Painting the Svitzer tug Wonga in Sydney Harbour

The 'Wonga' was built in 1983 and was one of the Svitzer 'pusher' tugs.

Their names started with 'W' - Wilga, Wonga, Woona, Walan, Watagan. I've no idea why they picked that particular letter to christen their tugs. As a 'wonga' is a type of pigeon, not a marine bird, I'm not sure why this name was chosen for a marine vessel.

To me, the trio of names 'Wilga', 'Wonga', 'Woona', had a sort of alliterative poetry, and whenever I painted one of the three, I would be asked if I also had paintings of the other two, to make up the set.

DH236 'The tug 'Wonga' with 'Victorian Reliance''
2007 oil on board 20 x 25cm
SOLD
Enquiries about other paintings of tugs

This shows the 'Wonga' in action with a cargo ship.

They were once a very common sight in Sydney Harbour, when Sydney Harbour was still a fully working port. As 'Artist in Residence' on the East Darling Harbour Wharves during the first decade of this century, I would see at least one of these tugs everyday. If they weren't accompanying one of the container ships or Ro-ros (roll-on roll-off car vessels) to the East Darling Harbour Wharves, Glebe Island or White Bay, they would be escorting a cruise ship to the Cruise ship terminal at Darling Harbour Wharf 8, or an oil tanker to Gore bay.

DH241 'The 'Wonga' 2011
oil on board 28 x 35cm
Available

This painting shows the 'Wonga' passing Goat Island. It was on its way to a new task, from its then home in East Balmain next to the ferries.

The number of tugs in Sydney Harbour declined with the closure of East Darling Harbour Wharves and its replacement with the controversial Barangaroo development project.

DH194 The 'Wonga' 2008
oil on canvas 20 x 25cm
SOLD
Enquiries about other paintings of tugs

This earlier painting shows the 'Wonga' passing Balmain.

Now, the 'Wonga' is one of the 2 tugs (the other being the 'Walan') based at Port Pirie which is located 223 kilometres north of Adelaide at the top of Upper Spencer Gulf,

Port Pirie, a small town of 16,000, is still home to the type of heavy industry now removed from Sydney Harbour. The Nyrstar concentrate smelter in Port Pirie is one of the largest smelters in the world.

Related Posts

Painting the tugboats of Sydney Harbour

Marine Art exhibition at Australian Maritime Museum

In the pink -the former Pyrmont Arms Hotel, Harris Street Pyrmont

The former pub 'The Pyrmont Arms' was at 42-44 Harris Street, Pyrmont on the corner of Harris and Bowman Streets.
Built in the 1870s,it closed in the early 1990s when the CSR refinery and distillery were progressively shut down and demolished to make way for the Jackson's landing development. Since then, it has been renovated as retail outlets, restaurants and home units.

P248 The 'Pyrmont Arms' from the CSR 1

1990 oil on canvas 31 x 31cm

Available

I first painted the Pyrmont Arms Hotel as a bird's eye view from the roof of the CSR refinery.I had been the 'Artist in Residence' at the CSR Refinery from the late 1980s to the start of its demolition in the mid 1990s. I had previously been painting at the top of the Panhouse, but one day in a fit of bravery I decided to paint from the top of the Boilerhouse next to the chimneys.
The CSR boilerhouse is now the site of the 'Elizabeth' apartment block of the Jackson's Landing LendLease development.
The Pyrmont Arms Hotel was then still an operating pub and was painted a grubby faded pale pinkish beige. On the back of the pub's western side facing the Scott Street squats, there was a huge ad for 'Have a cold gold KB', unfortunately not visible from my rooftop studio. Across the road was the brick facade of the CSR chem labs.
It didn't stand out from the rest of the rather dingy terraces at the 'Land's End' of Harris street, but what caught my eye was the contrast between the terraces and the overgrown area around the squats that was rapidly turning into a wilderness. I painted a small square canvas focussing on just the Pyrmont Arms, and resolved one day to paint a panorama of the northern end of Harris Street from this vantage point.

