This is a very unusual painting, as you can see, so here is the artistic analysis to help guide you through this colourful scene.
Meanwhile explores the contrast between fleeting human presence and the quiet permanence and beauty of the often unobserved built environment. This painting makes you instantly wonder how such a scene could have ever passed anyone by! The colours themselves are like a box of candy that you can’t dismiss without further investigation.
The woman walking through the scene is occupying a passing moment. Her movement is incidental and temporary. Outside of this instant she will continue on, while being locked into another distraction through her AirPods, and eventually disappear from the landscape.
Here, however, that passing moment is frozen and given temporary permanence. An ordinary walk becomes fixed in time for a moment, allowing us to observe it — and think about what it all means.
Alongside her, in a literal parallel universe, the rows of beach huts have a very different relationship with time. Repetitive, functional and familiar, they are the sort of architecture that can become almost invisible through constant presence. People pass them time and again without necessarily noticing their remarkable geometry and even more remarkable colour scheme. Yet from this particular angle, their repetition creates an unexpected sense of scale and monumentality. Something ordinarily overlooked becomes the dominant structure of the image.
The perspective turns the huts into a tunnel, drawing the eye towards a distant point and creating the expectation that the passage must lead somewhere. But the apparent destination never quite arrives. We will come back to this thought in a moment…
It is a journey created entirely by perspective and leads to a dead end, which on a second glance could even be the same vanishing point from where the woman started her journey into the scene itself. Anyway, your eyes will soon be pulled elsewhere…
At the centre of both sides of your exploration is a striking dark pink support post providing an unexpected piece of visual punctuation. Its colour and position are perfectly placed within the geometry of the scene, briefly catching the eye as it follows the receding huts. It is an ordinary detail of the landscape, yet within the composition it becomes something more — another point of interruption that prevents the eye from simply travelling towards an apparent destination. The eye feels like it’s being continually redirected by some sort of unknown force — into the tunnel, back out towards the woman, back to the pink post, and then out again into the wider landscape, almost for a breath of fresh air as you try to find quietness in the scene.
This is deliberate and while the image probably breaks conventional design rules, the painting is intended to create this subtle agitation in the act of looking at it. The viewer is caught between competing points of attention. There is no single place at which the eye can comfortably settle. This creates the contradiction at the heart of the painting. And just as we think we have found the route through the image, something draws us back into the loop. I’ve found that you have to live with this image for quite some time before you can stand happily in front of it having made peace with the concepts graphically depicted before your eyes.
Meanwhile refers to the intervals and contrasts between different forms of time and dimension, between the brief human moment and the slow, almost unnoticed persistence of an interesting world around it. While one person passes through the frame, everything else simply continues to exist. Just the act of looking becomes part of the tension.
Perhaps that is what Meanwhile ultimately asks us to consider: that while something fairly normal is happening to us all, the world around us is quietly carrying on, possibly at a different tangent. During the struggle to resolve the image, this painting is reminding us to slow down and actually notice and enjoy the beauty of these moments in our own journeys while we can. They are so easily missed as we head down our own tunnels…. maybe, also going nowhere! We will leave that question for another day!
Prints
Prints of Blue Prospects are available, and produced for me by a Platinum-certified printshop on museum-grade Hahnemühle archival paper. Their prints are stunning.
Size guide, but custom sizes are also available; Full size 500mm x 700mm print — £200
12″ x 16.8″ print on A3+ paper – £99.
They can be posted anywhere in the UK. Email me for details.