'Constructed City' 17: In Plain Site

All Images: Central Leicester, July 2020

My perambulations around Leicester, to document its major construction sites, have extended ever further over the weeks, as the number of active locations has multiplied.  Strangely though, this one had completely passed me by until now - despite being on one of the city's main arteries - and fairly centrally, to boot.  Midlands sports nostalgists may be interested to know it's on the site of the old Granby Halls - adjacent to the Leicester Tigers rugby stadium.  It's also notable that, for once, the finished building will contain a hotel - and not the usual student hutches. 

Anyway, I suppose it's evidence of how easily one can become entrenched in habits, given that I stumbled across this site during only a slight deviation from my regular route to visit another one, fairly nearby.  The lesson is clear for any self respecting flaneur en velo; the city will always deliver new surprises - as long as one keeps taking left turns.

In its current state, the edifice itself clearly belongs in the same category as those featured in my recent 'Steels' post - but maybe relates to the 'Building With Colour' images too.  Over the months, I've been struck by how each of these sites seems to take on a particular chromatic identity (itself being something which can change dramatically, as the work progresses), and there's no doubt this one is currently 'The Yellow One'.  Long time visitors here will know that 'yellow things' have represented another of my enthusiasms, over the years.  Other than that, it's the customary tale of yet another section of urban sky becoming hatched-in by a complex angular tracery of girders and bare-boned staircases.  Lovely!

Pretty, Vacant 5

All Images: West Leicester, June 2020

It seems that the subject matter of most appeal to me, whilst out and about with my camera, currently falls into one of two conflicting modes.  As usual, everything emerges from my immediate surroundings, but I've noticed that it's generally characterised by either a distinct emptying of, or conversely - an ever-denser occupation of, physical space.

The latter is an obvious feature of my on-going 'Constructed City' work, and I've already highlighted how the frenetic urge to build, currently overtaking several key locations around Leicester feels like a conscious filling-in of both the city plan, and the visual panorama.  The building projects that have captivated me so much over recent months, are all large-scale, multi-storied undertakings, and rapidly grow to represent significant and un-ignorable interventions on the visual (and thus, psychic) environment.  Viewed from a distance, (in my case - as approached on two wheels, like as not), they generally betray a distinctly monolithic blocking-in of any vista they occupy.  However, closer inspection generally reveals a situation of overwhelming visual intricacy, complex geometry, and almost limitless abstract appeal.  With these subjects, more is definitely more, and (as I've already discovered) the challenges of translating that in final pieces are not to be underestimated.

But however much those concerns currently dominate my imagination, there is also an countervailing pull back towards the themes of vacancy and absence which characterised my work just a few years ago.  That's what these 'Pretty, Vacant' posts are about.  For all that the local landscape is impacted by multiple, often startling, emerging edifices, it's also host to numerous examples of vacant commercial premises and abandoned real estate.  There is a palpable emptying-out to be detected in numerous locations peppered across the city.

Just a few years (or even months) ago, such motifs  seemed to speak of the economic convulsions of our age, or to anticipate the potentially catastrophic effects of insular politics.  Typically, these would include a decade of post-crash Austerity, and the inevitable B-word.  But, of course, to that list we must now add the implications of our latest pandemic  catastrophe (the C-word - I suppose).  Regardless of how severely we may or may not have been individually affected by recent events, there's a distinct mood of loss stalking the world right now.  Whether through actual loss of life, or through the disappearance of livelihoods, the restriction of economic activity, or the shutting-off of civic and social life - there's a hollowing of what many still fondly think of as 'normality' abroad, right now.  For some, this may represent a perversely welcome opportunity to re-set - perhaps on a global scale.  For others, it may resemble the latest wave of a much greater, gradually unfolding Apocalypse.  For the majority, it might just be another in an endless catalogue of (hopefully) temporary inconveniences - to be endured, and adapted to.

Whatever one's position on all that (for what it's worth, my own shifts between all three - on an almost daily basis) the empty sites I keep stumbling over still feel like a very apposite symbol of our age.  As with several of the examples I've featured in this little series, I have no evidence that this showroom's current state is specifically virus-related.  As a former Triumph motorcycle dealership, it may speak more of fluctuations in that market, to which I'm not privy - not least because another bike merchant also disappeared from the local landscape quite recently.  However my chosen images have never been about capturing specific subjects for documentary reasons alone.  The specifics of the local landscape are an inevitable part of my photographic habit - that's true, but I'd like to think they are quite quickly absorbed into a more subjective process of capturing secondary themes and multiple potential readings.  In that sense, the images here seem to reach out, beyond the simple facts of their situation - perhaps to evoke the recent denuding of our collective day-to-day experience.

