Margate Skyline No.56 (Dreamland) – Acrylic, gloss varnish on canvas, 20cm x 20cm x 1cm (May 2023)
The ongoing matter of looking up is still very much just that, ongoing. Something that started in Margate with Dreamland and the shapes of the Turner Contemporary in late Summer 2019 and went on with several paintings looking over the River Thames, a painting looking beyond a church in Hackney, looking up Beck Road (again in Hackney). No idea where these Skyline paintings are going to go, or for how long the series of paintings will go on for. Right now I’m enjoying the act of just looking up, of distilling the information, the sky, the space, the shape, the skylines, the sky beyond the rooftops or the spires or the light reflecting off the Shard or the shape of a Church in Shoreditch, the buildings of the Southbank. Someone asked if I was putting these paintings together for a show, the answer is no, not really, although there might be some bigger pieces being painted. Most of these smaller 20cm square canvas pieces have already been sold, indeed people have been asking me to paint particular buildings or places, it doesn’t really work like that though, it only works if I want to paint it. Still need to get back to the sea with all this looking up though. Some of it has now evolved to become about repeating an image or a set of shapes in an almost pop art manner, repeating the shape again and again from slightly different angles...
The painting is signed in my traditional way with an "S" on the actual artwork and fully signed, dated and titled on the back