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?

Related posts

Irons in the fire

Playing with fire

Macdonaldtown - A Station without a suburb
Strike while the iron is hot

Eveleigh- Industrial Heritage Artist at Work

ATP Open Day - Saturday, 25 Feb 2012
 Eveleigh paintings
The village smithy (sydney-eye.blogspot.com)
The slow return from the fire 
The fire within 
En plein air with street cred (sydney-eye.blogspot.com)

Oils ain't oils- Painting Still Life in the Eveleigh Railway Workshops

A still life typically depicts inanimate subject matter. 

It was initially despised as the most lowly form of painting. But every still life is a memento mori.
Memento mori is Latin for “Remember that you must die”.
I've delved into the long tradition of the ‘still life’ genre, which celebrates the magic power of painting an arrangement of commonplace objects to reflect on ideas of mortality.
When captured in paint, they are imbued with a life beyond the ordinary.

"Vanitas” elements reveal the emptiness of material pursuits and futility of earthly ambitions.  

The Latin noun Vanitas literally means “emptiness” and the central theme in these paintings is the Christian view of earthly life and the futility  & worthlessness of all ambition.

I love to paint “useless” things from industrial sites, the minutiae of everyday life. There's a poignant quality in this “rubbish”, so trivial to most. These remnants provide me with an endless source of subject matter. There are no people in these pictures but their presence is always felt. History, memory and observation provide the bones of the story.

E130A Oils ain't oils 1 2017 oil on canvas 10 x 10cm

Available for sale  

These rusty old oil cans from the interior of the Large Erecting Shop in the Eveleigh Railway Workshops truly are symbols of transience. They will be discarded and thrown into the skip bin as soon as I've finished my canvases. I've won them a stay of execution with my paintings.

E130B Oils ain't oils 2 2017 oil on canvas 10 x 10cm

Available for sale 

They contained the necessary ingredient to lubricate engines to keep them moving. Literally, to make something go. 

And they went.

Locomotives won't be repaired and maintained in the Large Erecting Shop for much longer. The best possible future for it will be as a running shed where only exactly what is strictly necessary to run trains will be tolerated. All else will be relocated at best, or discarded at worst. If it doesn't become a running shed, Mirvac and Channel 7 are lurking just outside to finish it off.

E130C Oils ain't oils 3 2017 oil on canvas 10 x 10cm

Available for sale   

Behind the oil cans was a board with inscriptions "1/2 Nuts", "5/8 Nuts", "3/4 Nuts","7/8 Nuts", which always made me laugh. You don't have to be totally nuts to work her, just half.

E132 Oils ain't oils 2 2017 oil on aluminium panel 51 x 51cm.

Available for sale 

I've concocted different methods for reproducing variety of surfaces  by experimenting with painting on metal panels.
This works well with the rusty cans - I leave the metal bare of paint and only paint in the rust.

This technique pays homage to the distant past.

When light rebounds from a matte surface, the irregularites of the surface scatter the light. However when light strikes a smooth polished surface such as metal there is a gleam, shimmer or lustre which can even reveal the shape of the original light source. Medieval students of optics called the depiction of reflected light in a painting "splendour". Light was not only regarded as beautiful, but also deemed to be sacred. This quality of light was difficult to reproduce in painting. Early medieval artists would rely on the inclusion of reflective and precious metals such as gold leaf, until the development of oil painting in the 15th century allowed artists like van Eyck the ability to create the illusion of reflection by superimposing thin translucent layers of colour. 

The workmen trained in the Eveleigh Railway Workshops were master manipulators of metal, so in these still life paintings I am using both these artistic traditions to capture every nuance of their lost tools.

Related Posts

Shadowboard

Ghost Train 

Revenant 

Nocturne - painting steam locomotive 3642

38's are great, mate 

Charge your battery 

Scar Tissue

Charge your battery

Work in progress - E125 ' '2 windows
 in the Large Erecting Shop,
Eveleigh Railway Workshops'
2017 oil on canvas 46 x 46cm

 

 

Available for sale

I painted while the interior of the Large Erecting Shop was being decluttered so it could be turned into a running shed.

There's the usual workshop detritus that's been lying around so long that everyone's forgotten who put it there and why.