As I write, Leicester's particular difficulties continue.  However, there may be a weak sense of renewed hope, elsewhere in Britain - to accompany a reported levelling-off of the daily virus statistics (although why anyone would put much faith in the official statistics - I'm really not sure).  Hopefully, this is not too misguided a hiatus, in what may still prove to be a far longer-lasting situation.  Perhaps all the empty floorspace and blank windows will soon feel less appropriate as topically symbolic motifs.  I certainly can't predict any of that.  Whatever the case, I suspect I would always be visually drawn to such subject matter - regardless of which specific readings might be subsequently attached.  That might be purely for formal/visual reasons - I suppose, or perhaps I'm just a perennial sucker for the bleak and the melancholy.  In this instance, it occurs to me that one might just as easily meditate on the paradoxical thrill of the 'everyday', or the strange resonance of contemporary non-spaces (motorway services and airports being other closely-related examples, perhaps).  The essential resonance of the location would remain undiminished - I believe.  Meanings fluctuate, just as do commercial lettings, commercial use and public health.  And window reflections and beautifully cast shadows do too, of course.  

Such morphing and layering of possible readings is the real thrill of a Psychogeographic relationship with one's own environment, and will always be most heightened in the hive of a city - or so it seems to me.  Only time will tell which may feel most appropriate in this one, over the coming months.

Completed Painting: 'Untitled 3 (Constructed City)'

'Untitled 3 (Constructed City)', Acrylic, Screen Print & Paper Collage on Panel,
60 cm x 60 cm, 2020

Greetings from Plague Town!  I can't pretend Leicester's exceptional status, as the only British city to remain in strict(ish) pandemic lock-down, has impacted my own life too distressingly.  However, there is a palpable sense of frustration (and indeed, mounting anger) abroad, over the reckless behaviour and mismanagement that may have brought our local situation about.  Whatever the rights and wrongs of all that (as ever - I suspect the blame lies at several doors), It's frustrating to remain in a state of relative limbo, particularly as the rest of the country gropes its way towards something resembling rehabilitation.  Sadly, I doubt we'll be the only place to encounter such difficulties, before this whole sorry saga is over.  One can only hope something useful will have been learned from the mistakes made here (ha!) - not that the thought of being a test-bed for calamity is exactly comforting.

Anyway, as I say, my own existence remains relatively uncompromised - on a day-to-day basis, at least.  I had been going into work for a few days a week, over the last month, despite the fact that our school remained closed to the majority of students.  And there was some satisfaction to be gleaned from breaking the week up - and in regaining a partial sense of purpose in the outside world.  But that's once more on hold, given that, regardless of the lock-down conditions, we're now officially (if somewhat laughably) in the Summer holidays.  It feels fairly futile to try to predict exactly what awaits us in the 2020-21 academic year (besides more complications and uncertainty - no doubt), so for now, I'm a completely free agent, with only myself to answer to.  I really can't complain.  There are plenty of folk out there who'd give their eye teeth to be in this situation (and still getting paid).  And the answer - as ever, is pretty straightforward; just get on with some artwork.

So, in that spirit, here's the latest of my 'Constructed City' paintings to reach completion.  I've already described my slightly tentative entry into this particular phase of work, as reflected in the limited dimensions of the two panels previously completed.  This one is a little bigger (although still far from large), and represents an attempt to take some momentum from completing the two tiddlers.  Perhaps it's all in my head - but scale really seems to be an issue with these paintings.  I've yet to fully analyse exactly why, but it's clearly something to do with the size of individual marks and zones of colour as a composition becomes more complex.  Even at this modest scale, the simple act of doubling the dimensions of the panel's sides from 30 cm to 60cm, seemed to raise a whole new set of issues.

In fact, the basic composition was initially pretty close to both '1' and '2', making this new one much more of an evolutionary step than a radical leap.  And the theme of veiled geometry, which had already emerged, was deliberately carried over here too.  However, in this case, it became apparent that the simple expedient of dragging a translucent field of paint across a portion of the nearly-completed painting wasn't going to work quite so well.  And so the piece entered a somewhat extended phase of formal subdivision and over-painting of that central passage, before anything even vaguely resembling a satisfactory conclusion was reached.

