Gantry

Demolition of Cruise ship Terminal at Darling Harbour 8

The Gantry

I had wondered if the gantries were to be kept intact and possibly recycled for use at the new cruise ship terminal soon to be built at White Bay.

Ironically they are instead about to be demolished by the very same man who built the orange gantry only 8 years ago.
More irony :
At the foot of the gantry is an incongrous inscription in fading and cracked fluorescent cadmium yellow capital letters :

"KEEP"

Breakfast in the ruins with my half finished canvas
of the last gantry of Wharf 8,
the former cruise ship terminal of Barangaroo

My painting of the last gantry of Wharf 8

View more of my Barangaroo paintings at my Barangaroo blog 'Painting Barangaroo'

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Out of Time

Painting inside the hall of the former cruise ship terminal at Wharf 8, South Barangaroo

"Out of time " 2010
oil painting on canvas 31 x 31 cm
Available
Enquiries about this painting

A poignant little genre painting. Stopped clocks; a security sign; an abandoned storeroom.

Industrial memento mori.

A memento mori, or "reminder of death" is a familiar motif from medieval art. Sometimes a gruesome skeleton clothed in tattered flesh holds a scroll bearing the Latin inscription, "I am what you will be. I was what you are. For every man is this so."

Other paintings have more subtle ways of implying the same message - a piece of rotting fruit or an overblown rose in a Dutch 17th century still life; an hourglass or a mirror may mark the passage of time in a portrait.

Every good still life painting should have at least a whiff of mortality about it; a slight sting in the tail; a spoonful of medicine to make the sugar go down.

I found a plaque commemorating the opening of this building - 1999. Not all that long ago, but already it seems like an eon has passed.

Sydney Ports Corporation has just arrived to take possession of this sign.

I found its inscription hilarious - it was about how passengers with cardiac pacemakers were not to go through the X ray machines, but had to be bodily searched by the security guards!

if they didn't have heart problems to start with they would when they finished; all the excitement might prove too much!

It is such an insecure security sign.

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