P249 'Pyrmont panorama- from the CSR '

1991 oil on canvas 46 x 92cm

Available

A few months later, I climbed the many levels of revolting, sugar syrup encrusted stairs to the top of the CSR boilerhouse again, to paint this panorama, and was startled to find that the formerly almost unnoticeable pub had succumbed to a brash attempt at 'renovation'.
Weirdly, it shared the same revolting shade of pink with another dying pub at the other end of Pyrmont, the 'New York Hotel' in Edward Street, opposite the Pyrmont Power Station.
This fluoro paint job was such a product of its time that it defined the late 1980s to 1990s, a period without style or taste. I remember leggings and jumpers in that same fabulously horrid "glow in the dark" colour, possibly an over-reaction against the ochres and browns of the 1970s. In architecture, it was known not very fondly as "Paddington Pink" or "Paddo pink" for short, although the examples in Paddington itself were much more muted.

P248B 'The 'Pyrmont Arms' from the CSR 2'

1991 oil on canvas 31 x 31cm

Available

It made the Pyrmont Arms stick out like a sore thumb from the dingy red brick warehouses and bond stores, and not in a good way.
I don't know if it was still an operating pub then or whether the new paint job was a desperate last ditch attempt to attract customers or preparation for its sale and possible redevelopment.
For the truth was that the pubs of Pyrmont were hanging by a thread. Their customers were gone with the destruction or relocation of the local industries that had employed them, and the industries of Pyrmont's future were yet to replace them.
The CSR Refinery and Distillery, which had replaced the sandstone quarrymen of northern Pyrmont a century before, was almost deserted and would be demolished and replaced with Jackson's Landing by the middle of the decade. But there was a strange interregnum before the new apartments were built and filled with inhabitants, and the northern end of Harris Street was a ghost town.
The iconic Terminus Hotel, only 2 blocks further up Harris Street, had already ceased trading a decade before, and stood abandoned, neglected and a constant source of speculation for the next 30 years, before its very recent renovation. How the 'Royal Pacific', later to be rechristened the 'Pyrmont Point'/ 'Point Hotel', ever kept on trading is a much bigger mystery that any of the urban myths swirling around the 30 year vacancy of the Terminus.
What is it with the lurid colour schemes inflicted on moribund pubs?
Far from Pyrmont, another doomed hotel, the 'Jolly Frog' also got the pink treatment not long before it suffered one of those mysterious fires that afflict abandoned buildings.
They must have used the same colourblind painter and decorator. And he must have got the paint at a huge discount, or it might have 'fallen off the back of a truck'.
Either way, it didn't work. All closed as pubs not long after.

P248C '42 Harris st -ex Pyrmont Arms'

2012 oil on canvas 31 x 31cm

Available

The 'New York Hotel' has been painted a tasteful off-white, and is now a medical centre, of all things!
'The Pyrmont Arms' has now been painted a dull blue on the ground floor and a muted yellow for the upper floors. It is no longer a hotel, but has been reasonably sympathetically renovated and is now a combination of apartments above and a bottle-o below.

And the Jolly Frog, 6 years after its devastating fire, is still awaiting redevelopment.

Related Posts

Paintings of Pink Pubs

The Boiling Frog

My page of Pyrmont Paintings

A Tale of 2 Pyrmont Hotels - The Terminus and the Point

To the Point

Pretty Vacant

Terminus Redux

A last look around the Harbour Control Tower

Today's painting on the deck gallery is a view of the much maligned and now demolished Harbour Control Tower.

BAR54 'Tower of Power' 2010
oil on canvas 61 x 61cm

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It had many sarcastic nicknames : the "Pill" (controlling the berths in the Harbour, the "concrete mushroom", and even "the hypodermic in God's bum"!

But I think that the viewer of my canvas can find the same stern monumental dignity  that attracted me to it as a subject.

BAR54 'Tower of Power' 2010
oil on canvas 61 x 61cm

Enquiries
The Sydney Harbour Control Tower, which lingered for a while at the northern end of Barangaroo, was demolished over a period of eight months starting in March 2016.
Consisting of an 87m high concrete column topped by an observation room with utterly breath-taking views, it gave the Harbour Master and Port Operations officers an ideal position from which to oversee shipping movements around Sydney Harbour.
The tower was designed in 1972 after two ships collided in the shipping channel off the knuckle of the wharf at Millers Point.
It stood sentinel over Sydney Harbour from 1974-2011 giving continual supervision of shipping movements.
Sydney Ports relocated its harbour control operations to Port Botany in April 2011, leaving the tower to gather dust for 5 years.