In passing, it's also worth noting that this one includes an extension of the collage techniques already built into its predecessors.  As well as sections of some of my 'CC' screen prints, I was able to recycle some of the associated (and normally sacrificial) proofs - with a wash of indian ink applied over them.  That might seem a small thing perhaps, but it's always pleasing to devise a new method of covering some ground.  In this case, it's also justification of my belief that nothing is ever wasted.  Those proofs were originally laid onto notoriously unstable newsprint, so it'll be interesting to see how the painting ages. 

  

Anyway, if the final result is far more complex than originally intended, it' also represents a far more concerted process of problem-solving.  If I'm honest, I'm probably still not totally happy with the painting as a whole.  However, it does feels like some resolution was achieved - and that any unanswered questions are now best left for the next attempt.  And, actually, with hindsight, such pieces often prove to have been the most useful in any body of work.  Opening a whole new can of pictorial worms, even within a limited arena, is always more instructive, in the long term, than merely repeating what one already knows.

Onward...



   

'Constructed City' 16: Building With Colour

Main Images: West, North West, and South Leicester, May - June 2020

As I observed last time, my ever-expanding archive of construction-related photographs is inevitably categorising itself into various recurrent themes.  Here's a little bundle focusing on the often startling colours of a modern construction site.

Frank Auerbach, 'Oxford Building Site II', Oil on Canvas, 1960

Frank Auerbach, 'Shell Building Site', Oil on Board, 1959

Once upon a time, construction sites, or 'building sites' - as they were traditionally known, were places of drab, earth colours.  The materials used were almost wholly organic, or of mineral origin, and often (in Britain, at least) appeared to inhabit a world of churned earth - top-dressed with congealing slurries of cement or plaster and littered with debris.  The main concession to gaiety was that drab, pink primer (or possibly, its dull aluminium counterpart) often used on wooden frames, or perhaps, the begrimed, primary yellow of a back-hoe excavator.  Building work seemed almost to be a process of solidifying and shaping the same primary mud from which each new edifice was raised.  In my imagination, it's a world evoked by the early post-war construction site paintings of Frank Auerbach, whose extreme impastos of mangled paint seemed ideally suited to such subject matter [1.].

The contemporary construction exists in a very different chromatic context.  It's usually one  characterised by far lighter tones, and a wide palette of, often highly saturated, synthetic colours.  The edges (and thus, the point of juncture between contrasting colours) all seem somehow sharper now, too.  In part, this is a reflection of the far wider range of artificial materials now employed, as well as the methods of their assembly.  A degree of traditional brick-laying, timber joinery, cement-pouring or surface-coating may still occur - to be sure.  But they now reside  within an overall process more akin to assembling a kit of pre-exiting parts [2.].  Many components of any new building - be they extruded, laminated, vacuum formed, or otherwise pre-fabricated (possibly even 3D printed nowadays - who knows?), arrive on site resplendent in a surprisingly vivid spectrum of self-coloured hues, metallic or translucent surface wrappings, and manufacturer's liveries.

Thus, a building in progress may now exhibit tangerines, lime greens, cerulean blues, sugar pinks and glittering silver - all juxtaposed within a few square metres.  Pipework, cabling, insulation materials, and plastics of all sorts, can be a particularly rich source of such materials - as typified by the pretty lilac hue prevalent in many of these shots.

Another important participant in all this is the temporary infrastructure of construction.  Safety barriers, barricades and access equipment all come in an ever more strident palette of primaries and saturated secondaries - un-ignorability clearly being one of their key functions.  Heavy plant, and the enormous lifting equipment towering over any large site, exhibit ever more brilliant colours these days, and, of course, the neon yellows and oranges of Hi-Vis workwear long overtook the wardrobes of construction workers, as safe practice and a general concern for well-being, overtook their industry.

In bright sunlight, a busy construction site is a far more garish environment than the urban landscape surrounding it.  For the reality is that many of these brighter hues disappear from the site as a building reaches its conclusion.  Insulation layers vanish behind more tastefully integrated final surface dressings.  The site is progressively denuded of brightly-painted kit, as it is readied for its unveiling.  In some cases, that final reveal may itself involve the removal of another layer of coloured wrapping.  New occupants will eventually arrive to inhabit the completed edifice, by which time the cavalcade of colour has transferred to a new location.

[1.]:  It should be acknowledged that, at the time those pieces were produced, Auerbach was limiting his palette for reasons of economy as well as aesthetics.  That quantity of paint doesn't come cheap across the entire colour chart, after all.

[2.]:  That distinction between 'building' and 'construction' seems particularly apposite, in this context.