Art Works - Units 1 & 2
Preliminary sketches in acrylic on paper showing the main protagonist of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (Christian, abbreviated to Chr.) leaving the City of Destruction and embarking on his pilgrimage. (Each image 80 x 50 cm)
Christian leaves the City of Destruction
Christian Caught by Giant Despair
Christian walks through the Valley of the Shadow of Death
Christian Caught in the Slough of Despond
Christian Imprisoned by Giant Despair in Doubting Castle​
Bunyan too was imprisoned for his religious beliefs for 12 years from November 1660 to May 1672. This picture combines both the incarceration of Christian and Bunyan himself.
Christian leaving the City of Destruction, Bearing a Heavy Burden.
Oil on board 60 x 30 cm
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The image was in part inspired by Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series (the desert scene and the horse) but the heavy load is taken from a newspaper image of a refugee carrying a red mattress. I have kept the red mattress as "the burden" in a number of other works inspired by The Pilgrim's Progress (see above and below).
Christian caught by Giant Despair (2024)
Oil on canvas 110 x 90 cm ​​
This picture is unfinished. I'm unhappy with many elements of it. It is one of a number of attempts at the same subject in different media, but currently lacks, to my mind, a true sense of "despair".
Christian Admonishes Sir Having Greedy on the no. 36 Bus (2024) (both 80 x 100 cm)
​ Acrylic on paper (above left) and oil on canvas with collage (above right).
The paintings reflect an incident on a bus journey from Vauxhall to Camberwell. The works blend a constructed image of a town in the Middle East taken (in the picture on the right) from that day's newspaper, with an incident the cause of which I have attributed to a character (Sir Having Greedy) from The Pilgrim's Progress.
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The picture is an attempt to address a current conflict many thousands of miles away and the fact that our engagement with that conflict was fed to me (in this instance) through a single image on the front of a free daily tabloid paper, thrown away by most readers before the end of the day. I wanted to combine that image with a typical incident on a bus, to demonstrate that the daily and immediate demands on our attention restrict the thought we can, or rather choose, to give to matters of far greater importance, but more remote from us, and in doing so dull our response to those matters. I refer later to Susan Sontag's discussion of that sense of remoteness in her work Regarding the Pain of Others (2003).​​
To the Militant, Identity is Everything (2024)
Oil on canvas. 110 x 90 cm
UN Security Council Meeting (2024)
Charcoal and gesso on canvas - 60 x 80 cm
Unfinished. See below for the finished work
This was an image inspired by Chaucer's Parlement of Foules, another allegorical work, a poem, in which birds meet and noisily debate the subject of love and a choice of mate.
I have an overwhelming sense that we will, as a species, always fight wars - that politics and diplomacy have not managed to eradicate conflict and never will. But the United Nations at the very least represented an international attempt to achieve exactly that. It is therefore profoundly frustrating when discussions in the Security Council Chamber, which ought to lead to binding resolutions which could, conceivably, ameliorate a confrontational situation, reach a stalemate or are otherwise inconclusive.
In Chaucer's poem three eagles each, in turn, try to persuade a fourth to take him as her mate. Many other birds join the debate in what becomes a raucous cacophony and, at the end, the object of the three eagles' wooing makes no decision. She postpones her answer for another year. It was the abiding sense, throughout the poem, that that would be the inevitable outcome of the Parlement that I wanted to capture in this picture. ​
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Detail from Portrait of Simon Srebnik
Portrait of Simon Srebnik (2024)
Oil on canvas with an extruded acrylic sheet set into a frame made from a discarded pallet to create a three-dimensional work
50 x 50 x 12 cm
This painting was made from a still photograph from the documentary Shoah, by Claude Landesmann, 1985.
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The text, laser printed onto an acrylic sheet, is taken from the opening scene of Shoah. The story is almost unbearable. I have presented it as it was written by Landesmann, without any editing. The work is therefore essentially a homage to Simon Srebnik himself, one of only two survivors out of 400,000 Jews killed at Chelmno, but also to Landesmann for the extraordinary work which is Shoah.
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Most of my current and recent work addresses the two major conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. Producing a work on the Holocaust is not however an anomaly for me. I have watched Shoah, approximately nine hours long, twice. It is a remarkable film, not so much because of the historic subject matter it addresses, but because of the way in which it does. As a deliberate editorial choice by Landesmann, there are no images or footage from the 1940's showing scenes from the Holocaust itself. The film was released in 1985 (it took Landesmann eleven years to make it) and consists entirely of contemporary interviews with three groups of people - local villagers who witnessed the transport of Jews to the camps featured in the film, survivors of those camps, and a handful of those working within the camps. What is interesting to me therefore is exactly that - we are not given images of the horrors themselves - only the words of those describing what they saw or encountered. In my Critical Reflection I consider the power, the often fading power, of images to which we have become inured. The dialogue in Shoah left me stunned, and that did not diminish when I watched it a second time. It was for that reason that I wanted to make a work commemorating the film in some small way.
