Illuminated manuscripts and stained glass windows- Painting the Dunlop - Slazenger factory Part 2

The graffiti inside the abandoned Dunlop - Slazenger factory reminded me of something, but I couldn't quite remember what it was.

'Abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger factory
Soda panorama' 2015
oil on canvas 91 x 183cm 
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The walls are rich in texture, vibrant in colour and elaborate in detail.

They are possibly full of hidden meanings, incomprehensible to the uninitiated, or it could be just random doodling.

'Abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger factory
Soda panorama' 2015
oil on canvas 91 x 183cm 
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The calligraphy is cursive and the chunky letters are interlocked like links in a chain, making the words hard to read yet hypnotic to look at.

'Abandoned Dunlop - Slazenger factory -
'Soda' panorama'  2015 
oil on canvas 91 x 183cm  
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There is a "horror vacui" - blank space isn't tolerated and won't last long.
Images are scattered throughout the factory, but the text dominates and has become imagery in its own right.

'Abandoned Dunlop - Slazenger factory -
'Soda' panorama'  2015 
oil on canvas 91 x 183cm  
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The letters are outlined in black, often with highlights of white or red on the ascenders (the parts of letters such as "h" "b" or "d" that extend above the line)  or descenders (the parts of letters such as "g" "q" or "j" that extend below the line).

Occasionally backgrounds of gold or silver add a bit more bling and some are even adorned with star bursts.

'Abandoned Dunlop - Slazenger factory -
'Soda' panorama'  2015 
oil on canvas 91 x 183cm

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John Paul, the demolisher who had given me the heads up about the site, finally nailed it.

The Book of Kells, he said. (John Paul is Irish!)

To be sure, to be sure!

 Detail of 'Abandoned Dunlop - Slazenger factory -
'Soda' panorama'  2015 
oil on canvas 91 x 183cm  
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This is a close up of my painting of the graffiti on left hand wall, and you can see that John Paul really had a point.

In another context, I could easily imagine one of the letters as a historiated initial in a medieval illuminated manuscript.

A historiated initial is an enlarged letter at the beginning of a text, which contains a picture.

Detail of 'Abandoned Dunlop - Slazenger factory -
'Soda' panorama'  2015 
oil on canvas 91 x 183cm  
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This is a closeup detail of my painting of the graffiti in one of the small rooms to the left hand side.

This font is dramatically serif (there is a large difference between thick and thin lines) and is extravagantly embellished with finials( tapered or curved ends), swashes (extended  decorative flourishes)and lachrymals (teardrop shapes).

 Detail of 'Abandoned Dunlop - Slazenger factory
'Soda' panorama'  2015  oil on canvas 91 x 183cm  
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Many different hands have been at work here, overlapping and adding marginalia, drolleries and the odd obscenity.

 "Soda" has been written in a more "slab serif" style, where there is less difference between thick and thin lines.

This tag stands out from its neighbours due to its cleaner font as well as its striking silver, black and pink colour scheme.

 Detail of windows in 'Abandoned Dunlop - Slazenger factory
- 'Soda' panorama'  2015 
oil on canvas 91 x 183cm  
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And what could go better with illuminated manuscripts, than stained glass windows?

These windows are very stained indeed.

The graffiti is probably much older than on the walls, as they would have only been accessible when the building still had a roof, which was at least a couple of years ago.

There is no lead separating the colours, however, being a factory, the windows were made from glass strengthened by an internal diamond grid of wiremesh. Breaks in the glass add spiderweb patterns.

'Abandoned Dunlop - Slazenger factory -
 'Soda' panorama'   2015 
oil on canvas 91 x 183cm                                       
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At sunset the window colours are reflected on the ground in a series of rainbows, an effect I last experienced visiting Chartres cathedral.

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'Palimpsest - Painting Dunlop - Slazenger factory' Part 1

Open House

A not very architecturally distinguished housing commission in the hinterland of Glebe/Ultimo was being demolished in 2011. 
I jumped the fence and painted some small plein air canvases while it was being demolished.

 "Half demolished apartment block
in Cowper Street Glebe/Ultimo"
2011 oil on canvas 15 x 15cm
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The 'Mirragang' at first sight looks quite presentable, until the lack of glass in the windows hints at something not quite right....

'Open Plan'  -half demolished apartment block 

in Cowper Street Glebe/Ultimo"
2011 oil on canvas 13 x 18cm
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The shell of the 'Mirragang' apartments on the left, and the 'Mirrabooka' on the right, frame the handsome dark brick building in the centre.

