Glen Davis Parking Station

Glen Davis Parking Station is a special place where industrial architecture of the 1940s melts into the natural beauty of the Capertee Valley. The abandoned mining town of Glen Davis, located 200 kilometres from Sydney, is as dramatic as the magnificent valley the township rests in.
This painting draws its source from a photo I’d taken while strolling down deserted Canobla Avenue in the 1980s. My walk on the avenue was thirty-five years after the town had ceased production of Shale Oil and people had left it abandoned in 1952.

I was able to track down the make of the car thanks to the chrome boot handle featured in the painting. The abandoned car, parked next to the Exhauster House and pointed towards Retort No. 1, is an early 1950s Chrysler, either a Dodge Kingsway or Plymouth Cranbrook. My guess is that it’s a Chrysler Plymouth - Australia built 4,382 examples of the Cranbrook from 1951 to 1953.

Through my research I was happy to find that the car was still at Glen Davis in September 2014 and pictured on Wikipedia media. It’s a great photo and can been seen by cutting and pasting this link into a web browser.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glen_Davis_old_Mining_town.jpg#/media/File:Glen_Davis_old_Mining_town.jpg

In this photo I can see the Plymouth has been pushed back towards the Primary Cooler building and is now covered in dead branches. When I saw the photo on Wiki for the first time, after spending hours painting the car, it felt like I was being re-united with old friend from my travels in the 1980s.

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I have taken the long road to discover that painting and photography can sit side by side, for me painting is my first meaningful creative outlet. I use my photography to inspire my artwork and I hope my love of composition, subject and light come through in my artwork.

I was born in Papua New Guinea and lived on a remote rubber plantation before moving to Sydney in 1971 at the age of 7. I was finding it hard adjusting to the city and my mother encouraged me to take up oil painting.

Having won an art competition when I was 10, the judges recommended that I study at the local TAFE on a Saturday morning. I completed one term but felt out of place with students who were all over 16 years old, so I did not continue. (I was also a TV junkie, we had no TV in Papua, and staying at TAFE meant missing out on Hey Hey It’s Saturday.)

It took me 40 years to rediscover painting.

The one constant in my work is to find a new project and during my break from painting I have been a project manager in Information Technology. This kept me in a world with projects, and here too I learnt that even the smallest piece of data contributes its meaning towards each information system. The other constant motivating me in life is to finish a project so I can start a new one.

My creative drive comes from knowing that each brush stroke I make contributes its meaning towards the completed work. What inspires me about art is how the smallest brush strokes, when added together, can radiate a meaning for the person who gazes at the painting far beyond the meaning of each brush stroke.

I aim to do my best in each project and try to avoid, at all cost, the haunting feeling I get when I leave a project unresolved. Even to this day I still think of my unfinished painting of a sailing boat peeping out behind photographic developing chemicals back in 1979. I was 15 then and my easel had been replaced by a camera and darkroom. A part of me still needed to finish the oil painting, but photography filled the void, so the unfinished artwork was thrown away in a frenzied darkroom clean out before my HSC exams.