It is not every day you see a city bus in the outback and perhaps even less likely to find it filled with glassware.
But the concept has been on artist Jeff Morgan’s idea list for some time.
WARNING: This story contains a reference to suicide.
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”.
Jeff Morgan says the light that comes through the bus’s large windows makes it “zing”. (ABC North and West SA: Isabella Kelly)
It is the latest art installation at his gallery in Hawker, about 4.5 hours north of Adelaide, in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges.
“The light comes through it all and it makes it really zing,”
Morgan said.
There was no exact source that inspired him, but his dyslexia makes him a very “visual” person.
Morgan said he discovered he had dyslexia around the age of 50, when someone working in neuroscience visited his gallery.
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)
“The first [thing] they asked was, ‘Have you had formal training?’ And I said, ‘No.’
“And they said, ‘Are you dyslexic?’ And I said, ‘You tell me.’
“We talked all afternoon and he diagnosed me with dyslexia.
“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.”
House painting injury
Originally a house painter, Morgan had to give up his trade in 1989 after injuring himself while working on an outback station.
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.
“I accidentally held my thumb over the end of the nozzle,” he said.
“It slipped and it blasted through my thumb, shattered the bone and filled my hand up with paint.“
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)
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.
He was told he would need to drive himself to the nearest hospital, two hours away in Port Augusta.
“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.’
“That was a very dangerous trip, really, because I started to black out on the way down.
“To this day, I can’t remember driving over the Port Augusta Bridge.“
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.
Life after the accident
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.
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.
“For about three years I was getting little pimples [that would] come up in my arms and in my armpits … and you’d squeeze them and white paint came out,”
Morgan said.
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.
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.
“I had a shotgun in my mouth and pulled the trigger,” Morgan said.
“It went ‘click’ instead of ‘bang’ and it misfired.
“That’s when I got down on my hands and knees and prayed to the Lord.
“I called myself Christian before, but for the first time I was serious about it.”
Morgan eventually found different lines of work, driving trucks and working at remote roadhouses, before the recession of the early 1990s hit.
The incident affected Jeff Morgan’s physical and mental health for years. (ABC North and West SA: Isabella Kelly)
It was during this time he started having a peculiar recurring dream every night about becoming an artist.
He recalled dreading these dreams.
“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.
But one day, while his children were painting with watercolours at the kitchen table, Morgan joined them and something transpired.
Sandy, Jeff Morgan’s kelpie, loves to pounce on glimmers of light that dance around the bus. (ABC North and West SA: Viki Ntafillis)
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.
“She said, ‘Where did you learn to paint like that?'” Morgan said.
That night, the troublesome recurring dreams he had been having finally stopped.
‘Dyslexia became my superpower’
Shortly after, Morgan took the leap and quit his job to become a full-time artist.
But first, he asked his wife if she was “willing to take the gamble”, and she said she was.
Jeff Morgan’s entire gallery oozes with creativity, with murals covering even the most unsuspecting surfaces. (ABC North and West SA: Viki Ntafillis)
“It was very scary, but I worked very hard at it,” Morgan said.
“Dyslexia became my superpower … because I was able to pick things up naturally just by looking at it.
“It was tough to make a living for a start, but we survived.
“I’ve never had to go back.”
Jeff Morgan encourages creatives to follow their dreams but says “be prepared to be a workaholic”. (ABC North and West SA: Isabella Kelly)
To this day, Morgan refuses to use artists’ paints, describing them as “rubbish”.
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.
Morgan’s advice for aspiring artists is “anything worth doing is often a struggle”, but it’s better than the alternative.
“You see people in jobs they don’t like and you think, ‘What a waste of their life,'”
he said.
“You also have to not listen to the people saying … it can’t be done.
“The ones that say it can’t be done shouldn’t stop the ones that can actually do it.”