Work in progress - E125 ' '2 windows
in the Large Erecting Shop,
Eveleigh Railway Workshops'
2017 oil on canvas 46 x 46cm

Available for sale 

In this area is an ancient trolley and a wooden pallet loaded with old lead acid batteries.

The lead acid battery, so familiar to motorists, was originally used to power the lights in train carriages while stopped at a station. It was invented in 1859 by French physicist Gaston Planté and is the oldest type of rechargeable battery.
Despite having a low energy-to-weight ratio and a low energy-to-volume ratio, the lead acid battery can supply high surge currents, so that the cells have a large power-to-weight ratio. This,as well as their low cost, made them an efficient way to provide the high current required by carstarter motors.

As electric cars take over the world, the lead acid battery will soon become obsolete.

So this still life is a fitting symbol of transience - an industrial memento mori.

Work in progress - E125 ' '2 windows
in the Large Erecting Shop,
Eveleigh Railway Workshops'
2017 oil on canvas 46 x 46cm

Available for sale 

Between the windows in the foreground is an old slatted pine heavy duty trolley.

It has cast iron, rather than rubber wheels, so probably dates from the late 19th century.

Work in progress - E125 ' '2 windows
in the Large Erecting Shop,
Eveleigh Railway Workshops'
2017 oil on canvas 46 x 46cm

Available for sale 

I see beauty in highlighting the truth, however random,awkward or clumsy it may be.. 

Related Posts

'This is how the light gets in'

Time for Safety

May close without warning - Part 2 : "All that is solid melts into air"

ATP Open Day - Saturday, 25 Feb 2012

The slow return from the fire

The fire within

'Ghost Train'

Macdonaldtown - A Station without a suburb

Ozymandias

Every ruin is a reminder that all things are destined for oblivion.
I am both artist and historian; painting amidst the detritus of the industrial past, walking under rusty girders in the shadow of toppled giants.

'Under the Hammerhead Crane'

2014 ink pastel charcoal on paper 115 x 80cm

FINALIST : 2014 KOGARAH ART PRIZE

FINALIST : 2014 MOSMAN ART PRIZE
Available 

This is a mixed media painting of the Hammerhead Crane, which unfortunately is now being demolished, despite its iconic heritage status and distinguished history.
By now the "hammerhead" of the crane has been almost completely dismantled.
Instead of painting from the more familiar viewpoint of Mrs Macquarie's Chair opposite, I tackled the daunting bureaucracy of the Navy for permission to paint 'en plein air' on Garden Island itself.
I stood directly underneath the Crane and looked up into the top of the soaring structure, to capture its sheer scale. It is the embodiment of the 18th century concept of the sublime.
This painting has now been chosen as a finalist in both the Kogarah Art Prize and the Mosman Art Prize.

People are absent in many of my paintings, even though I trained as a figure painter and for 2 decades spent several days a week drawing and painting figures from life. I find that leaving out figures or relegating them to the role of "staffage" enhances the sense of the powerlessness of the individual against the inexorable forces of destruction and change. The crane itself is the best homage to the absent and largely forgotten workers who created the industrial landscapes that are now being destroyed.

GIHC13 'The Hammerhead Crane - homage to Piranesi' 

2014 ink gouache on paper 56 x 76cm
Available

Spaces that have a sense of history, place and meaning, find an echo in art history.

The safety nets resemble fan vaulting in a ruined Gothic abbey and the zig-zag tangle of girders and scaffolding recall Piranesi's images of the 'Carceri' or the wreckage of the dying Roman Empire.

The Hammerhead Crane was built during World War II, and symbolized industrial might, the march of progress and confidence in the values of Western civilization.
The mood of past triumphalism is now tempered by the present reality of scuffed textures, rust and tarnished metal.
Even as a victim of the slow death of de-industrialization, it had retained a poignant grandeur as industrial memento mori.
The last gasp of the Industrial Revolution, and of Sydney's Working Harbour.
In the words of Shelley's ruin-poem Ozymandias "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Except that a future civilization would be extremely lucky to be able to find any trace of our heroic past.

Related posts

Under the Hammer

Hammerhead Crane

Patina - Beautiful Decay

Rust never sleeps : Painting the Hammerhead Crane Part 2

Painting the Icebreaker "Polar Star"

Keep your eyes on the prize (and your finger off the trigger)

3 "Highly Commended" Awards in the past 3 days!

One off winning $1,250.

One off winning another $1,250.

