Mind the gap..

The photo above was taken on the last magical day of Autumn, at Safety Cove/Turrakana near Port Arthur. If you peer hard at the gap on the horizon you may see weather battered tall ships limping through to reach shelter. You will need a time machine as the last cargo of convicts arrived in Port Arthur in 1877 but the cove has been popular with boats seeking refuge ever since it was discovered. (By whitey that is. I think the First Nation’s people had the mail.)

Anyhow, this beach is truly wonderful. Sometimes when the world feels a bit burdensome we drive all the way down from Hobart just to walk it.

On this trip we stopped at the Dunalley Bakery and purchased an excellent traditional aussie style burger (beetroot, egg, all the stuff..) from the hot bar. Eaten in the car whilst driving of course. Messy but perfect. This bakery gets mixed reviews and is not for everyone but it’s quintessentially Tasmanian and gets 5 stars from us.

On arrival we paused briefly to appraise this very well located holiday block. Not as flat as we would have liked and a bit expensive, but just over the way from the cove. Then it was straight on to the beach. As per usual the beach was completely empty. There was no plastic anywhere. Happy Face emoji. We saw an interesting shore bird, cream with fawn and brown speckles and the same basic structure as a Sooty Oyster Catcher but about half the size. A pied Oyster Catcher chick! We spend quite a lot of time on Tasmanian beaches but have never seen one before. There was also lots of Kelp and dolphins. A happy couple of hours on this beach on a fine day can last you for months.

Interior May. When a project is large and complex, with a lot of different elements it can feel like progress is halting and slow but May was a good month for a leap forward. Both end walls are essentially complete and most of the side wall and fireplace surrounds are finished. Cutting a lot of finishing trim to exact measurements, then painting and fitting it is time consuming but quite easy work which allows time to ponder the next steps. We got through a lot of the lining boards in the kitchen and still had time to begin developing the panels for a series of painted works. Winter tomorrow and only 20 days to the solstice. From now on the cold sets in and the real working period of the Tasmanian year begins. Hopefully we can speed the plough a bit through the dark months.

rgbDesigner May. Google search informs us that “Worldwide spending on artificial intelligence is forecast to reach $2.52 trillion in 2026”. There has been a lot of breathless commentary on whether ai models are about to become ‘conscious’. As Andy Warhol would say, “So What?” We at gowtywood productions have been conscious since birth at considerably less cost, even counting our carbon footprint.

Our ai prediction for May? If you can afford to completely ignore it you are wearing the new black.

rgbDesigner’s May palette is a cheerful collection of pretty colours. The perfect foil to the encroaching grey of winter. We’ve included the gradient and images from the Fosslines (named for the legendary Chris Foss), Circle Lines and Line Grid 2 generators.

You can buy rgbDesigner on the Apple AppStore here. Designed for iPad

Writing (and now music!) May. Our resident writer Robert Gowty had another busy month. Some highlights include:

Mods, Rockers and Blues Brothers: a tale of Friday nights at the old Valhalla cinema in Melbourne.

https://medium.com/rock-on/mods-rockers-and-blues-brothers-friday-night-at-the-valhalla-8877b20da25d

A new song: Out on the Plains

The End of the World Arts

Song: Out on the Plains

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5 days ago · 12 likes · 8 comments · Robert Gowty

The Basement: A Surreal Clown Tale

https://medium.com/short-and-weird/the-basement-fc3c9afaca77

The 69th and final episode of The “Insert Title Here” Series. The series going forward will be renamed The Adventures of Cucumber Man and will go back to the start to reimagine all the episodes in hybrid arts form:

https://medium.com/redemption/the-69-b6e3ec79ddc8

Heads up: the medium articles are paywalled unless you have a Medium subscription.

Our book of the month is “The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.” by Julien Jaynes. First published in 1976 this book is a plough, but a rewarding one. Some of the information in this book is very sad so you might like to confine yourself to the chapters on consciousness which are riveting.

“For if we ever achieve a language that has the power of expressing everything, then metaphor will no longer be possible. I would not say, in that case, my love is like a red, red rose, for love would have exploded into terms for its thousands of nuances, and applying the correct term would leave the rose metaphorically dead.”

“A theory is thus a metaphor between a model and data. And understanding in science is the feeling of similarity between complicated data and a familiar model.”

Sometimes we just can’t be assed hauling out to the bush for walking and, when struck with the type of ennui that requires a green solution, we head to the local Botanical Gardens. Hobart has a corker and our favourite spot is the Japanese garden.

