Half Nuts

 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.

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.

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Shadowboard

A shadow board is one of the most common options for tool storage found in amateur and professional workshops and sheds the world over. Its noble aim is to organize the workplace so that tools are near the work station where they are to be used.

Work in progress on the easel
E135A 'Shadowboard - No Brake' 2017
oil on metal panel 51 x 51cm
Available

Shadow boards have the outlines of a work station's tools marked on them, so operators can quickly identify which tools are in use or missing.

As well as providing easy access to tools,they are supposed to reduce time spent searching for the correct tool; to reduce losses due to carelessness, lack of proper maintenance or theft; to improve work station safety as tools are replaced safely after use, rather than becoming potential hazards; to reduce clutter; and to maximize the space available.

Work in progress on the easel
E135A 'Shadowboard - No Brake' 2017
oil on metal panel 51 x 51cm
Available

Well that was the Platonic ideal anyway.

The dream of imposing order on chaos is often cruelly exposed as exactly that - a dream, when reality kicks in.

How should a shadowboard be organized?

Sounds so easy and straightforward, but it reveals fundamental and often irreconcilable differences in temperament, age and level of expertise, and can be the source of perpetual bickering, even long-running feuds.

Work in progress on the easel
E135A 'Shadowboard - No Brake' 2017
oil on metal panel 51 x 51cm
Available

Should it be organized by type of tool (all spanners, screwdrivers etc grouped together), by size (aesthetically pleasing to have a hierarchy of tools descending by size, but not necessarily the most practical), by frequency of use (commonly used tools in the middle where they are easily removed or replaced) by ease of removal /replacement (large, awkwardly sized or heavy tools placed where people don't have to reach up or down for them) or by what is required for common tasks (a particular size of wrench/saw/hammer/screwdriver etc are often needed together for a task that crops up frequently).

Sometimes it can even be a passive-aggressive wish list, like a recent commercial for a hardware line of products where empty outlines were left for needed or desired tools, either in hope of a future financial windfall or thoughtful gift.

E135B'Shadowboard with 44 class diesel
-(Do not pull all way out) '
2017 oil on metal panel 51 x 51cm
Available

The usual result is a hotch potch of all the above.

Jumble of the useful, the once useful and now obsolete, the broken bits, the spare parts that 'may come in handy'; the lost, strayed and some frankly useless items that seem to breed unchecked in dark corners. When, if ever, were any of these used? Last week? Last century?

Work in progress on the easel
E135B'Shadowboard with 44 class diesel
-(Do not pull all way out) '
2017 oil on metal panel 51 x 51cm
Available

I used metal panels to paint on instead of my usual canvas, leaving the metal bare when the tool was shiny and well maintained, and only painting the non-metallic or rusty parts. The work above also includes a 44 class diesel lurking in the background.

The faded, naive lettering found on cryptic signs create abstract yet evocative grids of letters and word fragments, colour and text fading into meditative, elegiac compositions.

Other mysteries abound. As this is a workshop filled with tools and presumably people who know how to use them, why did someone bother to write "Do not pull all way out" on the drawers of the cabinet beneath, instead of fixing the drawer?

I'm no handyperson, but even I can fix drawers - it's fiddly but not that hard.

E135A 'Shadowboard - No Brake' 2017
oil on metal panel 51 x 51cm
Available

A massive Marie Kondo attack has been carried out in the Large Erecting Shop to tackle decades of clutter. Nothing to do with sparking joy.

Everything deemed not strictly necessary to the re-purposing of the Large Erecting Shop as a running shed is being given the old heave-ho - best case scenario sent to Thirlmere, worst case - the skip.

I was chased from one end of the shed to the other, as wherever I set up my easel, I seemed to get in the way. I was hunting for a quiet corner as the situation brought out crankiness in normally laid back people. I was incessantly asked "why I was painting this rubbish instead of the trains", but most of the trains will still exist somewhere, while this sort of subject, evoking the true spirit of the workshop, is ephemeral.

But fashions change as to what is deemed 'necessary' and unique and quirky items can be lost or destroyed in the rush to impose order on chaos..

In the Large Erecting Shop the shadowboards are no longer functional as no repair or maintenance will be carried out there.

Ghost boards with ghost signs for ghost trains.

They show the never to be filled outlines of lost tools for lost purposes.

Headstones of the workshop.