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We are Making a New World Again (2024)
​Oil on canvas, collage, copper rivets - 80 x 90 cm
This painting was inspired in part by Paul Nash's First World War painting We are Making a New World (1918) and in part by Samual Palmer's sketch for his painting The Bright Cloud (1834). The collaged image was taken again from a free morning newspaper and reflects my sense of despair at what feels like an inevitable and endless cycle of violence, leaving images of destruction which, as with the Callot, Goya and Dix print series, present a repeating echo of disaster and misery. ​​​
Above left: sketch (graphite on paper) for the untitled work below which addresses a human propensity for confrontation. See the Mind Map in my Critical Reflection
Above right: Bridget Riley - Kiss (1961)This image has always impressed me. I have borrowed the closeness of the two masses in Riley's work in the confrontational image below. It is the thin white line between those two masses which was relevant to my work.
Untitled - Oil on canvas 60 x 90
Untitled (2024)
Oil on canvas 60 x 80​​ cm
Above left: Early sketch (graphite on paper) for one of three porcelain vases, before I decided to move to decal decoration taken from Commando magazines from my school days in the 1960's
Above centre: Later vase sketch (graphite on paper) with part of an image of a tank from Commando magazine
Above right: Sketch (graphite on paper) of brushed steel vase stands
Above left: Vases being made. Porcelain slabs 5mm thick, held in place by cardboard stands. Each vase made of nine pieces, stuck together with porcelain slip before being fired.
Above right: Welding the steel stands, which were then brushed and polished with an angle grinder.
The three completed porcelain vases, stoneware fired at 1260 degrees, decorated with decal images taken from Commando magazine, the images manipulated in Photoshop to fit the shape of the vases.
The Commando magazines for the vases were bought on Ebay. Each magazine is numbered, and the ones I chose were from the years when I was at school. I will have read those magazines.
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Much has been written about the enormous volume of media material devoted to war and to violence more generally and the extent to which that material might, either consciously or unconsciously, influence our response to actual conflict and violence. Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow (2013) argues convincingly that the first, instinctive and compulsive thought process to which we are subject is heavily influenced by subliminal factors. I do believe that films and magazines about war can condition our immediate response both to images of real violence and, in part, to political debate on the subject of war.
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I wanted, in this work, simply to present, in an unexpected form, some of the images I was brought up with as a child in the 1960's. These magazines dealt with the Second World War, a conflict that had ended 20 years earlier but which continued to provide source material for children's magazines and films (and continues, remarkably, to do so today.)
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Porcelain vases - finished and displayed at the Copeland Gallery as part of the Camberwell MA Fine Art show in April 2024
Below: a video of those vases​
Ceramic plate - Persian 12th or 13th century, Museum of Islamic Art, Kuala Lumpur​
I was struck by the artistic restraint in this ceramic plate. Arabic text appearing, from a distance, as a smudged black line on an ivory glazed surface. I wanted to achieve something similar, but with a more sinister overtone, in the stealth aircraft picture below. An image of a warplane but not instantly recognisable as such. Indeed it is only truly recognisable as what it is when viewed from the side at a very acute angle.
This picture (the oil painting) is unfinished. I am applying to the surface a very large number of ivory-coloured layers of oil paint, diluted to a glaze with refined linseed oil, to create a completely flat surface with no trace of the underlying texture of the canvas, and which will I hope reflect the shiny, slightly translucent texture of the ceramic plate.​
Online image of a stealth aircraft from which the sketches below were taken (Source Unknown, no date)
Above left: Preliminary sketch for stealth aircraft (graphite on paper) - I wasn't happy with it. The aircraft was too obvious and including the bomb and the village in the bottom left corner lost the simplicity of the Persian plate
Above right: Second sketch (graphite on paper) for stealth aircraft (top), with more detailed drawing capturing relevant dimensions allowing the image to be stretched accurately so that, when viewed from the side, the foreshortening of the elongated aircraft reveals its identity
stealth aircraft - oil on canvas 120 x 80 cm
I will change the name of this picture once I have a translation of the Arabic text on the Persian plate above. I would like this picture to reflect that text in some way, as an acknowledgement of the work which inspired the painting, but with, in this case, a more sinister overtone.​
Stealth aircraft viewed from the left side, showing the foreshortened image of the aircraft
UN Security Council Meeting - Completed picture - oil on canvas 60 x 80​​ cm
I wanted this picture to be rich in colour, to reflect both the Medieval provenance of the underlying images of the birds and the opulence of the surroundings of the UN Security Council Chamber. I wanted however to keep the sense of motion in the charcoal sketch above, which appeared by chance when, in a fit of frustration, I began to rub it out. I used a similar approach with burnt umber oil paint thinned with linseed oil and rubbed with a rag across the canvas here.
Untitled
As above, and as displayed at Millbank 7.3.2024
Reference:
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Bunyan, J (Oxford World's Classics 2003) The Pilgrim's Progress: An Author's Apology for his Book
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