And one off winning $5,000.
Don't know whether I should accept congratulations or commiserations.
I hadn't known until I collected my paintings today that I had been awarded two "High Commendations" for my entries in the Camden Art Prize.
I had been awarded the "Highly Commended" for  "The Art of Navigation". This is a memento mori painting of antique navigation instruments, and pays tribute to the famous 18th century navigator La Perouse.

"The Art of Navigation" oil on canvas 75 x 100cm

Enquiries

Yet another "Highly Commended" in the "Works on Paper" Section for a moody charcoal and ink interior, "The Turbine Hall Of the White Bay Power Station"

"The Turbine Hall Of the White Bay Power Station"
2011 charcoal, pastel and ink on paper 75 x 100cm

Enquiries

The "Blacksmiths, Eveleigh" ranked first of the five "High Commendations" awarded in the Open Section of the Hunters Hill Art prize, making it the runner-up.

"The Blacksmiths, Eveleigh Railway Workshops" 
oil on canvas 91 x 122cm

Enquiries

I had known that it had received at least a "Commended", as its title was in bold print on the website, but I had no idea that it was the runner up until the end of the presentation night when I read the judges comments :
"Gripping subject matter - the painterly shadows take on a rainbow hue from the furnace which is the source of all light and tension in this finely rendered genre painting"

There was a lot more tension, although a bit more heat than light, the other day in the Hunters Hill Club, the venue where my painting is hanging.
This year, paintings in the Hunters Hill Art Prize are hung at 3 historic venues - the  Hunters Hill Town Hall, the Congregational Church and the Hunters Hill Club - all within a short walking distance from each other.
My 2 largest paintings are displayed in the Town Hall, my entry in the 9 x 5" section is in the church, and the painting of the Blacksmiths, which was the runner up, is hung on the wall of the Club.
 It's a great idea, as people who don't usually go to art exhibitions will get an opportunity to check out the art.
However there were a couple of sightseers that we would all have been happy to live without.
There was a terrifying incident at the Hunters Hill Club on the night before the art prize opening, which I was told about at the opening by John Booth, the editor of the local paper "The Weekly Times".
At 9.30pm, two robbers armed with an axe and a rifle smashed their way through a locked door.
As they approached the bar, three of the club's employees  managed to lock themselves in a room to escape.
 Fortunately the robbers weren't able to get into the room after them.  Just as fortunately no-one else was injured, although one of the robbers had pushed a patron off his bar stool before jumping the bar. However as they fled, one of the robbers can be seen threatening patrons with a long rifle as he forces them to hand over their belongings.
I'm relieved that these thugs were apparently neither art fans nor art critics.
No paintings on display in the Club were damaged or stolen, and none will return to their creators  with bullet holes as extra decoration.
 And I'm even more relieved that this brazen robbery didn't occur on the opening night, which was attended by hundreds of people.

Related articles
Axe wielding thieves rob club on Sydney's Lower north shore

Daily Telegraph 11 May 12
Video of the armed robbery at the Hunters Hill Club
"Armed robbery at club in Hunters Hill" North Shore Times Crime  11 May 12  by Torin Chen

 Related posts

"The Navigator and the King"
The Art of Navigation
New still life paintings of navigation instruments
Inside Out
Power
Time for Safety
The fire within
Eveleigh - Industrial Heritage Artist at Work
Strike while the iron is hot
All fired up
The village smithy (sydney-eye.blogspot.com)
En plein air with street cred (sydney-eye.blogspot.com)

Spin me round

'You spin me right round, baby
Right round like a record, baby
Right round round round...'
"You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" a song by the British band Dead or Alive. which was released as a single in 1984, the first UK No. 1 hit produced by Stock Aitken Waterman.
Not long after the last workers from White Bay Power Station left, never to return.

WBPS66 'Spin me round' (record player from
recreation room in White Bay Power Station)
2009 oil on board 51.5 x 25.5cm
Available
The Record player from the Recreation room of the White Bay Power Station is the epitome of Jolie laide "ugly beautiful"
This horrible, yet oddly fascinating object was old and decrepit even back in the days when 'Dead or Alive' recorded their cheesy classic.

Record player from recreation room
in White Bay Power Station
It comes from a "lost" entertainment hall in a forsaken building - equal parts creepy and beautiful.
The Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority had taken ownership of the White Bay Power Station in 2000, but were unaware of this hall's existence for several years.

