People and Place

 

I'm often puzzled or intrigued by why people are in particular places at particular times, or indeed why I find myself in that space encountering those people at that moment.

 

I've done a lot of drawing and painting after systematically recording the passage of pedestrians. Sometimes it's a record of passers-by within a time frame at a specific location. At other times, I'm recording 'blind' with a semi-concealed iPhone as I weave my way along a crowded street. I wonder whether they are thinking my presence is a strange as theirs, and whether the odd juxtapositions I perceive strike them as similarly absurd.

 

Caught in street movement, or sitting at cafes or hanging around doing nothing, their poses are ironically more suggestive of paparazzi "celebrity" shots so much a part of 21st century popular culture than of anonymous "ordinary" people. There's a lot going on visually in these pieces. Often they are not a work you can read at a glance. In this respect, and in the narrow horizontal format, it's reminiscent of Far Eastern handscrolls which I've always found fascinating both in terms of narrative content and composition. But the narrative quotidian aspect of the work also follows in the tradition of many European artists going back to Brueghel and Hogarth.