My exhibition is nearly here!

Opening night is 6pm - 8pm 13 March.

It runs from 13 March - 5 April at Fabric Gallery, 33A Broadway, Bradford (opposite HMV)

"Bradford gets a bad press. Media depictions of the city are not always flattering, often focussing on divided communities and recession stricken highstreets.

Why would anyone live here? Personally, I don’t take such a dim view of the place, I find it a very interesting city to walk around. There still stands many an indicator of its industrial heyday, when some of the finest examples of civic architecture in the country were built. They stand incongruously next to relics of 60s and 70s town planning, well meaning in their vision of a modernist utopia but often short sighted and unfinished. Bradford’s long history of immigrant communities can be seen everywhere, from Little Germany to the Westgate Mosque.

I am fascinated by what immigrants who move to the city make of the place. Do they see beauty or decay; familiarity or an alien world? Do they see home? Whenever I travel abroad I see the “exotic”, which is essentially the difference between that place and home. Whether it be the abandoned Russian military buildings in Paldiski or the desert fort of Jaisalmer, the landscape and architecture contrasts starkly from my home town and is all the more compelling for that. Could the same be true of Bradford seen for the first time?

Conversely, I am always drawn to small indicators, uncannily familiar landmarks in an otherwise alien city. It might be a church, a town hall or even a whole street that appears to have been miraculously transported from England. Of course it is no miracle, it was an attempt by the immigrant British communities to make the alien more familiar, to make a home from a foreign land. In a reversal of this, the immigrant communities of Bradford have done the same in building a mosque, a temple, a Polski Sklep or a synagogue, often in a style very different from the surrounding buildings but one that they would feel at home with. This all adds to form a rich and visually diverse landscape in the city of Bradford and one which I have tried to focus on in this exhibition. These paintings stand next to cityscapes chosen from countries with a strong connection to Bradford, namely India, China, Czech Republic, Estonia and Latvia. The exotic can be found in the most mundane places, it all depends on what home is to you."

Oil Paintings: Bradford Mosques

I have recently done a couple of paintings of what I regard as Bradford's most interesting mosques. The Bradford Central Mosque on Westgate has a beautifully lit up doorway at night. The intricate masonry is enhanced by the uplighting and it really does give it a sense of South Asian exoticism. However, the sandstone exterior is very in keeping with the surrounding Bradford buildings so it sits very happily in the landscape.

Contrasting with this is the Horton Park Mosque, Suffa Til Islam, on the outskirts of Bradford. Truly epic in scale, this palatial pink mosque is easily the most prominent feature in an otherwise fairly rundown part of town. I wanted to capture its "otherness" in the bleak landscape, a tribute to the architectural style of central and southern Asia but under the dull overcast skies of Bradford.

Oil painting: Manchester Road, Bradford

The sky is lit up on Manchester Road by some huge blue beacons atop a set of high rise blocks. These are the turbines installed to produce eco-friendly power, believed to be the first to top a residential building in Britain. They create an oddly futuristic landscape in an otherwise drab area of town and the contrast is quite stark.

I liked the composition of the old-world Station pub in the foreground with this Bladerunner-esque backdrop behind it. So I took a photo of it. Some loiterers outside the pub saw this as a valid reason to start a fight and crossed the road towards me. I was already returning to my friends car and we promptly locked the doors.

"Why you taking photos of me, eh?" the oik demanded.
"Why would I want to take a photo of your disfigured head?" Is what I didn't say.
Instead I calmly told him my real intentions and he cheerily waved us on (with 2 fingers).

My painting didn't seem to turn out as well as the location deserved, there just isn't something right about the composition. I tried adding a puddle first but it looked a bit odd. I also added the friendly local boy in the foreground.

So I left it for a while and recently went back to it. I added a completely wet road and a moon in the blank sky. It's probably better but not quite what I had in mind. Oh well, all that risk for nothing.

Oil painting: České Budějovice

I visited this small town in Bohemia and I've never seen such beautiful light. I visited this square in the day time, dusk and at night and every time it was lit with an almost heavenly light, it was weird. I like the colours on display at night, which is why I chose this composition of the square just after it had chucked it down.

The most famous thing about České Budějovice incidentally is it's the birthplace of the beer Budvar and I went on a tour of the brewery there. It was a rather bitter account of the ongoing trademark dispute with the American beer Budweiser, which also has it's roots in the city. Naturally they never missed an opportunity to mention the inferiority of this foreign imposter.

Oil Painting: Guangzhou (Canton)

There is a large European quarter in Canton, south China focussed around Shamian Island. This was divided into concessions and given to the French and British, who promptly started transforming the island into a mini London/Paris as was their wont in those days. Walking around it is slightly surreal as it's all so familiar even though I was thousands of miles from home.

I'm not sure if the subject of my painting is a French or British building. It doesn't really matter, I just wanted to make it into a ghostly monument to imperialism, a relic of a different age. As world power shifts to the east it is becoming an even more peculiar feature on the Chinese mainland.

I wanted to give the clock tower a ghostly quality so I lit it in a spooky white light and tried to keep detail to a minimum.

I used a bit of artistic licence with the street light which was actually much bigger but I wanted to make the colonial building the focus. The finishing touch was the red of the Chinese flag atop the clock tower, a foreign building reclaimed by the world's new superpower.

Spray painting - The Ratpack

A spray painted composition of the Rat Pack I was commissioned to produce.

Marilyn Monroe spray painting

Here's a recent commission I produced for my auntie who wanted a painting of Marilyn Monroe. There are a LOT of photos of Monroe but I thought one that was a little less well known and captured her in a more introspective mood would work well.

This is the one we decided on:

I then set about drawing it in 2 tones in Illustrator (with a third for the lips). The bottom layer is the grey, sprayed on first, then the black and finally the red.

With those drawn and printed out on A4, I drew a grid on them and massively scaled them up onto a large sheet of paper as the canvas is 90cm x 60cm.Oh yes, I hand draw my templates. With them drawn on 2 separate sheets, I then cut the shapes out using a scalpel. It's obviously important to leave your blank space open as any little 'islands' of white will be lost with the rest of the cut outs. Finicky? You better beleive it.

After all that, the spraying is the easy part although it can still go horribly wrong. I stick mine down using the terribly advanced technique of masking tape folded back on itself. This makes the lines crisper and stops the template flying away (like it did when I was spraying the red almost ruining everything). It also helps to spray outside unless you're looking for some hallucinogenic, fumey cellar fun.

And there you have it, Thoughtful Marilyn in 3 colours!