2024 Pyrmont Festival- paintings of Pyrmont, past and present

 

The 12th anniversary of the Pyrmont Festival of Wine Food and Art,

 will be held 11am - 5pm on  Saturday and Sunday 18th and 19th May 2024 in Pirrama Park at the northern end of the Pyrmont Peninsula.  

I'll exhibit a selection of artworks painted 'en plein air' in Pyrmont and Ultimo from the early 1980s  until now. 

Many of the works I'll exhibit were painted within a couple of hundred metres from the Festival site, and many have never been exhibited in public.

A new major work which will be featured is an enormous panorama painted from the James Watkinson Reserve in front of Ways Terrace (aka the Point st Flats)

P800 Sydney Harbour from Pyrmont 2023 oil on canvas 122 x 183cm

On the left of this canvas is Jones Bay Wharf, once home to a motley collection of waterfront industries, & now the upmarket function centre Doltone House. In the background, the controversial Barangaroo Headland Park has replaced the former East Darling Harbour Wharves/Hungry Mile. On the right, the handsome Federation architecture of the Royal Edward Victualling Yards (aka "REVY") still dominates Darling Island, but REVY 3 is now an apartment block, and Google has taken over the former headquarters of the Naval Support Command.  On the road below, the rooftops of the former Arrow Dive buildings are barely visible beneath the canopy of the Port Jackson Figtrees.

This painting is a sequel to a canvas I painted close to this viewpoint, 35 years ago in 1989, when Pyrmont was a very different place to how it is today. This 1989 painting is on the cover of my book of my Pyrmont paintings.

"Pyrmont- A History in paintings" by Jane Bennett

While I sold the 1989 painting several years ago, the book will be available for sale during the festival.

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

Enquiries
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

Barangaroo - tabula rasa

Today's painting on the deck is a panorama painted on the East Darling Harbour Wharves. It includes 2 of my former studios - the Harbour Control Tower and Moore's Wharf.

The now demolished Harbour Control Tower dominates the empty wharf. A row of pink terraces perch on top of the golden sandstone escarpment
while the Sydney Harbour Bridge can be glimpsed behind Moore's Wharf, a handsome heritage sandstone building housing the Sydney Ports Corporation.

The cute little federation building on the left is a Federation era sewage pumping station. It has since been cleaned up and relocated.

BAR60 'Barangaroo north -
The Harbour Tower,
escarpment and Moore's Wharf 2'
2010 oil on canvas 38 x 76cm

This canvas was painted just after the wharves had been cleared of all their maritime infrastructure, and just before work began on the construction of the Barangaroo Headland Park that replaced it.
It shows a place in a state of limbo.
I've included a couple of photos of this and a couple of other canvases as works in progress, to show some of the process involved in their creation.
I had to lug a french box easel, paint, brushes, medium, canvases, a couple of tables, a chair, and my lunch, packed inside trolley luggage. After doing this for several decades, I've become quite fit and strong!

Plein air oil painting behind the barrier
on the East Darling Harbour Wharves
Showing this canvas as a work in progress
with my trolley luggage, table, chair, french box easel,
paints, brushes and other equipment.

Barangaroo is a paradox.
The area now known as Barangaroo was off limits to the public for over a hundred years but was the central core of Sydney's economy. Necessary, yet ignored ; in full view yet strangely invisible.

Now it is centre stage, hotly debated and fought over, yet still unknown to the vast majority of Sydney.
Once a despised slum - now prime waterfront. Only the fashion has changed...

BAR60 'Barangaroo north -
The Harbour Tower,
escarpment and Moore's Wharf 2'
2010 oil on canvas 38 x 76cm

It had a complex. fascinating multi-layered history but has been treated as though it is tabula rasa - a blank canvas for architects to impose their will upon.

Nearly 200 years of maritime heritage disappeared with barely a token gesture to its previous existence.

Related Posts

Eaten by Robots

Barangaroo - Red Square, the Drill Rig and a little Archaeology

Tie a yellow ribbon

The Last of the Hungry Mile

My exhibition at the Sydney Open

The Last of the Hungry Mile- Harbour Control Tower from East Darling Harbour Wharves

Today's canvas was painted from inside Wharf 4 in East Darling Harbour Wharves during the its last few weeks as a working port.

DH181 The last of the Hungry Mile   
2007  oil on canvas  180 x 122cm

FINALIST 2007 SULMAN PRIZE

The once bustling wharf became a ghost town, as the cargo-loading infrastructure was dismantled, the 3 shore cranes were loaded onto barges for Port Kembla or Webb Dock, and anything remaining was put into storage or into a skip bin.

The wharf has now closed forever and Sydney’s traditional role as a working harbour is nearly over.
For Sydney Harbour to be stripped of its original character and purpose, was almost unthinkable.

Abandoned places have a haunting beauty.
They are points of temporary stasis in the turning world of urban change.

It was eerily silent; waiting for the demolition to start and the genesis of Barangaroo to begin.

Barangaroo is about hubris - a grand feat of ambitious central planning in search of a purpose. The vaunted economic rebirth of the area has like so much else been sent into hibernation by the Covid crisis.

