Original artwork description:

Palm 2 shop 2023

Oil on canvas 76 x 101 cm


Painting is a bit like cooking; you can have complicated ingredients and a simple method, or simple ingredients and a complicated method. You can follow a recipe closely or see what’s in the cupboard and use your knowledge, cooking skills and intuition to make a meal.

The ingredients for these paintings are found images of people that resonate with my memories and emotions, brought together with cityscapes that I have made on location in East London that carry an emotional bank of knowledge.

My painting is a combination of internal and external motivations; the method is to create compositions in a collage technique that is guided more by an internally motivated chemistry than an externally motivated existing narrative. However the story I want to visualise is about a group of people coming together in a place, maybe with a common purpose, or just brought together by chance; sequential art and murals have influenced the style and making of the work.

The painting is based on a number of drawings, brought together in one composition, I made three drawings on location on the Lower Clapton Road in London, outside the nursing home, the Palm2 shop and the New Era dry cleaners. Whilst I was there drawing on three separate days I picked up the vibe of the place, me various people who were interested to see someone drawing and noticed the variety of people living locally. Back in the studio I made a composition involving all the drawings and made a large painting in 2020, this current painting is based on the same composition with some changes - going back to the recipe analogy, when you cook the same thing twice the results can be quite different.

Materials used:

oil paint

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