In the shadow of the Bridge -Night Observatory Hill

Today's painting on the deck gallery is a nocturne painted from Observatory Hill.

O15 Night, The Rocks from Observatory Hill
2000 oil on canvas 84 x 112cm
Available
I've often painted the Rocks and Millers Point from this vantage point.
When I used to teach art classes, I'd give everyone a map of the best spots to sit so they could avoid having to include the Blues Point Tower!

O15 Night, The Rocks from Observatory Hill
2000 oil on canvas 84 x 112cm
Available

This view looks straight down Lower Fort Street where I have also frequently painted the heritage terraces, the Garrison church, the Harbourview and 'Hero of Waterloo' hotels.

Some of this collection are on my Miller's Point page in this blog.

It's a postcard perfect Sydney Harbour scene during the day. but at night the shadows make it evocative and mysterious.
The tales from the rowdy and sometimes sinister era of the Rocks 'Push' don't seem to be quite as distant at night!

O15 Night, The Rocks from Observatory Hill
2000 oil on canvas 84 x 112cm

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Sydney Bus Museum - painting Daimler doubledecker

Today's painting on the deck gallery is a portrait of MTT Daimler CGV6 112 at the Sydney Bus Museum in Leichhardt. It has been under restoration to operating condition since 2016.

BUS11 Restoration of Daimler doubledecker

2017 oil on canvas 61 x 31cm

It's had a rough life.

It was one of 15 Daimler doubledecker chassis ordered for use in Sydney. However they were rejected because their 4.95m chassis didn't meet the required specifications of 5,33m. 
Then they were sold to the Metropolitan Transport Service, Adelaide. The 54 seat bodies were then built in Granville, and driven overland to Adelaide.

BUS11 Restoration of Daimler doubledecker

2017 oil on canvas 61 x 31cm

After being in service in Adelaide until 1960, no 112 was sold to a cattle station in the Coober Pedy area of South Australia.

In 1990 it was recovered for preservation - and driven over 1,000 miles back to Sydney!

It might have been too small, but it's tough!

BUS11 Restoration of Daimler doubledecker

2017 oil on canvas 61 x 31cm

I painted this on site in the Bus Museum at Leichhardt, and some of the volunteers are in the background.

BUS11 Restoration of Daimler doubledecker

2017 oil on canvas 61 x 31cm

  

BUS11 Restoration of Daimler doubledecker

2017 oil on canvas 61 x 31cm

See more of my bus paintings

The Manly bus, Sydney Bus Museum

No 'glamping' on Cockatoo Island

This is a painting of the Utility crane in front of Sutherland Dock, Cockatoo Island.

CK36'Cockatoo Island- Crane, Sutherland Dock and the escarpment'
2006 oil on canvas 75 x 100cm
Enquiries

For the last decade, the public has been allowed to visit the island, but when I painted this in 2006, it was still off limits.

The Sydney Harbour Federation Trust was frantically fixing up the infrastructure to be able to open it to tourists. I would travel by barge at the crack of dawn from Mort's Dock with the other workmen.

CK36'Cockatoo Island- Crane, Sutherland Dock and the escarpment'
2006 oil on canvas 75x100cm
Enquiries

In the afternoon, I had to make sure I didn't miss the last barge back to the mainland, or I'd have to spend the night there.

Now there is 'glamping', but back then there were no facilities at all! No tents, no shelter - I occasionally spent the odd night in a tunnel, which was creepy. There wasn't even drinkable water & we all got terribly sick until we learnt to bring our own water!

CK36'Cockatoo Island- Crane, Sutherland Dock and the escarpment'
2006 oil on canvas 75 x 100cm
Enquiries

20 years before, I had painted on the island, near the end of its life as a working shipyard.

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Painting the industrial past on Cockatoo Island

More paintings of Cockatoo Island

Isolation Gallery- Walsh Bay

Today's painting featured in my Isolation gallery is from over 20 years ago. It shows the redevelopment of Walsh Bay Wharves.

W33 'Walsh Bay Wharves from Wharf 8-9'

1999 oil on canvas 61 x 101cm

I was 'Artist in Residence' at the Woolloomooloo Fingerwharves during their redevelopment & refurbishment in the late 1990s. Many of the same construction workers later worked on the transformation of Walsh Bay Wharves a couple of years later, so they inherited me as 'Artist in Residence'.

I painted the derelict, fire-ravaged and soon to be demolished Wharves 6-7  from the interior of Wharf 8-9.

The green netting and bright yellow boom contrasts with the red brick and weathered timber of the wharves.

W33 'Walsh Bay Wharves from Wharf 8-9'

1999 oil on canvas 61 x 101cm

I can't believe how much this area has changed since this painting!

Barangaroo has replaced the East Darling Harbour Wharves, aka 'The Hungry Mile', one of the last relics of Sydney's Working Harbour. 

