I'm sure this title will resonate with most people's feelings at the moment!
"Half nuts" certainly isn't too far from my current state of mind, so I thought this would be an appropriate painting to resume my Covid lockdown gallery on the deck.
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| E132B Half nuts 2017 oil on canvas 20 x 25cm |
However the title should really be "Half-inch nuts"!
This small canvas of rusty old oil cans, was from a series of still life studies painted in the Large Erecting Shop of the Eveleigh Railway Workshops.
The inscriptions in the background of half, three quarter, five eighths and seven eighth inch nuts, were on a tool box in front of a work cabinet. Needless to say, none of the sections contained any nuts at all, so it was a brave but doomed attempt to impose some sort of order into an assortment of motley widgets. People had obviously been putting tools back into whatever came to hand for quite some time.
During lockdown, I've been making a half-hearted attempt to organize my own shed and sort the useful items from the potentially useful, and the downright rubbish that mysteriously accumulates. I hopefully attach labels as I go, then cross them out if I have too many widgets or not enough. If there's anything that doesn't fit in an obvious category, but isn't quite rusty or broken enough to toss out, I put it in a large wooden box labelled "half nuts" in honour of my time at Eveleigh.