More paintings of the Eveleigh Railway Workshops

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Blacksmith forging in the Australian Technology Park, Eveleigh Railway Workshops

Today's painting on my isolation deck gallery is of one of the blacksmiths in Bay 1/2 of the Locomotive Workshops, South Eveleigh, Eveleigh Railway Workshops.

E93 Blacksmith quenching chisels,

Eveleigh Railway Workshops 2011

oil on canvas 152 x 122cm

This canvas is so large that parts of it are obscured by the railing and roof of my pergola.

However, I did paint it from life - nervously trying to keep my oil paint and turps out of the way of the blacksmiths who were swiftly carrying red-hot metre long metal chisels from the forge and quenching them in a vat of boiling oil!

As you do!

E93 Blacksmith quenching chisels,

Eveleigh Railway Workshops 2011

oil on canvas 152 x 122cm

I painted a series of blacksmith paintings from life and even exhibited them in Bay 1/2 while the blacksmiths were giving public forging demonstrations.

The blacksmiths at the time were part of 'Wrought Artworks' which had been founded by  Guido Gouvernor in 1991 just after the Eveleigh Railway Workshops ceased operations. He conserved the antique heritage machinery and kept it in working order so that they weren't static exhibits, but part of a working forge.

More recently, Matthew Mewburn of 'Eveleigh Works' has taken over this important and historically significant task.

The posts below include the stages of these paintings as works in progress on the easel, and some photos from several Open Days at the Australian Technology Park, Eveleigh Railway Workshops.

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 Eveleigh paintings
The village smithy (sydney-eye.blogspot.com)
Time for Safety 
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Selfie at South Eveleigh (Watching the forge fires fade)

I don't usually paint self portraits, but this is the exception.

I've been asked to exhibit in "Selfie", an exhibition of self portraits by artists who don't normally specialize in portraiture.

I have painted myself in front of the largest surviving forge remaining in Australia, the Eveleigh Locomotive Workshop

"Selfie" is on display from 11th - 26th May at 1047 Gallery, 1047 Botany Road Mascot.

Opening Saturday 11th may 2-5pm, closing drinks 26th May 2-4pm.
 Open Saturday & Sunday 11 am - 4pm
0401 037 359     ten-forty-seven@mail.com

Invitation to "Selfie" Exhibition at 1047 Gallery

 

 E158 'Watching the forge fires fade'
 2019 acrylic on canvas 31 x 61cm

 

Available for sale

From 1886 until the 1980s, the Blacksmith’s Workshop produced equipment and parts for manufacturing and maintaining steam locomotives.

The modern blacksmiths of Eveleigh Works still use traditional machinery in homage to this bygone era of steam trains and handmade tools.

However, despite their much-loved status as icons of industrial heritage, the blacksmiths face an uncertain fate as a Woolworths will be built next door. 

In the maelstrom of inner city gentrification, blacksmiths are anachronisms; living fossils from the 19^th century.

Much like plein air painters, I suppose.

The deep shadows and dramatic lighting of the forge evoke the evocative, melancholy poetry of nocturnal scenes painted by my heroes Caravaggio, Joseph Wright of Derby and Georges de la Tour. Their nocturnes are ‘memento mori’ paintings contemplating  transience and mortality. The flickering flame will soon be extinguished. 

My canvas is cloaked in darkness, yet a flash of intense illumination throws eerie green highlights across my face. Behind me the blacksmith darts gracefully backwards and forwards in his dangerous dance with fire.

My face looms in the foreground towards the viewer, lost in thought. My gaze doesn’t meet the viewer directly, but peers intently at something just out of sight. Am I looking back in nostalgia to the past, or staring warily at an unknown future?

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The village smithy (sydney-eye.blogspot.com)
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Painting in the Paint Shop - The Green Room

The Paint Shop was one of the North Eveleigh precinct’s 4 main buildings, along with the Carriage Works, Stores and the Chief Mechanical Engineer’s Office on Wilson Street. It is next to the much better publicized CarriageWorks building in North Eveleigh.

Starting my painting of
E136 'The Green Room,Heritage Store, North Eveleigh'
2017 oil on canvas 36 x 46cm
Available
Even though Eveleigh Carriage Workshops closed during the 1980s, a section of the Paint Shop remains in railway use today.

