Mixed Media on wood, ready to hang.

Signed on the front.

The artwork - Chameleon Wall - is a favoured landscape scene from my Glen Davis series. This crumbling rendered brick wall in the abandoned mining town of Glen Davis, located 200 kilometres from Sydney, has become a true chameleon against the sandstone cliffs surrounding the township.

I believe this wall forms part of the Transfer Pump House featured in Glen Davis street map. The Transfer Pump house is located at the back of the Tank Farm on Canobla Avenue.

When I was sketching the rendered wall, I was fascinated by the chameleon symmetry existing between the wall and the cliff face. I love how the main column of the wall, featured in the centre of the painting, is carried on by the sandstone column in the cliff behind the wall. I also like how the green mould, clinging to the chameleon wall, compliments the colour of the flora clinging on the sandstone rocks.

I first visited the mining town of Glen Davis in the 1980s, just 35 years after the town had ceased production of Shale Oil and people had left it desolate in 1952. It’s just one of those places that is a photographer’s paradise at any time of the day or night.

The Capertee Valley is recorded in the top 3 widest Canyons of the world, but it seems to lose the “grand “accolade because it is not as deep as the Grand Canyon in North America. What it misses out in depth it excels in for the colour of light and shade in the sandstone escarpments and for the ancient spirit of Capertee River. And now, the harsh smells from the distillation of shale oil have been replaced by the fragrant smoke of campfires, with billies boiling tea, in the Glen Davis campsite.