other. These were the glory times of using Kodachrome 64 slide film, of simple f-stop, focus, fill flash and of course great composition. At times the compositions needed to be hastily assessed due to the nature of the shot. It was not a time of taking hundreds of shots and hoping to fluke a result like in today’s digital world. In the world of freelance, every dollar counted and every shot needed to count. I needed at least two great shots from a roll of 36 exposures was considered the minimum.

Later, as editor/journalist/photographer of a small newspaper, I added the skills of chemicals and BW film development, of adjusting exposure and dodging in the darkroom. It was an interesting mix of extending creativeness and fixing mistakes, including times when I did not ask people remove hats in bright sun (or instead using the flash) and getting European and aboriginal skin tones equally well represented in the one photo.

Skip forward 25 years, the film cameras  are now dinosaurs in the new world of digital photography. For me a borrowed digital compact camera that took extraordinary close up shots re-introduced me to my photography ‘mistress’. Like a relationship reborn, there are the explorations and re-introductions to be made to bring the relationship up-to-date. The journey has seen upgrades of equipment and for me the expansion of the range of genres, though to-date I am still relishing the small landscapes of close-up within wider landscapes. There is so much to be seen, if we just pause maybe even bend down….and look.

I hope you will enjoy my work and understand that often I don’t see the typical, but do try to see the unique, and that just possibly, one or two of my images will find a place in your home or office.

More of my generic photography is here

Writing

I began writing articles for fishing magazines in the 1980s and again for a time in the early 1990s when I also wrote for 4WD and caravan magazines plus even one article for Australian Penthouse (don’t worry, it was only a travel piece!) Those later articles helped pay uni costs plus earned marks for my journalism degree.

2014 saw my enjoyment of writing resurface. Now I have turned my hand to fiction; both straight fiction and sometimes fictionalisations of events that I have experienced. Please see the writing category link at the top of this page.

The joy of wood

I started whittling in 1988 on the final leg of a trip around Australia. My first creation was a simple fish, created while sitting beside a campfire just south of Cooktown in far north Queensland. I smoothed it with pummicestone that for some reason seemed common on the high tide line of the beach despite no volcanoes existing for many hundreds of kilometres.

Marine creatures have been the most attractive to me, perhaps because of their simplicity and smooth lines. I find whittling cathartic; like those who knit, an activity that occupies part of the brain while allowing the remainder to either rest or think about something else.

In 2016 I discovered the joy of greenwood carving, specifically spoons. This created a new and perhaps overly absorbing use of wood and gave birth to Spoonguy.

 

Explore the site using the categories links at the top and right hand side of each page.

You can contact me  via mattATplusoneDOTcomDOTau  (replace the capitals with relevant items!)