Starting my painting of

E136 'The Green Room,Heritage Store,

North Eveleigh'

2017 oil on canvas 36 x 46cm
Available
The Paint Shop is owned by RailCorp and used by the Office of Rail Heritage to store heritage rolling stock and moveable relic collections. It is the storage site of the heritage suburban electric fleet which are being painstakingly restored by the dedicated volunteers of Historic Electric Traction.

Starting my painting of

E136 'The Green Room -

Heritage Store, North Eveleigh'

2017 oil on canvas 36 x 46cm
Available
Many companies have tried to lay claim to the huge slice of no man's land west of Redfern Station, and it really does have a slightly besieged air.
The University of Sydney made a spirited attempt to add it to its empire and it was even recently touted as a potential home for Google's new Sydney headquarters before the NSW State Government poured cold water on the idea.
The latest candidate seems to be Atlassian, as the jewel in the crown of yet another proposed technology hub (don't governments love 'hubs'!)
I don't know what the difference is between a 'hub' and the more lowly category of mere 'business park', but I'm sure it would be several hundred million dollars at the least.
I know that some sort of redevelopment is inevitable, but how much of the heritage would be retained is still unclear.

Starting my painting of

E136 'The Green Room ,

Heritage Store, North Eveleigh'

2017 oil on canvas 36 x 46cm
Available
The doorway under the stairs once led to the Store itself, where an old storeman once doled out supplies.
This corner of the Paint Store is painted a brilliant and venomous shade of green. Green now has vague connotations of health and nature, but a hundred or so years ago, it had a different reputation.
This colour looks suspiciously like the notorious arsenic based 'Paris green' which was invented just after the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century. It was so toxic that ballgowns dyed with this bright and deadly pigment were reputed to kill their wearers if they stayed too long at the dance. Wallpaper painted with Paris Green was even supposed to have contributed to the final illness and death of Oscar Wilde.
As though the arsenic and copper ingredients of the original formula weren't sufficiently deadly, some warped genius later added lead arsenate to the cocktail.
As this building long predates any health and safety rules my suspicions could be well founded. If you could overlook its one lonely drawback of being horribly poisonous, 'Paris green' is a very useful paint - bright, fairly stable, very opaque and giving good coverage. It has been used to colour fireworks, and also to kill rats in the Parisian sewers; hence its name. And it kills mosquitoes quickly and effectively. What's not to love about a paint like that......
In the theatre, a 'green room' is a waiting room for performers before, during and after the performance.
I feel that this quiet and neglected corner of inner Sydney will soon be the venue for a spectacular drama starring government, developers, community groups, universities and fabulously wealthy and powerful international companies.
There will probably be fireworks.

And it could well become toxic.

More paintings of Eveleigh Railway Workshops at my Eveleigh page

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Ghost in the machine

I've been painting ghost signs in the Eveleigh Railway Workshops, as one by one, the relics of the past slowly vanish.

There are faded sepia warning signs so old that they are handwritten.
Fire extinguishers have kept a quiet vigil, like forgotten sentries post battle.

E119 'Ghost sign in the Large'
2017 oil on canvas 31 x 15cm

Enquiries 

So, what is the 'Ghost in the machine' ?
This phrase, so often used, yet little understood, was coined by the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle to describe the Cartesian dualist account of the mind–body relationship.

One of the underlying assumptions within the famous maxim of the French 17th century philosopher René Descartes, 'Cogito ergo sum' ('I think, therefore I am') is  that the mind is not only distinct, but actually separable from the body.

E119A 'Ghost sign in the Large 2'
2017 oil on canvas 31 x 15cm

Enquiries 

According to the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), a person is defined as ‘an intelligent being, having reason and reflection, which can consider itself in different times and places.’ By this definition, someone is defined as a person if they can think about themselves in the past, future, and conditional, and in a variety of different places. 
If a person has this quality of self-conscious recognition, what is the cause? Does consciousness reside in their body, their brain, or their ‘soul’? If that person has had a serious accident rendering them unconscious and without brain function -so that the body is still alive but the mind is no longer self-conscious nor could ever be again-Is the body still to be regarded as a person? If not, then how can the physical body alone be that which makes them a person?
If the Eveleigh Railway Workshops are emptied of most of their machines and other heritage items, how can they still be considered to be the Eveleigh Railway Workshops?

How much can be removed, before it becomes an empty shell?

When the contents of a container are removed, is it still a container?
What is a body without a mind or a soul?

More paintings of the Eveleigh Railway Workshops

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Painting in the paint shop - The Green Room

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The fire within