Recreation room in White Bay Power Station
As you can see from my photo, this room was a time-capsule from the 1950s - murals, the old record player and even a pool table.
The record player sat on the canteen counter, still connected to the room's PA system, ping-pong tables were folded in the middle of the room and murals on the wall had survived.

Recreation room in White Bay Power Station
In this photo, you can see the very kind security guard in the background by the pool table.
In July 2011, shortly after these photos and my painting were done, the record player and pool table were removed, as well as 6 tonnes of pigeon droppings.This was part of a frantic clean out before one of the rare open days.
I was very lucky to be able to see this in situ, and even luckier to have enough time to paint it before it was taken out of its natural context.

Record player from the recreation Room in White Bay Power Station
This was the last time I saw it before it was taken away to be put into storage.
They left it on the ground outside, so I could paint it one last time , waiting for some curator of the future to rediscover it and find a purpose for it.
Waiting for whatever the future holds for the White Bay Power Station.
Art Gallery, funky bar, museum,offices, block of flats?
Tunnels and tollways will encircle it, the schmick new yet-to-be-built fishmarkets will be its neighbour.
The White Bay Power Station remains strangely still and silent in the eye of the tornado of change.
The redevelopment of the surrounding area spins around it.
Like a record, baby, Right round round round...'

Related Posts

Artist in Residence at White Bay Power Station

Artist in Residence at White Bay Power Station Part 2

Tower of power

Inside Out (Inside the White Bay Power Station)

Power House

The Navigator and the King

These 2 paintings will be exhibited in the Laperouse Museum until January 2011.

They were inspired by meditation on the unpredictable nature of history, exploration and the fate of nations.

They are memento mori paintings in the tradition of 17th and 18th century still life 'vanitas' paintings.

The portrait of the gallant yet doomed La Perouse receiving his commission from his equally ill-fated monarch is doubly ironic.

The antipodean voyage of La Perouse was personally planned by the king together with the explorer. The loss of La Perouse and his expedition caused Louis XVI both personal grief and political humiliation.

'La Perouse - the navigator and the King'
2010 oil on canvas 46 x 46cm
Enquiries about this painting

Louis XVI sought to reinvigorate the stagnating French economy through trade and had invested a great deal of the government finances into improving the French Navy.

This was both a personal and a political goal.

His private study was filled with nautical charts and the burnished brass of mathematical instruments, telescopes, sextants and the locks which the King himself designed and made.

Louis XVI desperately wanted to regain the colonial power and prestige lost by his grandfather in the Seven Year’s War. Most of the debt burdening his government was from French involvement in the revolt of the American colonies against Britain.

A radical program of naval reconstruction was undertaken by first Turgot, then Sartine and finally de Castries. These brilliant, though fiscally irresponsible men attempted to transform the French navy into the equal of the British fleet, but heroic projects such as the transformation of Cherbourg harbour came at a ruinous price.

La Perouse - 'The Art of Navigation'
2010 oil on canvas 75 x 100cm
Enquiries about this painting

It was a real 'Sliding Doors' moment.

If Governor Philip and all his ships had been lost at sea and instead La Perouse had made a triumphant return to France after adding the continent of Australia to France’s extensive colonial empire, what could have been the outcome?

Would Australia have been settled by French colonists or become a battleground between the French and British Empires as Canada had been?

If La Perouse’s expedition had ended in a blaze of glory, would the good publicity have sufficiently enhanced the reputation of the monarchy to withstand the economic and social pressures that resulted in the anarchy of the Revolution?

Now that the exhibition in the LaPerouse Museum has finished, I'm going to enter "The Art of Navigation" in the Camden Art Prize.

It's far too strange to win, it'll just confuse the judges.

But I feel like being brave.

And it will certainly stand out in the crowd.

Update : It was runner-up!

See my blog post "Keep your eyes on the prize and your finger off the trigger!"

Related posts

My New Still life Paintings of Antique Navigation Instruments

The Art of Navigation

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.

Related posts

Painting International Fleet Review Barangaroo


Painting International Fleet Review Barangaroo Part 2

The White Shed at White Bay

"May close without warning"

Solo Exhibition, Frances Keevil Gallery 

Sitzkrieg (barangarooartist.blogspot.com)

Storm warning,Goat Island (barangarooartist.blogspot.com)