Buy prints/ original of my last peice at Saatchi .com

Hello, this quite obviously is my new painting:

In a way it is a continuation of my Digbeth series, most of the buildings are of that post industrial type, with some of them battered or missing, or past their prime. After I drew the buildings I thought it would make sense to give it some authentic Digbeth tags:

I hope these hooligans don’t mind me copying their pastes, I have a lot of admiration and respect for LISK , AS ONE , PLIMSOUL , TEMPO33 , Lucy McLauchlan , Vomit and the one mystery artist, who I imagine to be French for some reason. If by chance you are one of those people or you know them tell them for me thanks, you make countless boring bus journeys to work more bareable.

This painting is the best peice of art I’ve done so far. You can see on the video that, my flat has bow windows which come out like a turret bulging from the corner of the building, and my buildings the last one on the street, so my flat sticks out a bit. It’s not really intentional, I don’t have space anywhere else, but basically anyone walking down the street can see my painting through the high old windows, I’m sure half the people in Moseley have been watching the progress of it for the last couple of months. Vera (my lady) told me one day a school girl rang the doorbell and came round to look at it. And once I was painting at night with the blinds down, and when it’s like that I can’t see out, but because of the lights inside, everyone outside can see me. I just heard this voice saying “that’s awesome man.. that’s awesome” a kind of young male voice, a bit bill and ted, I said “thanks” and nodded at the blind, “great art man” the blind said back.

I’m very pleased with it, people like it, I sent some of the work in progress photos to Ort cafe. I’d nearly ended up there at New Years, I’d heard that it was a nice place, and I think I saw it mentioned on created in birmingham or one of those birmingham blogs. I didn’t study art at university or college, so I’ve never done an exhibition before, but I thought this one is either good enough to sell or to exhibit somewhere, good enough for the next step up, so I sent them an email asking if they’d be interested. They got back to me saying they think it’s great, but they want me to do more, and put on a solo exhibition in October. Great. Will do. I’m very happy about it all. I’ve got time to make at least two more works. I’ve got some good ideas.

I was thinking of explaining the meaning of the painting, but I’d rather not. I don’t think it’s so complex or obscure that most people couldn’t work it out themselves so good luck with that.

Well, I started out doing this as a submission for a local magazine, but I’m not so sure if I will submit it. I don’t think it’s that easy to follow, and I don’t think it really clings together that well.

I do like the art, most of it, I think the technique has it’s faults but also a lot of charm.

Hope you enjoy.

These next two are the first two I did, so I’m not so happy with them:

Been working on these for too too long, scans don’t do the colours justice, but anyway:

Each of these were made from six scans on my a4 printer, which all came out at different darknesses, and bent out in different ways, so I’ve spent about a week painstakingly copy and pasting and airbrushing and messing with brightness and contrast and generally annoying computer stuff. I’ve learned a lot about GIMP in the process, but there has to be a better way of scanning paintings in.

Anyway these three pictures are of Digbeth, the Digbeth in my mind. Sheets of cold brick empty factories and fall – stumbling night time people at lengths from the faregrounds city. That’s all I’m giving you. I’ve put a lot of thought into these charecters and buildings and what they signify. These paintings took too long to make.

Just a little test, I’ve got plans for filming something else, this showed me I really need to get a copy of Sony Vegas or Adobe Premier, I can’t seem to get a torrent that works, think I’m too thick with computers, or lazy or something.

Music is Darkstar, they made a lot of good tracks but particularly “Aidy’s girls a computer”. They recently made a pretty disappointing album, which this track is from, not that it’s bad, it’s just they seemed to be breaking so much new ground, with their earlier singles, they sounded a rare thing: original and unique, but on the album they sound like a tonne of people, well crafted yes, but not what it could have been.

LARGE VERSION

My brother does a lot of photo-collage things like this, I wanted to do one to capture my flat as it is now, in the half way state before getting a sofa, book case, tv, chairs, etc. As you can see it was back just before Christmas when it was snowy. Also you can see 3 paintings that were very work in progress then, and are very nearly finished now, evidence of my endless hobbies, record addiction and Veras traditional folky Christmas biscuits.