DH159 The empty wharf
2007 oil on canvas 61 x 91cm

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I am naturally biased - I had the run of the Harbour Control Tower as a studio for nearly a decade.
As well as painting spectacular views of Sydney from the top floor and the amenities level, I used it as a sort of exclamation point in many landscapes of the wharf and Millers point. This canvas of the empty wharf has the strange melancholy of a de Chirico and the light poles marching steadily toward the Tower echo rows of classical columns.
As a pictorial device, the Tower would give an otherwise mundane streetscape an extra frisson. The feeling of someone potentially observing the scene from above from those green angled windows gave an almost sinister dimension.

MP5 Harbour Tower & Dalgety Terrace 2

2014 acrylic on canvas 18 x 13cm

Enquiries

The decision to remove the tower was controversial.
The developers of Barangaroo had considered it an eyesore as the surrounding development transformed the former port into a millionaire’s playground.
Former Prime Minister Paul Keating, self-appointed Baron Haussman of Sydney, and never one to shy away from an argument, stated with his customary belligerence that the tower did not have a "shred of heritage about it" and that calls to keep it were "rancid reactionism".
But he would, wouldn't he.

With his nearly pathological hatred of industrial heritage, that sits oddly with his working class background, he was grimly determined to get rid of it and pitched relentlessly into anyone with a good word to say about the former wharf.

This article written in November 2014 in the Sydney Morning Herald has a photo of me 'en plein air', painting the Harbour Tower Paul Keating so despised.

The Office of Environment and Heritage had previously described the tower as being of state significance “for its pre-eminent role in the history and maritime operation of the Port of Sydney.The Tower demonstrates 35 years of 24/7 operation in the Port of Sydney from 1974-2009 as the Port Operations and Communications Centre providing supervisory control over the many thousands of shipping movements in Sydney Harbour every year,” the Office said in its previous listing of the tower as a heritage site.
After the Heritage Minister decided not to list the tower on the State Heritage Register, the NSW Government approved a development application from the Barangaroo Delivery Authority to remove the former Harbour Control Tower . In their words : 'in order to achieve a naturalistic form and character for the reserve that is consistent with the site’s concept plan'.
I can't think of anything less naturalistic than Barangaroo. For some reason it brings to mind a poem called aptly "Poetry" by Marianne Moore about an imaginary garden that had real toads in it.
But as in the poem, the developers and their cheerleaders have little time for anything that doesn't fit their very narrow definition of what is "useful". Certainly nothing as useless as heritage.

'same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand.'

Excerpt from
"Poetry" by Marianne Moore

The National Trust  rejected a proposal by the Barangaroo Delivery Authority to demolish the tower while the City of Sydney council wanted it retained as an artwork or public lookout.

Some people suggested alternate uses for the empty tower: bungee jumping, abseiling, a viewing tower over Sydney Harbour, or a “pop-out” café.
However the Barangaroo Reserve project director Peter Funder said “We looked at a number of re-use options and it just wasn’t viable. It completes the vision we’re trying to deliver here of recreating the headland of Barangaroo.”
As for arguments about usefulness, you could also question what practical use does the Barangaroo Headland Park serve. It has allegedly been returned to the 1836 footprint, yet it is far from natural bushland, and the public certainly isn't permitted to hunt or fish there. So it is a construct - just as artificial as the concrete wharf it replaced.

This canvas painted in 2015 from the Stamford on Kent shows rows of lollipop like palm trees perched tier upon tier, as though on a giant wedding cake. The stairway to the top cuts through the cake like a knife cutting a slice out of the cake. Symmetrical and hierarchical, and as unlike real bushland as the horses on a carousel are from the living animals.

MP45 Barangaroo Headland Park from the
Stamford on Kent 2015 oil on canvas 122 x 153cm
COLLECTION: MITCHELL LIBRARY, STATE LIBRARY OF NSW
Enquiries

Its main function seems to be as a distraction from the scale of the southern end.
A spoonful of sugar to make the development go down.
A sort of 'Trojan park' under which is smuggled the true purpose of Barangaroo; to separate punters from their money.
It's a pity that almost all evidence of Sydney as an industrial port has been wiped away. I certainly found poetry in it.
I can't get used to the lack of Tower in the streetscapes of Millers Point - they look strangely empty now.

Related Posts

Article in the Sydney Morning Herald about my Barangaroo painting on display in the new galleries of the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW

Barangaroo paintings in Frances Keevil Gallery

Paintings from the top of the Harbour Control Tower in Frances Keevil Gallery

No Place like home - Plein air painting in Millers Point

Today's painting on the easel of my deck gallery feels appropriate for these uncertain times when many people have been confined to their home in unexpected lockdown and have been rethinking many things they previously took for granted. Such as the relationship between the individual,the community and the government.