The residents of Millers Point have mostly been relocated, & the area almost resembles a ghost town.

W33 'Walsh Bay Wharves from Wharf 8-9'

1999 oil on canvas 61 x 101cm

More at my WALSH BAY WHARVES page on this blog

 

Paintings of a passing Port 

 

The last of the Hungry Mile 

 

Barangaroo - tabula rasa

Isolation Gallery on the deck - Ex HMAS Adelaide on Glebe Island

Due to the Covid-19 restrictions, my wings have been clipped.

I'm caring for my elderly and very frail mum at home, so even when restrictions are relaxed, my obligations as a carer mean I'll still be very restricted in the amount of plein air painting I can do.

Paintings on the deck

I've used my enforced downtime to repair old paintings. When canvases are taken to exhibitions and handled a lot they can get scuffed at the edges.
I'd spent the start of the Covid season putting up a pergola over the front deck so it would be a nice breakfast nook. But it's been really useful as.a studio extension as it's sheltered from rain and all but the fiercest winds.
I started putting some large canvases out there to dry after repairs, just to get them out of my way so I don't trip over them.

Down the side of my garden is a walkway to the local park and I noticed a few people staring at the paintings. I did this for a few weeks, but when I didn't have anything on the easel for a couple of days they asked me to put some paintings back up.

A3 Ex HMAS Adelaide late afternoon panorama
2011 oil on canvas 61 x 183cm                            
A25 'ex HMAS Adelaide sinking'
2011 oil on canvas 25 x 51 cm

The galleries are shut, so I thought 'Why not? At least it gets them out of my studio'
Since then I've had a different painting every day on the deck gallery. Sometimes two if they have a connection to each other.
I choose at random - it's a chance to wander through my past.
Enjoy.

A3 Ex HMAS Adelaide late afternoon panorama
 2011 oil on canvas 61 x 183cm

This is a sort of before and after pairing.

The Ex HMAS Adelaide on Glebe Island being stripped of most of her interior fittings before scuttling, and a small painting of her scuttling off Terrigal.

A25 'ex HMAS Adelaide sinking'
2011 oil on canvas 25 x 51 cm

See the posts about these paintings

"Two ships in dock"
"Ghost Ship Part 2" 
"Ghost Ship Part 1"

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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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)

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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Terminus Redux

I have mixed feelings about the renovation of the Terminus.
Although it's been restored,not demolished or replaced by apartment blocks as so often happens, it has been stripped of its poetry.

P286A 'Terminus Redux'
2017-8 ink, charcoal on paper 131 x 106cm
Enquiries : janecooperbennett@gmail.com
I painted a large mixed media work on paper, as well as an even larger oil on canvas, just before the iconic vines were removed. The awning had been stripped back to a fragile skeleton, but the bricks had yet to be sand-blasted.
However well a place is renovated, inevitably there must be compromises between keeping the original character and making it a viable business.
No expense was spared on the fitout.The designers and architects have done their best to restore the old pub building while retaining quite a lot of the original pub from tiles to timber. The pressed metal ceiling upstairs is a sympathetic replacement not the original, which was too badly damaged.

P286 'Terminus Redux'
2017-8 oil on canvas 122 x 183cm

Enquiries -janecooperbennett@gmail.com

I miss the vine-covered facade. It had probably been planted early in the 20th century by a CSR employee, as the same species of Virginia creeper covered the manager's residence and the courtyard of the 'Rum Store'.
Recently I attended the launch of Shirley Fitzgerald's wonderful book on the history of the Terminus. I was honoured that Shirley had asked me to contribute a photo of one of my paintings of the Terminus facing opposite its longtime companion and rival, the Pyrmont Point Hotel (aka the Royal Pacific).

P252 'The Terminus and the Point'
2011 oil on canvas 31 x 61cm
Private Collection : Sydney
Enquiries : janecooperbennett@gmail.com
When I went upstairs, I almost walked into one of the walls, not from one too many cocktails, but because I'd expected the hall that once led through to the building next door. I believe this passageway had to be closed off due to updated fire regulations.
A typical pub menu, priced rather steeply, cashes in on the hipster ambience from the 32 years that the Terminus spent as an icon of urban decay.
As a contrast, when I'd visited the Terminus prior to its closure in the early 1980s, they were giving out free food. Possibly this had contributed to its original decline and fall.
The new owners aren't making that mistake, quite the opposite.

Ironically despite having kept the ghost sign outside, no Resch's is on tap.

For more information about the Terminus and Pyrmont Point Hotels

see My Pyrmont page in this blog

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To the Point
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A Tale of two hotels - the Terminus and the Point

The bad twin of Pyrmont Street

Pyrmont Paintings past and present 
Paintings of Pink pubs - Painting the Jolly Frog Part 2