This post about Ferropolis comes to you courtesy of The Presurfer. The Presurfer is a blog run by Gerard Vlemmings. I’ve been checking in there fairly regularly for several years. I enjoy it because you never know what you’re going to see over there. Ferropolis is an open-air museum near Dessau Germany containing huge machinery, giant monuments to twentieth century industry.

Many years ago, back in the 80s, I made quite a few paintings that featured ruins of industry in the landscape. The first of them is called The Architect. That painting was made with oil paint on canvas back in the first studio I had after university, on Clendenan Ave. in the area of Toronto we call the Junction. It must have 1984 or 1985. This painting is not too big – maybe 3 feet wide. Although this painting hung in a friend’s house for a number of years, that turned out to be a temporary home for it and I’ve had it since. I don’t believe I’ve ever exhibited this one. It still resonates for me in all kinds of ways and as well it reminds me of where I was and what I was doing at the time. I’d like to one day find a permanent home for this painting and see it hanging again. If you see the  picture and fall in love with the painting, I’m open to serious offers.

Another painting from that group of industrial painting is this one, a painting that does have a good home. By the time I made this painting, I had changed studios and was living and working in an old storefront on Ossington Ave between Queen and Dundas. Some of you may know that area because it is now the home of a bunch of swanky restaurants, but back in the mid-80s it was a quiet street with a few kitchen reno shops, a sign-writer, a Portugese bakery and so on. Later, much of that section of the street turned into Vietnamese coffee  joints – the ones with the blackened windows and the pink and black signs. At any rate, I still like the painting a lot. I don’t recall if I titled it at the time. I might have titled it later on. I really don’t remember and I don’t associate this one with a title. This is an oil painting too, bigger, close to six feet wide. It has an unusual worked matte quality to the paint which is hard to explain and hard to photograph. I can only say that it gives the feeling that the orb in the painting is sitting on the edge of an endless abyss.

I think those are the only two of that group of paintings that I can place. There is one called The New Murphy Power Plant that I gave to a friend at the time, someone I knew from University. I have no idea if she still has it or even where she is for that matter. I never photographed that painting (yeah I know, how dumb was that?) but one day it would be really interesting to see it again.

There was one called The Bad Inventor and a couple others that I destroyed along the way. There was also my favourite of the bunch, a large painting called The Listening Machine, a painting that was unfortunately irreparably damaged in storage. This was another oil painting, with a highly textured surface. I exhibited the Listening Machine in a studio show I had at my Ossington studio back in the 80s.