This garden is worth contemplating for a couple of reasons, the first being that it was designed and executed for the purposes of contemplation and does a very good job of providing the necessities of said state. As a great example of ‘garden as an aide memoire’ we were standing on the walkway over the pond when a text message arrived to tell us that our great niece Órla had been born and now every time we stand in that spot someone will say “This is where we were when we heard that Órla had been born”

The second reason for contemplation is that this garden is a living embodiment of what happened when people everywhere worked to rebuild relationships between countries and cultures in the aftermath of the second world war. Bridges were built and crimes forgiven and it was hard work because everyone had behaved very badly and everyone was very angry and sad. Our Japanese garden was ​​designed by Kanjiro Harada, a landscape architect from Yaizu, Hobart's sister city in Japan. It’s of its time and is wildly kitch by today’s standards and all the more perfect for that. Children adore it and if you are visiting Hobart we recommend a day out in the gardens. You can walk there through the domain if you’re a walker or there is usually parking near bye. You can read some more about the sister cities idea from which this garden has flowered here.

Interior April. We have to confess that this job is taking longer than we would have liked.. however.. The windows are in, the trim is sanded, painted and installed and all that is left is a final coat of paint and a tricky cut to measure piece for the far right hand side. To break the monotony a bit we’ve started on the wall at the other end. This wall has a lovely log cabin door frame and handmade sliding doors with real plate glass. We are really standing on the shoulders of giants here and it makes the whole project doubly rewarding. We have included a shot of the handmade light fittings that are waiting a refurb. They will be reinstalled on the outside eave once they are finished. Wu factor 10/10

rgbDesigner April. This month’s palette is called Barbara1 because it has colours drawn from the works of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Some of these colours have informed our recent interior work as will be obvious. rgbDesigner does not use AI in the form of a LLM and is more like a synthesiser for colour with a large number of settings that can be combined to produce palettes, gradients and generated images. It works, like many of the best things, by math. First we have the palette, and then the gradient. Following that we’ve produced a couple of offset square images and some brushed background. Many things that look like ‘art’ are not art but these images are not ‘art’ but look like art. If you catch our drift ;)

You can buy rgbDesigner on the Apple AppStore here. Designed for iPad

Writing April. Rob Gowty, our resident scribe had an unexpected turning in the road when his Medium crew became enamoured of the out takes he posts when he produces AI images for his cucumber man stories. ( do not bang on at us about AI please. We use all the tools in the toolbox and cucumber man’s story is inherently the story of AI and the future ) We’ve included some cucumber man images below so you can see the evolution. A point of interest is that he appears to have ‘trained’ the AI (DALL-E 3) over time and has begun to see an endearing consistency in the images it produces for him. When they stop supporting DALL-E 3, Cucumber Man will be gone like an AI partner who has been removed from the AppStore.

You can read some Cucumber Man stories here. They are paywalled but they are also so short you can read them anyway.

Our book of the month is an audio production of Star Wars CATACLYSM by Lydia Kang. Here it is on the Apple book store but it’s widely available and will most likely be at your library. Listening to this book whilst undertaking mundane chores will gift you an insight into the mind of The United States Secretary of ‘War’ who was clearly raised on this stuff. Portentous. Driven by an excess of emotion and belief.

Lydia Kang nails it. Do you think this is her real name or a pen name? It’s very on brand.

May the force be with you.

This guide will step you through the tools available and give instructions on how to build a palette.

Colour Picker Modes.

rgbDesigner has six colour picker modes that allow you to choose colours for the main palette:

1. rgb:r - rgb swatches with a set red value selected from the bottom control strip.

2. rgb:g - rgb swatches with a set green value selected from the bottom control strip.

3. rgb:b - rgb swatches with a set blue value selected from the bottom control strip.

4. hsb:hue - hue, saturation and brightness (hsb) swatches with a set hue value selected from the bottom control strip.

5. join - the two secondary palettes are presented so colours can be selected into the main palette.

6. image - load an image from your Photos app and pick colours directly. In the sample shown, the colour picker is in image mode.

7. image selection icon - when the colour picker is in image mode, the image selection icon appears. Tap on it to choose an image from the Photos app.

Main Palette Controls.

8. files - this is where you can save and load your palettes. You also use the files screen to set the two secondary palettes.

9. fill - tap on the fill button to populate the main palette. There are nine fill types that you can use. The current fill type is set on the settings screen.

10. undo (back arrow) - undo the most recent change you have made to the palette / redo (forward arrow) - redo the change that you have recently made. If the redo button is greyed out, this means there are no undo steps to be redone.