Plein air painting on site with protest banner
MP22 '67 Lower Fort st - This is my home'
2014 oil on canvas 46 x 61cm
Enquiries

What makes a house a home?

Is it just a place, or is there something a bit more intangible and numinous?

Why is where you live so important?

Plein air painting on site with protest banner
MP22 '67 Lower Fort st - This is my home'
2014 oil on canvas 46 x 61cm
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I had been painting the East Darling Harbour Wharves for at least a decade before the development of Barangaroo so radically transformed the nature of the western side of the Sydney CBD. Long before the consequences of the end of Sydney's Working Harbour were understood by the general public, I could see the knock-on effect and how it would change the shape of people's lives.

I increasingly started to paint in the streets of the Rocks and Millers Point,knowing that the departure of the heavy industry and shipping would leave this area once again vulnerable to developers and the government. Only a couple of decades earlier, similar pressures had been faced, and the push back from an alliance of residents and unions culminated in the Green Bans led by the revered Jack Mundey AO. Some redevelopment ensued, but residents were relocated into purpose-built social housing in the Sirius Apartments, and Millers Point mostly held its ground.

But this time seemed different.

Millers Point, a historic harbourside enclave with 19th-century terraced houses is only a stone's throw from the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Walsh Bay Wharves and the former East Darling Harbour Wharves (now Barangaroo).

The grand terraces of Lower Fort Street perch on the escarpment overlooking the Walsh Bay Wharves. They spent the last century owned by the Harbour Trust in its various manifestations, and run as 'residentials' for waterside workers. The wharves, stores and workers' housing were completely integrated. The tight knit community was composed of people whose families had worked on the wharves, in some cases over 5 generations.

Plein air painting on site with protest banner
MP22 '67 Lower Fort st - This is my home'
2014 oil on canvas 46 x 61cm
Enquiries

In the 1980s the Millers Point residences passed from the control of the Maritime Services Board to that of the Department of Housing and there was a noticeable decline in service, repairs and maintenance of the properties.

In 2012 the NSW government decided that almost 300 public housing properties at Millers Point must be sold saying the revenue would contribute to the public housing budget although how exactly the money will be spent hasn’t yet been made transparent.

Plein air painting on site with protest banner
 MP22 '67 Lower Fort st - This is my home'
2014 oil on canvas 46 x 61cm
Enquiries

You could easily tell which houses were still inhabited. Banners were hung over balconies, spray painted onto sheets in stencil letters: 'Millers Point Not 4 Sale'; 'Say No to the Total Sell Off of Public Assets'.

The ubiquitous Reg Mombassa designed protest T shirt of a skull smoking a cigar and wearing a top hat, flapped from every washing line.

I painted a series of canvases recording the protests.

Plein air painting on site with protest banner
 MP22 '67 Lower Fort st - This is my home'
2014 oil on canvas 46 x 61cm
Enquiries

The most creative protest banner was a washing line "This is my Home" on the corner of lower Fort Street and Downshire Lane in the shadow of the Harbour Bridge. It summed up every emotion and argument in a single pithy line.

As I painted this, I became friends with its author, Sally.

The artist on site with the local wildlfe
while plein air painting on site

I adore lizards, especially blue tongues, and was very happy when Sally lent me her blue tongue lizard to cuddle. To protect it from the local cats, it had a refuge in the garbage bin left lying on its side. I'd wondered why the bins were apparently scattered randomly on the tree stumps, and then realized they were lizard havens filled with rocks, food and water for 6 out of 7 days, and only used briefly for their original purpose.

I returned to paint a much larger canvas, but soon after, some low life stole Sally's T shirts. She replaced them with a set of towels with another appropriate and thought-provoking motto,  "Age in place" stencilled on them.

Sally was a real character. Despite almost unbearable daily pressure from the authorities, she had the moxie to take the Government to court to try to remain in the home she had lived in for over 30 years.

Unfortunately after putting up a spirited fight, she eventually lost the case and was relocated against her will.

Related Posts

Millers Point Three years On

(Vanessa Berry's blog 'Mirror Sydney'- with a photo of me painting in High Street)

"Millers Point through the Looking Glass "Clearing House

CLEARING HOUSE is the Tenants' Union of NSW's record of what's going on in Social and Affordable Housing portfolio redevelopment and renewal in New South Wales. They asked my permission to use my painting on this site.

