It is not every day you see a city bus in the outback and perhaps even less likely to find it filled with glassware.<\/p>\n
But the concept has been on artist Jeff Morgan’s idea list for some time.<\/p>\n
WARNING: This story contains a reference to suicide.<\/p>\n
After gutting the 12.5-metre Adelaide city bus and lining the walls with cabinets full of glassware, the former commercial bus was transformed into a “kaleidoscope”.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jeff Morgan says the light that comes through the bus’s large windows makes it “zing”. (ABC North and West SA: Isabella Kelly)<\/p>\n
It is the latest art installation at his gallery in Hawker, about 4.5 hours north of Adelaide, in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges.<\/p>\n
“The light comes through it all and it makes it really zing,” Morgan said.<\/p>\n
There was no exact source that inspired him, but his dyslexia makes him a very “visual” person.<\/p>\n
Morgan said he discovered he had dyslexia around the age of 50, when someone working in neuroscience visited his gallery.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jeff Morgan says he had been looking for a decommissioned bus that he could buy for a while. (ABC North and West SA: Isabella Kelly)<\/p>\n
“The first [thing] they asked was, ‘Have you had formal training?’ And I said, ‘No.’<\/p>\n
“And they said, ‘Are you dyslexic?’ And I said, ‘You tell me.’<\/p>\n
“We talked all afternoon and he diagnosed me with dyslexia.<\/p>\n
“He explained that normally people that haven’t had formal training, their paintings are very flat and that mine had a lot of depth, and he said that’s a trait of dyslexic people.”<\/p>\n
House painting injury<\/p>\n
Originally a house painter, Morgan had to give up his trade in 1989 after injuring himself while working on an outback station.<\/p>\n
The nozzle of his airless spray gun had become blocked and, while trying to clear it, the air pressure shattered his thumb and filled his hand with paint.<\/p>\n
“I accidentally held my thumb over the end of the nozzle,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It slipped and it blasted through my thumb, shattered the bone and filled my hand up with paint.”<\/p>\n
Jeff Morgan’s career as a house painter came to a dramatic end in 1989 when he split his hand open. (ABC North and West SA: Isabella Kelly)<\/p>\n
Morgan called the Royal Flying Doctor Service from the homestead landline, but all medical personnel were responding to a semi-trailer crash on the Nullarbor.<\/p>\n
He was told he would need to drive himself to the nearest hospital, two hours away in Port Augusta.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I don’t think he [the doctor on the phone] realised the seriousness of my injury and he said, ‘Try to make your way down to Port Augusta and we’ll deal with it there.’<\/p>\n
“That was a very dangerous trip, really, because I started to black out on the way down.<\/p>\n
“To this day, I can’t remember driving over the Port Augusta Bridge.”<\/p>\n
Morgan was sent straight to the operating room and while doctors were able to save his hand, neither it or he would ever be the same.<\/p>\n
Life after the accident<\/p>\n
About a month after the accident, suffering from the extreme stress of losing his income and not knowing if he would ever be able to work again, Morgan suffered a minor stroke.<\/p>\n
The then-33-year-old was also experiencing strange, lingering symptoms, which led him to believe the paint he blasted into his hand during his accident was still in his system.<\/p>\n
“For about three years I was getting little pimples [that would] come up in my arms and in my armpits \u2026 and you’d squeeze them and white paint came out,” Morgan said.<\/p>\n
Forced to give up his house-painting business due to the damage to his hand, Morgan tried other lines of work but his injury made manual work difficult.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If you or anyone you know needs help:Suicide Call Back Service<\/a> on 1300 659 467Lifeline<\/a> on 13 11 14Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander crisis support line 13YARN<\/a>\u00a0on 13 92 76Kids Helpline<\/a> on 1800 551 800Beyond Blue<\/a> on 1300 224 636Headspace<\/a> on 1800 650 890ReachOut<\/a> at au.reachout.com<\/a>MensLine Australia<\/a> on 1300 789 978QLife 1800 184 527<\/a><\/p>\n The deterioration of his physical health and loss of livelihood quickly led to a decline in his mental health and he tried to take his own life.<\/p>\n “I had a shotgun in my mouth and pulled the trigger,” Morgan said.<\/p>\n “It went ‘click’ instead of ‘bang’ and it misfired.<\/p>\n “That’s when I got down on my hands and knees and prayed to the Lord.<\/p>\n “I called myself Christian before, but for the first time I was serious about it.”<\/p>\n Morgan eventually found different lines of work, driving trucks and working at remote roadhouses, before the recession of the early 1990s hit.\u00a0<\/p>\n The incident affected Jeff Morgan’s physical and mental health for years. (ABC North and West SA: Isabella Kelly)<\/p>\n It was during this time he started having a peculiar recurring dream every night about becoming an artist.<\/p>\n He recalled dreading these dreams.<\/p>\n “I’d wake up and think, ‘What a ridiculous idea. Fancy stepping out of a good paying job [during a recession] to be an artist,'” he said.<\/p>\n But one day, while his children were painting with watercolours at the kitchen table, Morgan joined them and something transpired.<\/p>\n Sandy, Jeff Morgan’s kelpie, loves to pounce on glimmers of light that dance around the bus. (ABC North and West SA: Viki Ntafillis)<\/p>\n His mother-in-law, who was also present, was taken aback by his painting of a remote homestead he had come across during his travels as a truck driver.<\/p>\n “She said, ‘Where did you learn to paint like that?'” Morgan said.<\/p>\n That night, the troublesome recurring dreams he had been having finally stopped.<\/p>\n ‘Dyslexia became my superpower’<\/p>\n Shortly after, Morgan took the leap and quit his job to become a full-time artist.<\/p>\n But first, he asked his wife if she was “willing to take the gamble”, and she said she was.<\/p>\n Jeff Morgan’s entire gallery oozes with creativity, with murals covering even the most unsuspecting surfaces. (ABC North and West SA: Viki Ntafillis)<\/p>\n “It was very scary, but I worked very hard at it,” Morgan said.<\/p>\n “Dyslexia became my superpower \u2026 because I was able to pick things up naturally just by looking at it.<\/p>\n “It was tough to make a living for a start, but we survived.<\/p>\n “I’ve never had to go back.”<\/p>\n Jeff Morgan encourages creatives to follow their dreams but says “be prepared to be a workaholic”. (ABC North and West SA: Isabella Kelly)<\/p>\n To this day, Morgan refuses to use artists’ paints, describing them as “rubbish”.<\/p>\n For his murals, he prefers to stick with the weather-resistant house paints he used to paint buildings with, saying they make his art more vibrant and long-lasting.<\/p>\n Morgan’s advice for aspiring artists is “anything worth doing is often a struggle”, but it’s better than the alternative.<\/p>\n “You see people in jobs they don’t like and you think, ‘What a waste of their life,'” he said.<\/p>\n “You also have to not listen to the people saying \u2026 it can’t be done.<\/p>\n “The ones that say it can’t be done shouldn’t stop the ones that can actually do it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is not every day you see a city bus in the outback and perhaps even less likely…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":105690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[11480,4624,64,63,246,134,24262,75953,75954,57481,1124,14248,36731,75955],"class_list":["post-105689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-art","tag-artist","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bus","tag-entertainment","tag-flinders-ranges","tag-hawker","tag-jeff-morgan","tag-mural","tag-south-australia","tag-suicide","tag-visual-art","tag-work-accident"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
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