Gallery
Sketch brutal4
Sketch big hills small gateways
Subways and Flyovers 002
Gateways and golden ratios – pylon (detail)
Daytime Flats 001
Towerblocks 001
As part of the clearance of the slums, Nottingham’s inner city was transformed by the modernist’s aggressive purity and utopian social engineering.
The jagged angles and clean simple lines failed to herald a brave, transformed society. Utopia didn’t find its articulation and mediation through fearless concrete and instead the city slumped into decay, condemned to a Brutalist death and new slumlands. However, the scaffold is up and once again, the planners are at the fabric once again, unpicking, unpicking, unpicking.
Commerce is what we believe 002
Porche = mc²
Carbon as concrete motorway 005
Carbon as concrete motorway 004
Commerce is what we believe
Doodle 003
By the year 2020 all schools will be acdemies
Yay!
Fighter
Motorway – Threeway
Doodle 002
Hi-jacking of Egyptian Airliners strangely good-natured make the world mad, bad and humorous. Wearing a bomb-vest as a romantic gesture is very unlikely to have the desired effect. More disturbing if it did.
There is no accounting for the logic of lovers, especially estranged, strange lovers.
Carbon as concrete motorway 003
Motorway Day 001
Motorway Night 002
Motorway Night 001
Motorway Italian Job
Motorway Go Faster Stripes
Cerne Abbas Gaint 002
Cerne Abbas Gaint 001
Nighttime Flats 002
Blue Lines
Graphic
First and Last and Always
Carbon as concrete motorway 002
Motorway drawing
in charcoal
Carbon as concrete motorway 001
Motorway drawing
in charcoal
Gateways and golden ratios
Pylons are the consequence of a competition win and in theory these massive, imposing structures are supposed to be invisible against the grey skies of Britain.
This is not the case and the march of these towers across the landscape seems more an invasion than mere infrastructure. We are being taken over by Greek ideals, to a time when spirit and beauty were intertwined.
True blue history blue
The extension of the M3 motorway across the English South Downs caused political protest, not from the usual suspects of the day of the loony-left, but from true blue Tories.
Built through SSSIs and historic chalk downs.
Split Level 001
Orange Haze 002
Nighttime Flats 001
As the night deepens and to our eyes at least, the solid structures melt into air.
Marx believed that the system sowed the seeds of its own destruction. However, he was mistaken and despite itself, goes from strength to strength.
Big Sky 002
Big Sky 001
Subway Flyover 001
Places where no one goes. Abandoned, subterranean, on the boundary between above and below.
What events occur in places like these? Descend to the lower and despair.
Finance Doodle 001
Blood and money and taxation.
It comes as no surprise, especially when those not stealing a living are called ‘The Little People’. Do we have to wake up to a world become too big?
Number Plates – Individual
Taking note of personalised number plates around the city gives you an insight into just how many people want them. Are there so many of us that are against the system? Is there a desire to fight against authority and assert the individual self like number six in the prisoner did?
However, there is a price to this. Some number plates cost so much that the only way to afford such an item is to hold extravagant wealth. Can any true rebel be a beneficiary of the system they fight against or does it mean that in this social order, only those at the top can be identified by a name rather than a number? Asserting yourself against the system is an illusion perpetrated by those that govern the system or aspire to. The revolution has been bought or stolen by the establishment.
Cerne Abbas Giant 004
Cerne Abbas Giant 003
While modern relative to its misconceived Iron Age origins, the lines of its form do link to an ancient node, a time of archetypes and primeval forces stirring in the depths. Like graffiti, like a Banksy out of chalk, out of mischief, devotion or homage to the landscape of Dorset’s South Downs this huge figure is barely seen from the vantage of its own hillside. A depiction of violence, desire and power up close unseen just as the cosmic forces that have driven us since ancient days.
What difference is there between this and the modernity that thrust forth concrete tower blocks? Both look back to civilisations that lived in fear and awe of the gods, of sprites and spirits and faerie folk, those embodiments of truth and power, forever the great mysteries.
Big Skies Sketch 1
Big Skies sketch with cars and tower block. Painted on cartridge paper with oil paint and depicting a low level communal building under a turbulent, flowing sky.
Blue Motorway M1
Concrete. Solid. Certain and unchanging. Travelling on the motorway network, the miles of similarity is both reassuring and unsettling. The human condition is an ever-changing state and the a static certainty is abhorent. However, risk-adverse and fearful, perhaps it would be better if nothing ever changed.
With or without help the world will never stay the same. However these colossal monuments perhaps demonstrate our futile attempts to take control and bend the rules for our own advantage. Or perhaps it is simply a question of budget. An accountant’s pragmatic solution and globalised view. Enjoy.