Brilliantly renovated and cut in half

'Red Square'  and 'The Drill Rig' - An update

 This painting and the next were originally parts of the same canvas. A sudden gust of wind and the canvas was picked up and impaled on the edge of the easel. One of the many hazards of life as a plein air painter!
I had the damaged canvas standing face to the wall at home for several weeks, too depressed to look at it more closely.
Instead of a repair I finally decided to complete the surgery and separate it into 2 square canvases.
I had to decide what to lose and what to keep. The original canvas contrasted the meditative reflections of the interior with the activity of the exterior. Now they have been accidentally and forcibly separated. I was very upset at first, but, on the principle of 'whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger', I'm starting to appreciate their qualities as separate canvases.

'Red Square'

'Red Square' oil on canvas 36 x 36cm

Now 'Red Square' is truly just that : a red square on a square canvas. Unless you know what you are looking at and where it comes from, it could be an excercise in abstraction.

Degas and the Drill Rig

'The Drill rig teams.' oil on canvas 36 x 36cm

I enjoy the idea of a 'picture within a picture', especially with the framing device such as the window or the curtain caught in the act of being moved to reveal the background image which is the real focus of the painting. That painterly trick is called "repoussir" ( 'to push back' in the original French) and I picked it up from studying the works of the master of perspective and design, the French Impressionist, Edgar Degas. While most people are looking at his ballet dancers, I try to prise apart the jigsaw of his compositions. His pastels of dancers would have been charming, yet forgettable, if they had merely presented a full length image of the subject. By cropping his subject unexpectedly and half hiding/half revealing his dancers behind staircases, furniture or doorframes, Degas added the element of surprise. There is a feeling of chance with the encounter; even an element of the voyeur.

This shows the bi-fold door half opened to reveal the drill rig teams, about to start drilling. It is unclear whether the door is opening or closing. The scene is deceptively still; the trucks have arrived; the men have set up their equipment and are poised to start work. This is the calm before the storm.

For the earlier incarnation of these 2 canvases as a single larger canvas see my post in this blog: "Red Square"

Geophysics

The Drill Rig at South Barangaroo

"The Drill rig" 2010 oil painting on canvas 30 x 40cm

A core sample is being taken on South Barangaroo, to make sure that there are no nasty little surprises when construction starts.

Incidentally, all of Barangaroo is landfill.
When I painted on the K.E.N.S. Site (the "Kent, Erskine, Napoleon and Sussex street block " which is now the new Westpac headquarters) next to Moreton's pub (known as the 'Big House' by the wharfies) I saw steps that were unearthed that once belonged to an early 19th century Fingerwharf, and must have roughly coincided with the original shoreline. They were halfway between Kent and Sussex Street - so anything west of Sussex Street is fill.

Don't forget your toothpaste! (A little amateur archaeology)

A couple of the men from Coffey and Macquarie Drilling have worked at the same sites that I have painted at! These include the former A.G.L. Site at Mortlake, developed by Rosecorp (which is now known as 'Breakfast Point') and the Carleton United Brewery site at Chippendale, which is still underway. One wet and miserable day at the Carleton United Brewery site, I was offered some of the old bottles and jars to paint by the archaeologists, instead of struggling through the mud laden with an easel to paint the chimney in the pouring rain. A few weeks later, the archaeologists generously made their spare finds available for the construction workers to souvenir. I suppose that an old brewery site wouldn't suffer from a lack of bottles! I took a small selection of 19th century ceramic and glass bottles, including perfume jars, ink bottles and a big brown 'Geneva' bottle (mother's ruin or gin), but one of the men on the drill rig team had a real prize - a small ceramic jar with lacy craquelure that once contained an early 19th century version of toothpaste! When we realized that we both were proud owners of these relics, I brought my paintings of the CUB finds and the bottles to Barangaroo and he brought in his toothpaste jar for me to paint.

My Carleton United Brewery still life can be seen on my 'Urban Landscape' page on my other blog, 'Industrial Revelation'.

This is their 2nd last hole before the drill rig team pack up and leave Barangaroo.

Barangaroo : Red Square

Barangaroo: Painting inside the former cruise ship terminal

"Red Square" unfinished oil painting on canvas 41 x 91cm

A work in progress, still on the easel.

 'Red Square' oil painting on canvas 41 x 91cm

This canvas is still a little unfinished, but you can get the general idea of what I'm attempting to do here. It's an interior versus exterior painting, playing with light, transparency and reflections. Unlike the other doors in the loading dock, which are solid slabs of brilliant scarlet, these are translucent fluted sheets that both reveal and conceal the view. 

The "Red square" to the left was the bright scarlet entrance to the passenger walkways allowing access to the cruise ship.
In 20th century art history a famous quote about early abstract art was "The red square is haunting painting", about an oil painting by Kasimir Malevich, one of the originators of the Russian Suprematism movement in abstract painting. The red square has certainly haunted this building! It reminds me how quickly the 'new' and 'modern' passes into history. It is ironic how "Modernism" is now a historic term referring to the art of 50-80 years ago, and the architect of this former wharf has either deliberately or unknowingly raided its vocabulary!

In the background are the two drill rigs of the geophysics team, Coffey and Macquarie Drilling.

For an update on what happened to this canvas, see my post at this blog:'Brilliantly renovated and cut in half'