Dead Lorry, Yellow Lorry

Shaun Morris, Truck Painting, Details Unknown

I notice from his blog, that my friend and fellow painter, Shaun Morris, is preparing for another round of imminent exhibitions.  I don’t know the specifics just yet, but it appears he will soon be hanging examples of his recent, nocturnal truck and truck park paintings on walls in both Sheffield and Wolverhampton.  I’ll certainly pass on more details once he is into his full publicity phase.

Shaun Morris, Truck painting, Details Unknown

I’ve discussed Shaun’s work repeatedly on this blog, over recent years, and his exhibitions of evocative Motorway nocturnes, ‘Stolen Car’ and ‘Black Highway’, in particular.  The current HGV pieces continue to explore some of the themes that emerged in those paintings, but point to new ones too, not least in their new focus on specific vehicles rather than the carriageways they traverse, (and the even more ambiguously charged spaces between).  If we remain stranded beneath or beside a dimension of perpetual transit, its daylight voyagers now join us, as they come to rest.  The lorries bring their own set of associations, (and formal concerns), of course, but Shaun’s world remains a darkly poetic one.  His paintings maintain a melancholy, slightly haunted dream of modern life.

Shaun Morris, Truck Painting In Progress, Details Unknown

Anyway, I won’t harp on about all this too much here.  No doubt there’ll be further mention of Shaun’s activities, once his work actually hits the walls.  For now, I’ll append this post with a small group of my own truck-based images.  I stumbled on the two vehicles depicted here in recent months, during my regular photographic sorties around my inner-Leicester back yard.  Both are treated with less obvious dark reverie, and rather more frontal formality than Shaun’s, - he being a far more representational painter than I will ever be.

All Remaining Images:  West Leicester, Spring 2015

The yellow recovery vehicle, rather predictably, speaks to my abiding passion for geometric hazard graphics and expanses of Safety Yellow paint.  It inevitably lent itself to a fairly standard process of homing-in on its qualities of pattern, shape and colour.  I guess ‘Recovery’ is another of those slightly ambiguous and potentially loaded found texts I might easily have incorporated into a painting of my own on another day.

The other example is an abandoned trailer that has been slowly decaying on the forecourt of a vacated business premises for some time now.  If I’ve approached it with no less habitual formality, it does, I think, provide even more scope for multiple interpretations or tangential associations.  As Shaun himself points out, in his recent post, the image of a static or abandoned trailer has acquired rather specific, and definitely disquieting, resonances, just lately.

Corrections:

A return visit, since this post was written, reveals that the business premises mentioned above is by no means vacated, as I'd assumed.  There is a vehicle service and repair operation still trading out of it, despite initial impressions to the contrary.  Apologies to them for mistakenly consigning them to oblivion.

Furthermore, that's not just an abandoned trailer at all, but a complete truck.  In my defence, it's an easy enough mistake to make with its cab parked tight up against an adjacent fence, as it is. It still appears to be fairly well abandoned, although that probably means I'll see it driving around Leicester, next week.  

I hope the basic point of my musings still holds true.  Talk about an unreliable witness, though…