The Smoking Man- An Annie story.

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   I’m at the bus station an hour early waiting for Annie in the little restaurant. There’s a guy there, sitting, smoking. That’s all he’s doing- smoking very slowly, puff puff puff, puff. The cigarette is held quite daintily between his index and middle fingers at their ends (I wonder how it occurred to him that that was the easiest way to hold a cigarette? Surely there is less chance of it being crushed if you hold it in a v, like Churchill and his cigar?). He holds the smoke in for along time. His lungs must be big or his throat long or both, because it seems forever before the smoke comes out, first in a long jet of smoke, like the smoke form a steam train.. Then after a while, it drifts out in a soft cloud. It lingers there. The face of the guy isn’t sad but somehow I imagine that it ought to be. I wish I weren’t like that, thinking people should be sad for no reason at all. It’s so still in the restaurant that the smoke hands around lingering before it disperses too. I guess it’s what he likes doing most. He’s got some beer in a bottle there, but he’s not sipping. Annie won’t be here for an hour but I couldn’t think of anything better to do than wait in the bus station. I thought that maybe if I went to the bus station I’d be closer to her.

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The Garden City (nocturne)

Here is the complete print (86 x 60 cm).

Nocturnes

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The Garden City - Nocturne (details) I shall publish the whole print later this week.

 I think of these with piano music in mind- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkse1g9ibnM

 There is a beautiful tradition of night pictures which I'd like to tap into.

 

 

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The Garden City- more work

Here is some more recently completed work-

The Garden City

The first prints of the new series have dried, and I'm showing them on Flickr.

They're called "The Garden City", as a sort of homage to the planners of the nineteenth century.

I've structured the pieces with an underlying grid, with circles and other shapes overlain.

Edinburgh

Back in 2001 I did a series of monotypes based on city plans, called The Ideal City.
These were quite successful, and were featured in the Urban Planning journal, Planum.

They were also exhibited in The Polish Cultural Centre, in London, and a couple of prints sold to the accountancy firm Ernst and Young.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28509471@N05/sets/72157607392792398/

It's time for me to revisit these themes. I'm most interested in 18th and 19th cnetury planning- as seen in Edinburgh and London, especially the use of the "circus" used as a visual contrast to the more frequent rectilinear shapes.

My working methods here will be subjective- responding to the shapes and colours as I procedd, usually from a simple schematic base. I'm not going to copy the plans. I want to work from felt memory. I'm confident that I've internalised the ground plans of these cities.

And in the end, it is the emotional effect of the finished image that counts, not its veracity.