Original artwork description:

Walking around East London I have sometimes been struck by the beauty and strangeness of empty spaces on housing estates. The four or five-story high blocks of flats dating back to the 1930’s or 50’s sit on all four sides of a minimally designed public space, a piece of grass with no landscaping is dissected by a path leading out onto a street. In the middle of the bustling modern city, these spaces are tranquil but not private - they are looked over by a hundred windows, however in these empty courtyards of grass the people looking out from their windows are looking at nothing much, really it is a functional space, a patch of grass and shrubs that need minimal maintenance and a path to take you from A to B.
When I made this painting I began with the empty square and then put in foreground trees, next pillars of smoke began to emerge purely improvised and next a figure. I was thinking about how smoke rises and shapes itself into strange forms as it moves upwards there is a suggestion of broken furniture and an abandoned bike in the ashes of the fire.

Materials used:

oil paint

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