Millers Point from the top of the Harbour Control Tower

Tie a yellow ribbon

There goes the neighbourhood

Walsh Bay History - Paintings of a passing Port

Monet and Streeton meet Windsor Bridge

Windsor is one of the 'Macquarie towns' on the Hawkesbury River created in the early 19th century by Governor Lachlan Macquarie as the foodbowl of Sydney.

 TSWB1 Windsor Bridge from western side
2013 acrylic on canvas 46 x 61cm

Available

Thompson Square, established in 1795 at the centre of Windsor, is thought to be the oldest public square in Australia.

The old Windsor Bridge was a beam bridge built in 1874 for horse-drawn vehicles.

This canvas was painted in 2013 before NSW Roads and Maritime Services (RMS) department had started work on the replacement bridge, 35 metres (115 ft) downstream from the existing bridge.

The bank on the Freeman's Reach side of the Hawkesbury, where I painted this idyllic view marks exactly where the new bridge is now situated.

I painted these scenes in jacaranda flowering season as the bluish mauves offset the bright greens of the foreground.

TSWB3 Windsor Bridge early morning from western side
2013 acrylic on canvas 46 x 61cm
Available

The old bridge is an austere construction with modestly proportioned piers and the engineering of the cross bracing  consistent with the challenges of its location.

TSWB12 View from Windsor Bridge in jacaranda season
2015 oil on canvas 25 x 51cm
Available

As you can see from the painting above, the real charm of Windsor Bridge is revealled in its river vistas.

Monet would have loved this spot. And my gallerist, on seeing these works, did ask if I'd painted them in France.

This area certainly inspired Arthur Streeton, one of the Australian Impressionists, who painted his masterpiece "The Purple Noon's Transparent Might" not far from here.

TSWB16 'Construction of the new Windsor Bridge' 2019
oil on canvas 91 x 183cm
Available

But now the timeless harmony of the sleepy river and the Georgian, Victorian and Federation architecture of Thompson Square has been surrounded by a maelstrom of excavation and construction.

Most of the old trees have now been felled.

The new bridge opened to traffic on 18th May 2020.

The new approach road rises up on a large visually intrusive embankment as it cuts a swathe  through the square.

There is now a bitter battle to save the 140 year old bridge from demolition. The RMS has stated that it will start removal in the coming months, but many would prefer the old bridge to be restored and left in situ. 

Related posts

My page of Windsor Paintings

Painting Thompson Square, Windsor

The Boiling Frog

Fish and chips

The Phantom Toll House

Millers Point from the top of the Harbour Control Tower

Before the inevitable demolition of the Harbour Control Tower, I wanted to paint a very large panorama of this amazing view.

I'd had the run of the top floor and the amenities level of the 87 metre high Harbour Control Tower from the early 2000s until port operations finished there in April 2011. Afterwards I had occasional access to create paintings of various stages of the construction of Barangaroo. 

I'd spent many unforgettable New Year’s Eves on the top floor, painting 360 degrees of the fireworks exploding underneath against the spectacular harbour view.

The perspective was very tricky, so I warmed up with a few smaller works first.

This is a small study of the rooftops of the heritage Miller's Point terraces and the former Bond stores of the Walsh Bay Wharves.

Work in progress " Miller's Point  and Walsh Bay Wharves

from top of the Harbour Control Tower "

2014 oil painting on canvas 36 x 46cm

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There was such an overwhelming mass of tiny details that I needed to tackle this subject in a series of small works before risking getting bogged down in a huge oil painting. I wanted to understand the rhythm of the landscape.

The perspective is made more complex by the landbridges over the twisting streets winding their way from the angled rows of Walsh Bay Wharves up the hills.

The entire suburb of Miller's Point lies at my feet and the roads seem to curve towards the Opera House in the middle distance.

HCT47  'Millers Point from top of Harbour Tower'
oil on canvas 36 x 46cm

As you can see, my palette changed by the time I finished this work - one of the hazards of working 'en plein air'. I started early, but didn't finish for a few hours, so the clear pale yellows of the morning deepened to the burnt orange and rich purple shadows of the afternoon.
I had to stand on a chair to paint this, as the windows on the Amenities floor were a bit too high for me to see the terraces.
I'm only 5'1"- short, even for a woman.
Exactly the same height as Toulouse-Lautrec. Unfortunately I love painting canvases on an epic scale.

