En plein air with street cred

So, what does it mean 'en plein air'? It translates as 'in the open air' and is roughly equivalent to another French expression 'peinture sur le motif' meaning 'painting on the reason'. It is the opposite to painting in the studio either from memory or from a photograph. Monet, Pissaro, and Renoir gave it a go. I toured the sanitorium to which Van Gogh committed himself in St Remy in 1889, and there in the garden, amongst the immaculately trimmed lavender bushes, was a smattering of painters 'en plein air'. A jaw-dropping moment.


What Jane is doing here is not, strictly speaking, 'en plein air' but is most certainly 'sur le motif'. She is in the thick of it; she is painting real time; she is multi-tasking. She has to wear googles, for heaven's sake cause the guys get a smidge carried away with the sledge-hammers.

Can you see what I mean by multi-tasking? For starters, those two massive canvasses on the large easels, are not quite finished, so there are visions flashing around her head that she will incorporate later. Propped around her work easel and paint table, are a number of smaller canvases, between which she swaps as the session progresses. I envisage her eye-brain as a camera, click-click-clicking away with minute details of the whole. The trained mind registers the image, and she swaps over to the appropriate canvas ... or starts another one.

Guido and Chris are doing their own smithy thing, progressing a work, knowing that Jane is capturing their stance, their bearing, their actions. And knowing that, today, they have an audence (behind a perspex wall).

The village smithy

Yesterday, I introduced you to plein-air painter, Jane Bennett, working in the heritage bays down at the Australian Technology Park, in the suburb of Eveleigh. Today - and tomorrow - I shall have a crack at showing you what I was trying to get at with the expression 'the body electric'.


This is Chris, one of the artisans from Wrought Artworks, established in 1987 - who converted the old smithy area of the Eveleigh Railway Workshops and now maintain and work it under the aegis of the Australian Technology Park. There aren't many wrought iron foundrys left in Sydney. This one is worth a visit. The relationship with the ATP has not always been plain sailing, but wrinkles seem to have been ironed out. For those who would like to understand more, I have appended a doco about Wrought Artworks.

Theme Day - Singing the body electric

Across the cacophony of sound, I bellowed to Jane, 'You look so much more at ease in these surroundings than in an art gallery'. She beamed, dabbing one of her myriad of brushes into the splodges of colour on the palette over her shoulder, 'I'm a worker!' she shot back, returning to her canvas, the shroud of concentration masking her face yet again.

I winced at my own feebleness. How could she do it? The noise was intolerable, the heat suffocating, and the dust incapacitating. But she revelled in it. It set her on fire, like no other workplace.


Maybe, Walt Whitman had been onto something back in 1855, with his paen to the electrifying nature of a calling:

I sing the body electric!
The expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him,
The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horse-man in his saddle,
The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner kettles, and their wives waiting,
The female soothing a child, the farmer's daughter in the garden or cow-yard,
The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert,
The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv'd neck and the counting;
Such like I love, I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother's breast with the little child,
Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count.

Today is the first of the month and Theme Day for the City Daily Photo Blog community. Click here to visit participants from around the world

This is my contribution to the Signs Signs community.

Craggy

Picture at an exhibition ...

The 'poof' factor

The past is an elusive land, that fritters through our fingers. The 1840 Sydney of Joseph Fowles has been no-more for eons. The Darlinghurst struggle-street of Henry Lawson has been botoxed into oblivion. The gentrified and bohemian Macleay Street of Kenneth Slessor has oozed into the sludge of the criminal under-class. So the inner glass-half-full that is me, hummed with positivism during the week when I encountered Jane Cooper Bennett, historical artist.

Having seen my photographic record of the Victoria Street AIDS mural, Jane invited me along to the opening of her latest show in a public exhibition space within St Vincents hospital. She had been asked to record the streetscape of the immediate vicinity prior to the construction of the Kinghorn Cancer Centre. A plein-air historical artist and a photographic footpath flaneur espouse similar urban streetscape values. We trawl the delapidated inner city recording what exists before the wrecker's ball calls 'poof'.

There is a Heritage Fair on 25th February at the Australian Technology Park, Eveleigh, during which Jane will be painting en-plein-air. Come along from 10am 'til 4pm. Watch her canvas tranform before your eyes. Experience the skill and artistry of the forgers of wrought iron. The past is gone, but not forgotten. We lament its passing, but celebrate its being.