This former wool bond store, the Farmers and Graziers No 2 Store, was the last of the great bond stores, and replaced a swath of houses in 1936. The low-lying swampy area of Glebe and Ultimo has always been known for cheap and often nasty housing.

 From the 1850s onwards, a jumble of workshops, slaughter yards, boiling-down works and other scrappy industries sprang up around the noxious waters of Blackwattle Creek. Cramped cottages without water or sewerage, were erected by landlords for the working poor. People lived cheek by jowl with domestic animals. Refuse and offal from the slaughter yards often remained to rot on the mudflats. The abattoirs provided the bones to be burnt in the Char Tower of the CSR Distillery, which were used to filter sugar. And all of the residue was pumped right back into the Blackwattle Creek.

However uninspired these redbrick tower blocks looked, they were a vast improvement on their predecessors.

Mind you, that wouldn't have been hard.

Almost anything would have been.

 'Open House' -
2011 oil on canvas 25 x 20cm
Available
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The patch of sky behind the half-demolished windows gives a feeling of a stage set.
These 15 public housing apartment blocks in Cowper Street, Glebe, were demolished by the state Labor government in 2011, resulting in the eviction of 130 tenants. Although new housing on the site was promised, to be funded by the proceeds of money raised by the sale of 99-year leases to Millers Point terraces, the land was left vacant for years as a development application was lodged and contested in court.
The O'Farrell cabinet approved construction plans for 153 public housing units, 95 affordable housing units and 247 private apartments on the site in 2013.

Now the Baird government has finally announced plans to rebuild this demolished public housing estate on Cowper Street as a mixed private, public and affordable housing community.

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Palimpsest- Painting the abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger Factory

A palimpsest is a manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing.

The word is also used for something worked upon for one purpose and later reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.

I've recently been painting both inside and outside the abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger factory in Alexandria.

It has been abandoned for about 25 years, and has innumerable layers of graffiti ranging from the sublimely talented to the ridiculously inept.

Painting "Yellow Eye" oil on canvas 75 x 100cm
in the abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger factory

 

The walls of the abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger Factory are a palimpsest - a fascinating mix of both creation and destruction.

Painting "Yellow Eye" oil on canvas 75 x 100cm
in the abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger factory

29-04-15 Starting my first canvas of the Dunlop-Slazenger factory. I don't know what the image is of or what it's called, so I've christened it "Yellow Eye".

Painting "Yellow Eye" oil on canvas 75 x 100cm
in the abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger factory

 

It's an insight into the way different generations alter the landscape of their ancestors.

Painting "Yellow Eye" oil on canvas 75 x 100cm
in the abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger factory

 The factory is full of ghosts.

Painting "Yellow Eye" oil on canvas 75 x 100cm
in the abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger factory

On the second day of painting this canvas, I changed the composition to include the bizarre cartoon characters on the upper walls.

There is a grotesque creature which is part baboon part wildebeast and part crocodile with wriggling worm-like hair, and two characters resembling demonic smurfs.

The glass has also been tagged, and the rays of the setting sun make it light up like the stained glass of Chartres cathedral.

Painting "Yellow Eye" oil on canvas 75 x 100cm
in the abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger factory

 

 

The building is now being sand-blasted back to the original brick and will be redeveloped for apartments.

Painting "Yellow Eye" oil on canvas 75 x 100cm
in the abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger factory

 

 

Such is progress, alas.

Painting "Yellow Eye" oil on canvas 75 x 100cm
in the abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger factory

 

 

My extremely fashionable painting outfit. Lady Gaga will be copying this soon!

Painting "Yellow Eye" oil on canvas 75 x 100cm
in the abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger factory

 

 

Painting in PPE (Personal protective equipment)

DS3 'Greeblies' -
Abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger factory'
2015 oil on canvas 122 x 122cm

 

 

Available for sale 

 

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Illuminated manuscripts and stained glass windows- Painting the Dunlop - Slazenger factory Part 2

Patina- Beautiful decay

 GIHC16 'Detail Hammerhead Crane'
 2014 oil on canvas 28 x 36cm
SOLD
PRIVATE COLLECTION : SYDNEY

In my major solo exhibition "Under the Hammer" at the Frances Keevil Gallery there are several paintings of the Hammerhead Crane seen from various vantage points in the middle distance.

However, I also painted several canvases of close-up details that at first sight look like abstract works. I can assure you, they are completely realistic. They just focus on a tiny portion of the subject, unlike most of my work. These paintings have been wildly popular, but I wonder whether it is just because onlookers have become less capable of coping with the complexity of an entire scene, and are only able to appreciate a fragment.