11. main palette display controller - a palette is made up of 32 colours, displayed in columns of eight colours. All shows all 32 colours, while the numbers will display a single column at a time.

12. settings - set the various options for how the palette screen operates. This is where you set the fill mode and the display type for the numerical display.

Numerical Display.

13. The Numerical Display shows the values of the current colour, which is displayed with a green border. Display types include rgb(1.0), rgb(255), hsb and hex values.

The last two week of March and the first two weeks of April are the ‘golden hours’ of our year. The flies have died, the snakes are sleepy, the weather is perfect and the days are still long enough. This is the time for Alpine walks so we did Lake Osborne and the Arve Falls walks in the Hartz Mountains. The Silver Banksia ( Banksia marginata ) was in flower and full of raucous birdlife getting their calories in before winter.

People die attempting alpine walks all the time so we took robust precautions such as taking a jumper, making Sahara Sandwiches for our picnic and wearing shoes. These walks are doable for active kids and if you feel they would amuse you there is more info here.

Interior March. The windows are finally in their slots. That was fussy. Even a couple of millimetres out and they don’t rest well on the eye. Lots of faffing about with the sander and plane but anyhoo, finally they’re in and the most of the trim is on the wall. We felt the windows might not be there for ever so installed them using lashings of silicon instead of traditional fixings. This worked better than our wildest dreams and allows for movement in a good way. You will note that these are interior windows and not load bearing.

rgbDesigner March. This month’s palette is informed by our trip to the Hartz Mountains with colours harvested from photos of the atmosphere. The featured generator is ‘stripes’, a simple but powerful tool with lots of options for customisation. The variations in these images are produced by altering the shade width only but as you can see from the screen grab you can also change orientation, mode, width and shade mode. Pretty much endless combos. We like stripes for designing large backdrops for window displays. Striking but neutral.

You can buy rgbDesigner on the Apple AppStore here. Designed for iPad

Writing March. Our resident writer Robert Gowty has had a busy month!

A thought provoking new series on the politics of convenience.

Living Without Running Water (The Politics of Convenience #1)

The End of the World Arts

Living Without Running Water

If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires. Epicurus…

Read more

3 months ago · 7 likes · 14 comments · Robert Gowty

https://medium.com/civil-politics/living-without-running-water-a6d07e9fbe3b

Grizzly Man and the Call of the Wild (The Politics of Convenience #2)

The End of the World Arts

Grizzly Man and The Call of the Wild

Preface…

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2 months ago · Robert Gowty

https://medium.com/civil-politics/grizzly-man-and-the-call-of-the-wild-997a3a05866e

A short and weird on “Why a Staycation at the Gormanston Valley Caravan Park Might Be Your Last Vacation (Short & Weird: Rudimentary Structures #4)”

https://medium.com/short-and-weird/why-a-staycation-at-the-gormanston-valley-caravan-park-might-be-your-last-vacation-8da88f4a0e86

Some existential ( isn’t that the word of the month ) extrapolations

Complacently Adjacent (Existential Extrapolations #7)

https://medium.com/@robertgowty/complacently-adjacent-96c4cad69a98

and another fabulous spoken word.

Where Am I? (Spoken word in The Oral Tradition: Tribal Aperture)

Saccharum

The Oral Tradition: Tribal Aperture

To focus is not to limit…

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3 months ago · 64 likes · 63 comments · S y l v i A 🌞 K a l i n A, Jozef Cain, Stephen, Alma M., Mark Farley’s wandering’s, pen n. bolsillo, Tangled Words, Laura Catanzano, Robert Gowty, Paul R. Pace, Marissa M. Zhu, Vision2Verse, Sacred Rebelle, kōtare, Camille Brody, Steve Elliott, Ann Lyons, The Monday to Friday Poet, kerri, and L. Cohen

All this without mentioning the war ; )

Our book of the month is Lady Glenconner’s Picnic Papers , a chatty tome that collects the writings of many of Lady Ann’s family and friends on the subject of picnics, and which manages to encapsulate both an elegiac homage to a pre war England, and an insiders view of the new world boom that followed. Some good recipes and some lessons for those who like to learn.

From the picnic reminiscences of Patrick Leigh Fermor…

“The picnic baskets may have contained all sorts of Moldowalkechian wonders - sarmali wrapped in vine leaves, fragrant mititei, chicken croquettes as light as feathers, a sterlet from the Pruth, perhaps, or even, and by the ladleful, wonderful Black Sea caviar from Vâlcov in the Danube delta, on the fringes of Bessarabia; turkey in aspic, almost certainly. Apart from fine indigenous cooking this country seemed to be the meeting point of all that was most delicious in old Russia, Poland, Hungary, Mitteleuropa, France, the Balkans and the Levant. The picnic would have been more likely to start with fierce Moldovian raki than with a milder southern tzuica of distilled plums; excellent white and red wines, stored in tortuous catacombs, would have accompanied it throughout.