The tower would sway in the wind, sometimes almost imperceptibly, and sometimes with a rolling motion that can induce seasickness which is distracting when trying to paint fine details.

In the far distance, you can see the silhouette of the half-demolished Hammerhead Crane on Garden Island, which was finally removed by October 2014. I had just finished a stint as 'Artist in Residence' on Garden Island painting this before the demolition started.

The demolition of the Harbour Control Tower would be next. However I did manage to finish a few large scale panoramas from the top floor, before I lost one of my best studios forever.

The State library now has several of these works in their collection.

Related articles

Paintings of the old Port

Millers Point, 3 Years On

Out from the storerooms -paintings from the State library Collection

Related Posts

Last of the Hungry Mile

Tie a yellow ribbon

Eaten by robots

The mother art is architecture

Meltdown-Oxycutting, William Wallbank and Sons, Auburn

The now derelict 'William Wallbank and Sons' was a foundry on the Parramatta Road, Auburn, built in 1932.

I've been painting the machinery before it is all stripped out and sent to a scrap metal yard.

AWW5 Oxycutting, William Wallbank + Sons foundry

2017 oil on canvas 46cm tondo

Some of the ladles and other machinery that couldn't be sold intact were being broken up for scrap by oxycutting. 

During this exciting process, I painted some small and medium circular canvases, known as tondos.

In Art, the circular format of the tondo was often used for religious subjects.

Extreme chiaroscuro was also exploited by artists such as Caravaggio, to heighten the contrast between the gloomy background and the intensely illuminated saints or angels.

The fire in the dim interior gave the scene a mysterious atmosphere, reminding me of the nocturnal paintings of one of my favourite artists, Georges de la Tour.
Figures in his paintings are enveloped in shifting accretions of darkness - hands and features picked out by pooling, smoky light. 

AWW5 Oxycutting, William Wallbank + Sons foundry

2017 oil on canvas 46cm tondo"

Oxycutting is one of the oldest welding processes.

A torch is used to heat the metal to its kindling temperature. When it's cherry red, a stream of oxygen is focused on the heated part and chemically reacts with the ferrous metal, producing more heat and forming molten iron oxide which is then blasted out of the cut.

The melting point of the iron oxide is about half that of the metal being cut, so it will immediately turn to liquid iron oxide and flow away from the cutting zone.

AWW5 Oxycutting, William Wallbank + Sons foundry

2017 oil on canvas 46cm tondo"

Starting a cut in the middle of a workpiece is known as piercing.

Once it has started, steel can be cut surprisingly quickly, far faster than if it were completely melted through.

Sometimes remnants of iron oxide remain on the workpiece, forming a hard "slag" which can be removed by tapping or grinding.

AWW6 Oxycutting, William Wallbank + Sons foundry
2017 acrylic on paper 56 x 76cm

The hottest part of the flame is approximately 6,000 °F (3,300 °C) - hot enough to easily melt steel.

But the flame of the cutting torch is not intended to melt the metal, just bring it to its ignition temperature.

The rest of the heat is created by the burning metal itself.

AWW5 Oxycutting, William Wallbank + Sons foundry

2017 oil on canvas 46cm tondo"

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A basic oxy-acetylene rig is faster than a petrol-driven cut-off grinder, as well as lighter, smaller, quieter and not as prone to severe vibration. 

Oxy-acetylene torches can easily cut through ferrous materials as thick as 200 mm. 

However oxy-acetylene has its limitations. It can only efficiently cut low- to medium-carbon steels and wrought iron.

High-carbon steels aren't suitable because the melting point of the slag is closer to the melting point of the parent meta.The slag from the cutting action mixes with the clean melt near the cut, which means the oxygen doesn't reach the clean metal to burn it. With cast iron, graphite between the grains interferes with the cutting action of the torch. Stainless steels can't be cut either with this process, because the material doesn't burn as easily.

AWW7 Oxycutting, William Wallbank + Sons foundry 2

2017 oil on canvas 46cm tondo

Painting this was fascinating, but there was an undercurrent of sadness, as it

marked the point of no return.

The life of the former foundry was at an end, and its vivisection will be the last fires lit inside.

"Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice."

"Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost

Related posts

Rust Bucket

Steady Rest

Scar Tissue

Wrong side of the tracks - Darling Island Bond and Free

All fired up

Eveleigh - Industrial heritage artist at work

Irons in the fire

White Bay Power Station - Inside Out

Power Base - Artist in Residence at the White Bay Power Station