Completed Triptych: 'Safe From Harm 1'

I’m sure a lot of amateur artists share the elusive dream of making a living from the production of their work alone.  Of course, for so many the reality is actually one of fitting our art practice around the demands of a day job.  It would be disingenuous not to admit that one of the big obvious advantages of working in a school is the generous holidays.  There’s no substitute for a solid block of painting time and this Summer I was able to really capitalise on it and get stuck in straight away.  With a chunk of available time, I decided to carry out an idea for a piece comprising multiple separate elements.

'Safe From Harm', 2011, Acrylics & Paper Collage on 3 Panels,
150 cm X 50 cm (Each Panel), 150 cm X 200 cm (Overall)

‘Safe From Harm 1’ is a triptych of narrow, one and a half metre high, vertical panels - each bearing one word of the title.  The phrase came via the Massive Attack song of the same title.  Over the years critics have waxed lyrical on the quality and significance of their music, particularly of those first two albums from the early 90’s and I was certainly sold on it from first hearing.  There is a small personal connection for me as well.  I lived in Bristol between 1981 and 1987 and during that time I witnessed the disturbances in St. Pauls and paid several visits to the city’s infamous, racially mixed, (and often fairly heavy), Dugout Club.  Both were important ingredients of what became known as ‘The Bristol Sound’.

I have distinct memories of hearing early hip hop records for the first time down at the Dugout and on several occasions I believe they were played by the nascent Wild Bunch Sound System - the collective from which Massive Attack was to later emerge.  During my first term as a student my daily cycle journey into college took me past the Coach House studios where their first album – ‘Blue Lines’, (including ‘Safe From Harm’), was to be recorded.  Towards the end of my time in the city I shared a shabby house on Richmond Terrace in Clifton.  Just round the corner was one of the first bits of proper ‘Wild Style’ graffiti I ever saw - courtesy of Massive Attack’s 3D.  I was a naïve, white, middle class art student from the East Midlands but even I could tell something was happening.

'3D', 3D (Robert Del Naja), Clifton, Bristol

For a detailed survey of Bristol’s eclectic and pioneering music scene, try reading ‘Straight Outta Bristol: "Massive Attack", "Portishead", "Tricky" and the Roots of Trip Hop’ by Phil Johnson [1].  My first contact with it all was with the angular, white funk/punk aesthetic of bands like Pigbag, Rip Rig and Panic, Automatic Dlamini and The Pop Group.  Occasional trips to St Pauls and surrounding areas, visits to The Dugout and the general rise in consciousness around post-riot Bristol soon made me much more aware of the deeper, blacker, strands of Soul, Reggae and Hip Hop permeating the musical culture of a city that was surprisingly ghettoised.

Others have noted just how dramatically the dread mood of the deprived zones east of the city centre was juxtaposed against the complacency of affluent, trendy, (white), areas like Clifton and Redland, just up the road.  The location of The Dugout placed it centrally between the two worlds making it an obvious place for curious students to come face to face with a less privileged but inherently creative, alternative scene.  I also have a cherished memory of venturing into a boozer somewhere in Montpellier one night to hear a DJ entertain a room of middle-aged and elderly people, many of whom I guessed to be first generation Caribbean immigrants.  Once it became obvious we were there for genuine reasons, we were treated to an evening of music that sounded as near to ‘the real thing’ as anything I’ve witnessed. 

     

By the time ‘Blue Lines’ came out in 1991 I had relocated to Leicester, (a city with its own rather different multi-cultural dynamic), but it certainly captured the smoked out, soulful, tense sometimes threatening vibe of parts of inner-city Bristol as I remembered it.  ‘Safe From Harm’ has endured in my mind as a resonant phrase for twenty years, as has my love of the particular song.  Shara Nelson’s vocal evokes a perfect blend of vulnerability and implied threat and captures that yearning for safety that all modern urban dwellers crave to some degree in the face of,

“Midnight rockers

City slickers

gunmen and maniacs…”

And surely, there can be no better evocation of urban paranoia than 3D’s laconically rapped interjection,

“I was lookin’ back to see if you were lookin’ back at me

To see me lookin’ back at you”.

In the intervening years we have all become familiar with the style of graffiti once known as ‘Wild Style’.  Calligraphic tagging has become a ubiquitous form of territorial marking and now constitutes just another layer of visual texture within the overall urban environment, - a kind of visual noise in essence.  Amongst the other textual strata to which my eye is constantly drawn are various forms of official or formal signage and the ragged, disintegrating layers of fly posters which accrete on unsupervised city surfaces.  All three were combined as sources for the painted triptych.

    

One particular observed example provided a specific source and was to dictate the tall, thin format of each individual panel.  Dotted around a major road junction close to my home, are a series of huge streetlights with substantial square pillars at street level.  As blank, available space these are routinely tagged and I became particularly attracted to the way one writer had scrolled his text down the narrow, vertical space.  Once augmented by a small fly poster, the subject became irresistible and was quickly photographed for use as the starting point of my composition. 

 Sketchbook studies were evolved to incorporate my three words, (conveniently of equal length), and then reproduced pretty faithfully at full scale.  The techniques I used were essentially those of recent paintings but with a more overt use of collage in the backgrounds.  I incorporated actual fragments of salvaged fly posters here along with photocopies and individually cut out characters.

[1]:  Phil Johnson, ‘Straight Outta Bristol: “Massive Attack”, “Portishead”, “Tricky” And The Roots Of Trip Hop’, 1997, Coronet Books.