The point of departure was an old and many-legended Cantacuzene country house with inhabitants of indescribable charm. It lay at the heart of a once large but now much reduced estate in High Moldovia, and the time was 1939.”

…

“It was a summer of unparalleled beauty and remoteness, but the months passed too fast; the crops were in and the storks were gathering before heading south; and suddenly, not unannounced, the evil omens had begun to multiply quickly, until all seemed black.”

We always take a picnic when we go to the forest. Somewhat less glamorous than Patrick’s but no less delicious.

May the road rise with you

Here’s a selection of wallpaper sets that we used to sell on our old Wix website. In celebration of the joy that is building a website on substack we’re making them free so knock yourselves out.

All the wallpapers are made with our rgbDesigner app and are labelled for ease of use

The first set is called Cloudy Bay Lagoon and inspired by fishing trips to the same.

The second set is called Salamanca after our famous drinking quarter down at the Hobart docks.

The third set is Tinderbox, named after our favourite Marine reserve. This is the set we use. We’ve included a picture of the reserve for your enjoyment.

A quick click around leads us to think that downloading works best on mobile and desktop, not so much with email. Sets include sizes for Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad, iMac and Laptop. We’re going to assume that you know how to add wallpapers to your devices but if you’re not sure you can ask DeepSeek ;)

Started February with the Fishers Point walk down at Cockle Creek. Most of the year it’s in the fridge so it was nice to have some warm weather. Just a few souls because it really is the end of the earth. Many of them hiking in bare feet (shrug emoji).

The forest is particularly enjoyable here and some lovely intertidal pools.

If you fancy visiting this incredibly remote place and taking the air you can find some guidance here.

Interior February. The only game in town at the moment is window building. Attempting to maximise the not great light in the workshop, interior windows are the solution. Chunky and a bit squat to match the log cabin aesthetic, they take longer to build than you would expect. So much sanding. I used Tasmanian Oak (Eucalyptus hardwood) from the local hardware so they are heavy as well. Still, coming along nicely.

rgbDesigner February. Robert Gowty, who is also our software engineer, has been working on an update for rgbDesigner over the past month. As well as bringing the interface into line with apple’s latest iPadOS, he’s developed some new generators. Rather than using AI, this app is a professional colour tool that uses HI (human intelligence). We like AI but really it only gives you an opinion. Sometimes this is fine but if you are a colour professional you want TOTAL CONTROL. Obviously this never really happens but rgbDesigner comes pretty close. Here’s our palette for February (soft vibes here atm) and examples of the line grid generators. great for working up some packaging ideas.

You can buy rgbDesigner on the Apple AppStore here. Designed for iPad.

Writing February. So far this month has been action packed.

Robert posted his first spoken word video to youtube and brought the ‘Australian Cadence’ some new fans.

He’s also written a compelling review of “Fragile” by Yes ( Tagline: KING CRIMSON VERSUS YES. THE DARKNESS AND THE LIGHT DO BATTLE. #4) on Medium which you can read here if you do the Medium thing. The Album Cafe publication, which Rob is currently editing, is undergoing a bit of a renaissance at the moment. Worth a look.

A couple more medium moments including a short and weird “Only Push The Button In An Emergency”, and the latest episode of THE “INSERT TITLE HERE” SERIES: PART #3.16, otherwise known as ‘the cucumber man’. These are both member only stories just a heads up.

Our Book of the Month is The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater. She is such a comfort :)

Mind how you go

gowtywood productions

Are websites dead? Who knows. They have begun to seem very clunky though. Also hard to find. Substack seems a refreshing way to both talk to the world, and listen to what the world has to say. Let’s go.

Gowtywood productions is a polymath business with several main activities. These include:

Interior Objects. These can be purchased complete and will be added to the substack as they become available.

rgbDesigner. This is an iPad only tool for design professionals. If colour is your superpower this tool is for you. It’s available on the AppStore here We’ll be sharing some palettes for you as we go.

Writing and Publishing. Our text engineer Robert Gowty has a writing practice that is both broad and wide. You can find his take on everything from album cover art to cucumbers here. He is working on his first novel.

Walking. We spend a LOT of time staggering around, and falling over, in the forest. We share our favourite staggers and falls of the month in our newsletter.