GIHC18 'Girder, Hammerhead Crane
2014 oil on canvas 61 x 91cm 
FINALIST : 2015 HORNSBY ART PRIZE
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Now I can't overstate how much I hate the flat picture plane!

And "modern" art has been all about "the surface", flatness and shallowness, in more ways than one.
In my paintings, I want depth, perspective and layers; physically, emotionally and intellectually.
So even in my canvases of close-up details, there are hidden depths and a sense of space extending beyond the picture plane, especially in the drawings and paintings I created while looking up, standing directly underneath the centre of the crane. I feel that the painting with the greatest sense of space and depth is  "Under the Hammerhead Crane" seen below.
However these canvases of details of the Hammerhead Crane have given me the chance to reveal the transmutations, ambiguities and impermanence of form by the beauty of its decaying exterior.

 GIHC20 'Under the Hammerhead Crane'
2014 oil on canvas 61 x 91cm
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Patina is the visible sign of age on the surface of a material. It panders to our growing desire for the proof of authenticity; a backlash against the homogenized and generic corporate spaces that have taken over so much of our world. Materials are imbued with a history that speaks of ‘natural’ processes accrued over time, such as distressed wood, weather-beaten stone or brick, faded wallpaper, well-worn textiles, rusted ironwork, greening copper - the valued hallmarks of "shabby chic" in upmarket interior decor.

If you lose the texture, you lose your history.
The irony is that patina is seen as adding "authenticity", even though it has been caused by the degeneration and instability of the object.
I think of rust on a metal structure as though it is blood dripping from a wound.

Worship of patina can be seen as yet another symptom of the post-modern obsession with surface at the expense of ‘authentic’ depth.

Patina can be a by-product of the natural process of ageing, but it also functions as a memorial to disaster, natural or otherwise- the architectural equivalent of post-traumatic stress, showing the ‘wound’ inflicted by the trauma of the past as it reverberates down into the present.
Patina straddles the space and time between construction and ruin. The allure of patina lies in its instability; because any attempt to stabilise it affects the essential process.
The art critic Walter Benjamin said that the ‘real’ is only revealed in moments of ruination.
As with ruins, patina represents a fragment that suggests the meaning of the whole. Patina holds together contradictions, reveals historical depth, and yet ironically also remembrance and even healing.

Under the Hammer
Exhibition dates: 

Open from Tuesday 18th November –  Sunday 7th December

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Painting the Hammerhead crane Part 1

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.

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Under the Hammer

Before the Navy finally booted me off Garden Island, I made sure that I tackled some large scale drawings
Since 2007, due to real or perceived safety issues, temporary catch platforms have been suspended from the long arm and short arm jibs. They spoil the line, but apparently provide access to allow condition inspections to be performed safely.
At first glance, it looks as though the Hammerhead Crane has 5 legs.
However, one of these "legs" is a lift to give access from the wharf to the slew ring level (seen in the centre at the top of my drawing). As the crane is 61m high, this wasn't an idle luxury.
Unfortunately this lift has been out of operation since 1998.

While drawing this, I met probably the last person to have ever used the lift. He was escorting a group of photographers to the top, and had pressed the lift button when he heard a muffled explosion, and then found his hands were black with graphite.

He said that he was lucky and got off lightly. I think he was right.

'Under the Hammerhead Crane' 2014
ink, pastel, charcoal,graphite on paper 140 x 110cm
WINNER : 2014 DRAWING PRIZE ROYAL EASTER SHOW
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My hands were also black with graphite after creating this enormous drawing.
I stood directly underneath and looked up into the top of the soaring structure.
By looking up I sought to capture the Burke and Longinus concept of the "sublime", with its overtones of awe, terror and vertigo, rather than the picturesque aspect of the typical "hammerhead" profile, a view familiar from Mrs Macquarie's Chair opposite.
The girders were silhouetted against the open sky; the safety nets resembling fan vaulting in a ruined Gothic abbey.

While creating this enormous drawing, I also remembered Piranesi's devastating images of Roman ruins, dangerously broken and overgrown amid the wreckage of a dead civilization.

 GIHC7 'Under the Hammerhead Crane'
2014 ink pastel charcoal on paper 76 x 56cm

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I am an artist and historian, born into a time and place where only sport and business are valued. Drawing on the ruins of the industrial past , walking under rusty girders in the shadow of toppled giants.

Every ruin is implicitly a reminder that all things are destined for oblivion.

The Hammerhead Crane was built to demonstrate industrial might and the march of progress.

Even as a victim of the slow death of de-industrialization, it retains a poignant grandeur.

This was exhibited in my solo show "Under the Hammer" at the Frances Keevil Gallery from November 18th - December 7th 2014.

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