JOURNEY MAN
1990
Charcoal
366x152cm
ENQUIRE
It was against this backdrop of acceptance in the Royal Academy schools, a looming degree show, and sense of the vacuousness of my large dark drawings that I started work on a 12-foot charcoal drawing that evolved into ‘journey man’. I drew three large circles on a 12-foot piece of thick watercolour paper using the charcoal of the end of a long stick with absolutely no preconceptions or idea what would eventually emerge . It was a photograph of Henry Matisse drawing with a big stick that inspired me to adopt this approach because this enables the large sheet of paper to be in the field of vision at one time and thus get an overview of the basic underlying compositional structure. A circle spreading outwards was the natural shape that filled the dimensions of the paper and overtime a man in a boat appeared that evolved into a personal dream narrative set in the Black Country of past, present and future.
The figure became a self-portrait who is straining at the oars of the boat that is tethered to the basin of a canal. I carry only a sketchbook and music player for the journey ahead and all around are visions of a life lived through many generations. These hand me down memories blur into the present whilst ahead the journey through the bridges leads to an unknown destination. On the left a woman carries a large metal casting as if playing a ritualistic drum that offers a prayer for the land around. She is the strong woman, with her child on her back whom she works hard to make a life for. The street behind is the Black Country of old before the streets were filled with traffic- a simpler but very hard time when chickens were free to wander in the road. On the bridge an old man stares aimlessly into space.
On the top of the factories is a field with a lone horse trapped in it, this is a story recounted to me by my grandfather who spent World War two making ammunition in one of the factories that was covered with pseudo grass to avoid detection from the Nazi bombers that pummelled the area. A lone figure sits beneath this field smoking cannabis to escape from the realities of the world around, or is he trying to gain insight into the world around. The glass works cone tower sits like a steeple reaching skywards giving a focal point of identity and purpose in the making of glass. Below this an exhausted man reaches out to a Coot that is paddling away. This man is trying to touch and reconnect with nature in some way but the industrial colonization and domination of the land all around keeps the bird just out of reach. Above this man a group of people gather round a body, these are members of the national front who have just killed a personal friend , a fine man of Jamaican descent who was chased by a gang of skinheads and died of an asthma attack. The air all around is heavy but on the horizon a bright light breaks through illuminating everything with its glow.
This drawing marks a very transitional point in my life on many levels. It was the last big drawing I did in Nottingham as I was about to London for an unknown future but still the Black Country refuses to let me go. It is in this harsh unflinching industrialized ancestral landscape of past ,present and future that a light appeared in my work for the first ever time.
Technically the only way this light could break into the heavily worked dense darkness of the charcoal was to scratch into the paper with a knife to reveal the glowing pure white of the untouched paper and it was the appearance of this glowing light, coupled with the physicality of cutting into the paper that echoed of a fundamental shift in my worldview .
The figure became a self-portrait who is straining at the oars of the boat that is tethered to the basin of a canal. I carry only a sketchbook and music player for the journey ahead and all around are visions of a life lived through many generations. These hand me down memories blur into the present whilst ahead the journey through the bridges leads to an unknown destination. On the left a woman carries a large metal casting as if playing a ritualistic drum that offers a prayer for the land around. She is the strong woman, with her child on her back whom she works hard to make a life for. The street behind is the Black Country of old before the streets were filled with traffic- a simpler but very hard time when chickens were free to wander in the road. On the bridge an old man stares aimlessly into space.
On the top of the factories is a field with a lone horse trapped in it, this is a story recounted to me by my grandfather who spent World War two making ammunition in one of the factories that was covered with pseudo grass to avoid detection from the Nazi bombers that pummelled the area. A lone figure sits beneath this field smoking cannabis to escape from the realities of the world around, or is he trying to gain insight into the world around. The glass works cone tower sits like a steeple reaching skywards giving a focal point of identity and purpose in the making of glass. Below this an exhausted man reaches out to a Coot that is paddling away. This man is trying to touch and reconnect with nature in some way but the industrial colonization and domination of the land all around keeps the bird just out of reach. Above this man a group of people gather round a body, these are members of the national front who have just killed a personal friend , a fine man of Jamaican descent who was chased by a gang of skinheads and died of an asthma attack. The air all around is heavy but on the horizon a bright light breaks through illuminating everything with its glow.
This drawing marks a very transitional point in my life on many levels. It was the last big drawing I did in Nottingham as I was about to London for an unknown future but still the Black Country refuses to let me go. It is in this harsh unflinching industrialized ancestral landscape of past ,present and future that a light appeared in my work for the first ever time.
Technically the only way this light could break into the heavily worked dense darkness of the charcoal was to scratch into the paper with a knife to reveal the glowing pure white of the untouched paper and it was the appearance of this glowing light, coupled with the physicality of cutting into the paper that echoed of a fundamental shift in my worldview .
Bottom Image: Mareel with Princess Anne