Off the map : London's East End
One
of Peter's urban vistas - a true classic.We
had been for a walk
around London in all its variety of hectic life and its beauty and
ugliness, although the ugly is, if anything, more interesting and
inspirational.This
painting (in oils)
shows an area of Brick Lane on the walk from Bethnal Green to
Whitechapel and beyond ending up at Tower Bridge and
then across the River to Hays Galleria at Bankside, all,
(except Hays Galleria), unchanged since we lived in London and explored
it very thoroughly - more so, as Peter knew of many places as a
resident of the City since birth and areas he spent time painting back
in the days when he was at Art School in the 1970's.
This motorcycle business
was (and is) situated in a back alley off Brick Lane near a brewery
called Trumans and is covered by graffiti (shades of Banksy) - off the
map! There are a number of motorcycles of many sorts - old and new,
colourful and interesting, bland and uninspiring, but the whole very
inspirational and Peter was immediately moved to render a memento
partly because the colour and the circular grafitti reminded him of
"The Who" (rock band). He worked on it for hours at a time
using new paint techniques and a new palette. The motorcycles in their
different liveries give light and direction to the viewer. Perhaps you
are a car lover. We are neither of us prone to preferences in this area
but that does not stop us being struck by the variety and construct of
all these machines. "This
is, of course, now, and that was then" meaning that "back in the day"
when Peter first had an artistic association with Brick Lane, things
"were a bit different" back in the early 1970's. . . . . . "One
of the things that our tutors at St. Martins School of Art liked to do,
as "good training" for going out into industry, in an era when artists
frequently had reportage jobs working for magazines and newspapers, was
to "toughen us up" for the often daunting job of "drawing in public"
and the idea was to send us all down to places like Brick Lane to draw
for a couple of weeks. The first week we were there, two of the girl
students on the course sat side by side on the kerb drawing the shop
fronts on the other side of he road. Suddenly, a car drew up, two
geezers got out of it and duly set about each other over the bonnet. I
remember with amusement the look on the faces of the girls, who were
"nice" girls from "nice middle class backgrounds" from "nice suburbs
outside of London" as they looked at each other, rigourmortised with
fear. It wasn't the genteel place its became in the financial services
boom time era, where the local Council has recently installed padding
around lamp posts to stop people banging into them because they are
always on their mobile phone."Fings"
(definitely)
ain't
what they used to be".
Deborah Vernell Jones
