Written City 6: The Grey Boxes

Many of my paintings employ a fairly vivid palette these days.  However, there is a variety of utilitarian battleship grey that also seems to recur in my work, providing a useful foil to the passages of heightened colour.  There’s nothing clever about it, it’s usually just a mixture of Titanium White and Mars Black about halfway along the tonal scale between the two extremes.

'Safe From Harm 1', Acrylics & Paper Collage on Three Panels,
Each Panel: 150cm X 50cm, 2011

For all my love of colour, I always return to that unassuming grey for its ability to give the eye a brief rest within a painting and allow a neutral space where simultaneous contrasts may occur optically.  Perhaps, in the not too distant future, I’ll attempt a primarily grey painting.  Indeed, Gerhard Richter practically made a career of that at one time or another.

Gerhard Richter, 'Stadtbild M8 (Grau)', ('Townscape M8 (Grey)',
Oil on Canvas,  1968

Gerhard Richter, 'Grau' ('Grey'), Oil on Canvas, 1968

Another painter who, I think, uses grey beautifully is Christopher Wool.  I originally came to Wool through his stark, ironic text paintings but also love his more recent wiped abstracts.  The greys in these canvases are the result of the turpsy dilution of black paint rather than of methodical mixing and are full of beautiful nuance and transparent tonality.  I think there are parallels between his looping, self-cancelling calligraphic lines and the graffiti tags which always catch my attention.

Christopher Wool, 'Untitled', Enamel on Linen, 2009

Christopher Wool, 'Untitled', Enamel on Linen, 2007

Out in the field, I particularly associatiate the colour with industrial surface coatings of a mundane, practical nature.  A while back I realised this probably originates in my observation and photographic documentation of the most unassuming forms of street furniture, - the grey boxes.  I’ve been collecting these for a while now as I travel around with my camera and have even been known to return to a specific site that I’ve observed from the car window on a routine trip.  Pointing my camera at them always attracts bemused stares from passers by, making me realise just how eccentric the activities I take for granted as an artist must seem to some folk.

I don’t even really know what purpose they serve, although it’s pretty obvious that they generally contain electrical equipment.  As many sit at junctions or kerbsides, I assume they contain the control systems for traffic signals or street lighting.  Possibly, some are part of telecommunications networks.

At first glance the boxes appear pretty similar but closer acquaintance reveals that they’re all actually individual in different ways.  Of course, what really distinguishes them, and the reason they first came to my attention, is the wealth of graffiti, fly posters, stickers and other examples of unofficial signifiers they attract.  It’s evident that many constitute way-markers in the network of taggers’ territorial squirtings; whilst others become regular bulletin boards for fly posters and accrue beautiful textures of torn paper, tape residue and text fragments in the process.

These photographs were all taken in Leicester and Birmingham and are collected in a round-up of the ‘interesting grey boxes’ I’ve found over recent months, (this bit makes more sense if you imagine it spoken in an adenoidal, anoraky voice).