Blocked off landscapes and gunships over isleworth

During my year's of heavy drinking, I like many alcoholics spent most of my time outside.
Because the bedsit I was living in was filled with some fairly maladjusted people I preferred to sit and drink by the river and one of my favorite spots was by the river in Brentford, this was at least in part due to the illegally moored houseboats that lined the waterfront in Watermans Park. I got to know some of the people who lived on these boats and they, like me were existing on the fringes of mainstream society and like me frequently got harassed by the authorities. So there was a shared experience there.
Last January I returned to Watermans Park and the local authority had lined the whole waterfront with 8 foot Heras fencing, effectively closing the access to these boats. Many of them had been removed. But the image had a profound effect on me.

After moving into my new flat in December 2019 I noticed that military helicopters would land and takeoff rapidly on the sports ground of the Army school of music at Kneller House that sits directly behind my house. Usually these are Chinook transport helicopters but occasionally an armed AH 64   Attack Helicopter lands which is an odd discordant sight in suburban London, below are some photographs that I took with a view to making something of them in my studio practice.

 

A strange sight and the noise was tremendous 

Other artists who use bunkers and a series of shots from the Netherlands, that involved trespassing

This is a photograph by an artist named Jonathon Andrew, I like his work because he seems to capture both the menace and the strange melancholic feeling of these structures. While doing online research about Cuckmere haven during World War 2 I found an entire online culture dedicated to exploring and photographing these structures.
Because many of these structure are on private land,  in order to get close to them abit of trespassing is sometimes involved this was the case for me in the Netherlands in August last year when I took these pictures. The blue sign on the far left says No Entry in Dutch, while I broke the letter of the law by climbing over some rusted barbed wire I did damage the structures which ultimately is what regulations about trespass refer to.

Bunkers, photographs and paintings

The following pictures look at my interest in world war 2 fortifications, both as history and as a subject of painting.

The photograph above was taken by me in August 2018 on the island of Schiemonikoog off the Dutch coast. The bunker was part of a large bunker complex that during the war was built around a radar installation by the occupying German forces. What is odd is that on the surface these bunkers are now almost invisible. The photo below demonstrates this.

The entrance to the bunker can just be seen in the centre of the picture. Seeing pictures of what this area of the Island looked like during the war is very odd because now all trace above ground has disappeared. This visited inspired my work in the second year.

Artists that have influenced me:; Turner, Constable, John Martin and Peter Kennard

While in more recent works Ravilious and Nash have been important to my work my first inspiration to follow my mother and become an artist came from a visit to the Clore Gallery in London after it opened in the late 1980's.

It was this painting that started it for me. There is the sense of movement and drama and the back story about Turner being tied to the mast during the snowstorm in the channel that the work depicts.

 The Image above is a very large canvas by the English artist John Martin that hangs in the Tate called The Great Day of His Wrath. There is something very cinematic about Martin's work that I enjoy.

Here is another example of John Martin's work, like the painting featured above it has a biblical theme, the title is Before the Deluge. Martin was well loved by the general public but often disparaged by his contemporaries. Because while his work was dramatic at its core it was in step with popular morality of the time. Constable also produced work that was technically accomplished and popular.

The image above is John Constable 's landscape The Hay wain a painting that typifies the appeal to sentimental nationalism, which although I'd like to claim to be immune to still resonates with me at some level. However the photo-collage by Peter Kennard featured below is the antidote to that sentimentalism because he lampoons that sentimental view of a romantic English landscape with the unpleasant reality of the UK as it is now as a vassal state of the declining American empire.

Peter Kennard's work also interests me because he in a way defiles the landscape by filling the eponymous Haywain with nuclear weapons.

Artists that Influence me, Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious

The two paintings featured above are both by the British artist Paul Nash, his work exercises a strong influence over me because of the evident attachment he feels towards the landscape he paints. The first of these two paintings is called Bomber on the beach. The cliffs in the background remind me very strongly of the cliffs around Birling Gap on the South coast of England where I spent a great deal of my childhood. The second picture is Nash's epic portrayal of the Battle of Britain, completed in 1941. The meandering river that snakes into the sea at the base of the painting looks very similar to Cuckmere Haven, which is down the coast from Birling Gap and Eastbourne.
Both the cliffs and the river appear in my own work, both in terms of photography and painting.

The Paintings featured above are the works I completed just before the Government Lockdown in March. The painting at the top was taken from a photograph that was part of a much larger series of photos that I took in September 2019.
I include images of Cuckmere Haven that will seem familiar both in terms of Paul Nash's piece and also in terms of the painting of Eric Ravilious featured below.

The photograph featured below is part of the series I mentioned above.