‘The familiar and the strange’ March 2026
In 2025 I changed my painting locality. From my usual Bellambi Point view of tankers lining the horizon, I followed to where they berth in the Inner Harbour of Port Kembla. I became a little obsessed with the industrial area that is positioned between the ocean and the Illawarra Escarpment. The grand scale of the buildings, machinery and cargo ships demanded a presence amongst the surrounding ancient ecological formations.
Over the course of the year I returned to the same area and became acquainted with certain spots to sit and paint from life. I began a serial method as a strategy to become familiar with what and where I was painting. What I observed changed depending on time, weather and human interaction. Morning or afternoon light was less intense, allowing for gentler tones and softer shapes. Late lunchers either shyly walked past or stopped to admire and speak about my frequent visits. Engineers would explain to me what the smoke and noise was occurring behind the fenced off areas and at 3.30pm sharp the gates opened for blackened manual workers to leave rapidly in their individual machines, creating and displaying dust storms of their own.
I observed mammoth cobalt blue cargo ships come and go, yellow ochre skies surround solid grey stacks that puffed out titanium white clouds, sometimes soiled with sepia hues. Slick black piles of coal grew as mid yellow bulldozers continued forming more ebony mountains. Wind carrying the smog and dust across pillared aqua buildings and the Escarpment in hues of purples or greens, an organic feature in contrast to the occupying human structures. The subjects were captured quickly and in multiples on grey textured paper. Grey, a tone to set the scene and perhaps the overall feeling.
For shelter from the drizzling rain I was given a golf umbrella by a regular visitor. Contract workers provided positive feedback over my shoulder and people, cruising, contributed to my view as they stopped to yell out the window ‘watchya paintin love?” Shelter from the sun was provided along the harbour canal by a line of Banksias. Their unusual smokey coloured leaves caught my interest and as I handled a branch to investigate, I was coloured with soot. The un-lovely facts of where I was painting were exceeding my initial interests. My familiarity with the place was becoming abstract (and uncomfortable).
I withdrew into the studio.
Objects and shapes are etched in to my mind from countless days of investigating the same area and I begin to build, using clay, my own stacks and structures to paint from. With painted pools of watercolour the constructed forms start bleeding into each other as I contemplate the industrial port. I soon envisage images of fire in a profusion of orange Nasturtiums picked from my garden, they replicate the flames that erupt from the chimneys pointing to the Port Kembla sky. Blooms of white Pandorea billow out like puffs of smoke and reds, pinks and purples make blurry masses expelled by vertical black stacks. The objects are not grounded, they seem to float in my memory space on paper.
Returning to the area after a short break I come across detours in place, updated thoroughfares and new plants to beautify the area. A worker lost his life on Monday. Tuesday production continues and I paint a dense blue cargo ship splitting the sea and escarpment in two. I title the painting ‘Port Kembla Blues’ it conveys both what I see and feel. I retract to my garden where there is nothing but flowers.