DH181 The last of the Hungry Mile   
2007  oil on canvas  180 x 122cm

FINALIST 2007 SULMAN PRIZE

The columns of light poles point towards the Harbour Control Tower, which was one of the last vestiges of the working port in the area, and was demolished a few years later.
This Port Operations and Communication Centre was a milestone in the history and operation of the Port of Sydney. The construction of the tower gave oversight of maritime operations over all the Port of Sydney for the first time.

Nestling underneath, on the escarpment is the historic Hotel Palisade, once a rough waterside early opener, now gentrified for the expected inflow of tourists to Barangaroo on the west and the revamped Walsh Bay Wharves to the north-east.

Why the Hullaballoo about Barangaroo?

"May close without warning"

The Hungry Mile  
Tie a yellow ribbon

Millers Point

Eaten by robots

My old studio, the Harbour Control Tower

MP55 Harbour Control Tower from Observatory Hill

2016 oil on paper 9.5 x 9.5cm

Available

 
Another one of my old studios has bitten the dust.

I feel like I can jinx a place just by painting it.

I have been observing the start of the demolition of the Port Operations Harbour Tower in Millers Point.

Love it or loathe it, the Tower was one of the last vestiges of Barangaroo's former life as a working port.
The heart and soul of the former 'Hungry Mile' has been ripped out and replaced with machines.
Literally.

MP56 Harbour Control Tower from Argyle st

2016 oil on paper 9.5 x 9.5cm

Available 

Once the 'mushroom cap' at the top of the Tower was fully removed, the concrete stem below it was eaten away by robotic excavators from the top down.

Just another portent of the world envisioned by Isaac Asimov in his book “I, Robot. Technology asserts its robotic grip whether you like it or not.

Progress is so impersonal.

Eaten by robots- what a way to go!
So very Dr Who. "Exterminate, exterminate!"

MP54 Harbour Control Tower

from the Hotel Palisade 2016-7

oil on canvas 122 x 153cm
Available

Meanwhile paint peels off surrounding terraces awaiting their inevitable gentrification. The Hotel Palisade opposite has completed its journey from seedy early opening waterfront dive to expensive hipster hub, while retaining some of the trappings of its colourful past.

Related Posts

Barangaroo - Red Square, the Drill Rig and a little Archaeology

Barangaroo - Tabula Rasa

Tie a yellow ribbon

The Last of the Hungry Mile

My exhibition at the Sydney Open

North Barangaroo Headland Park - The thin blue line

My stint as 'Artist in Residence' in my Studio on the top floor of the Sydney Ports Corporation's Moore's Wharf has given me a front row seat to paint the evolution of the former Wharf 3 at East Darling Harbour Wharves (formerly the Customs Shed) into the North Barangaroo Headland Park.

 MW16 'North Barangaroo Headland Park-
The 'Blue Line' from Moore's Wharf ' 
2011 oil on canvas 31 x 61cm

Enquiries about this painting

I painted this in September 2011 from the western window of my Moore's Wharf studio, which overlooks the construction site that will soon be the North Barangaroo Headland Park.
Apart from the recent Open day in June, Barangaroo would still probably be an unfamiliar location to most people,  unless they live or work locally.

In the background of these 2 paintings, Balmain is the headland on the left, Goat Island is on the right, and in the centre distance is Ballast Point in Birchgrove. Ballast Point, formerly a derelict refuelling depot, was refashioned into a park in 2008 by the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority. I'd been lucky enough to be able to paint a series of paintings at Ballast Point just before its transformation.

Some of the structures which were around the Ballast Point fuel tanks are still in a rusting heap mouldering away behind the White Bay Power Station, and can be seen in a couple of paintings I created on site as Artist in Residence at the White Bay Power Station.

On the concrete of the former wharf, there's a blue line painted in a series of stylized curves and zig-zags , to divide land from sea. A little like the line painted on many Sydney streets for the marathon of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, which is still visible in the oddest places.

No Olympic athletes here, just the odd local jogger or dog walker.

It's also a weird echo of the seemingly abstract lines of different colours used in its previous incarnation as a wharf, to distinguish pedestrian walkways from truck parking zones.

On the southern side of the line the sign "Headland Park" has been painted on a green background. On the other side of the line "Sydney Harbour" has been painted in the now ubiquitous Barangaroo blue.
Soon after this was painted, excavation began.

According to the Barangaroo Delivery Authority, the coastline is intended to follow the contours of the shore as it was before European settlement.

Liiterally, "cut along the dotted line".

 MW28 'North Barangaroo Headland Park -
The caissons from Moore's Wharf '
2013 oil on canvas 36 x 46cm
Enquiries about this painting

And, as you can see, they did.

This was painted in February 2013.

By this stage, the skin of the concrete surface has been pierced.

The caissons of the north end of the wharf are now exposed and full of water like a lot of tiny swimming pools.

The geometric symmetry of the wharf still remains, but mounds of sand and gravel hint at the new shoreline yet to come.
Soon the straight edge of the wharf will be broken, the caissons removed and the yellowblock sandstone will be carefully positioned around the new shoreline.

Related posts

Out from the storerooms- Paintings in the new galleries of the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW

Barangaroo paintings in the Frances Keevil Gallery

Millers Point from the top of Harbour Control Tower

Lashed to the Mast - Plein Air painting, Moore's Wharf