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.

Where to?

I don't know what to do next. The roundels series was well recieved. I know I have to work in a completely different way for the next series of works. Beyond that, however, what exactly to do, or indeed, what precisely to make work about is uncertain to me.

I'd like it to be something connected to the plates of drawings found illustrating natural histories, however.

Here is another detail from the Rooundels Series. The entire set can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/28509471@N05/

Details

Here are some details from the Roundels series.

I'm coming to an end of this series.

I could continue, but I think that would result in repetition, and the work becoming more and more decorative and mechanical, like wallpaper.

Some confident works

Here are some of the better ones- there have been some very weak prints too. Howver, I think the weak ones are somehow "necessary". Without them it wouldn't be possible to make the good ones.