Main Street Apocalypse - stage 1

This is a commission that came in from posting the previous painting "Whiteface" on the IX Facebook page. They have asked for me to push the Apocalypse aspect of my current Roadside Apocalypse series towards something much more dystopian and as such this will be painted outside of that series so as to keep continuity.
I was thinking of a classic American Main Street location for my next painting anyway so I decided to go with that for this commission. The setting is a kind of Mad Max post apocalypse America wherein the survivors of whatever has happened are eking out an existence in the ruins of their town using whatever technology still works but kind of doomed really as once this tech stops working they are left with nothing. Yes all a bit downbeat I know but this is what they want!
For this picture I remembered the amazing chaotic electric cabling that I saw in Indian cities and thought this would be ideal to put into this, kind of a Fourth World country reduced to a Third World (mind you India is developing fast and although that cabling looks mad, it still works!)
I think I am going to set the time of day as early evening because I would like to have a bit of neon still working and a few lights in windows to show that people are living there.
This was "drawn" up with a small bristle brush using a mix of Burnt Sienna and Winsor Violet mixed with Liquin.

Artists & Illustrators magazine

I have a four page "Masterclass" article published in the September (no. 408) issue of Artists & Illustrators magazine.  It is a 12 step progress through a painting called "Ponte San Agostin" that I painted especially for the article based on thoughts of those two mantras that I have stuck to my easel. For more information on them please go to posts on this blog earlier in the year. Although the title is "Lose Edges, Join Shapes" I always felt it should have been called "Design in Painting" but they stuck to the original title. It's all about simplifying shapes by losing edges and combining the shapes so that the painting has a stronger design. This is the last of the three articles they commissioned from me for this year so far, I did suggest a couple of ideas for others but I haven't heard back from them on that.

Fine Art Connoisseur magazine

As I was able to get three paintings accepted for this year's Art Renewal Center's 14th International Salon book I was offered a discount on having my work featured in an article about the Salon in Fine Art Connoisseur magazine published in the USA. Although not exactly cheap I thought that it was worth a try as I need to get my work in front of US buyers outside of the IX Imaginative Realism arena.
I now realise that it has a link to my website that I haven't updated for a couple of years...and I'm not sure if I can remember how the program works...
I chose a landscape painting that was not Imaginative Realism even though the three paintings that were chosen were in that category in the book. I just felt that this was a chance to reach a wider market and hope I haven't wasted five hundred pounds!

Roadside Apocalypse

These paintings are an extension of an earlier series called Roadside America which in the end were somewhat unfocused as to what I was trying to get across.
In 2016 I wrote in the Roadside America section of my book Dreamland  "It is not the modern bustling city that I'm interested in but the places where time has not marched on and has rather left them behind, the look of the America that I saw on television growing up in the 60s when there were many hit American shows broadcast in the UK. The urban architecture, the billboards, the cars, the colours looked so iconic of America in that era although tempered with the threat of the Cold War always there in the background".

"This feeling is very much reflected in "Main Street" above, where I have a lone vapour trail streaking over the landscape... is it a Soviet bomber? Where has everybody gone, are they hunkered down in their fallout shelters waiting for the end of the world?"
It is this theme that I am now developing in Roadside Apocalypse, the American urban landscape overlaid with the threat of the Cold War which somehow seems to have returned with the reemergence of Russia as a Superpower now vying again for power on the global stage.
When I was a kid in the 50s and early 60s in the UK I have memory of my parents going out one night leaving me alone in the house. I heard a lone jet aircraft passing over high in the sky and wondered could that be a Soviet bomber on it's way to drop the H Bomb. It must have affected me because I still remember it frightening me. This was the height of the Cold War period and that threat was always there in the background even for a twelve year old kid. The world of Dr Strangelove was real, 24 hours a day.
Many American TV shows were shown in the UK back then and the American urban landscape became very familiar to us. When I finally got to the USA in 1979 it was at the tail end of the big gas-guzzling cars era and many older buildings were being knocked down and replaced by more modern architecture. In more recent years as the world becomes more homogenised (Americanised?) a lot of the USA looks like anywhere else and the older America of my childhood TV days is harder to find... but it's still out there, you just have to go and look for it.
All the locations I paint are in the present day American landscape. My subject matter is not Americana per se, I might well have a motel sign or diner in a picture but I'm much more interested in a relatively ordinary street scene in a small nondescript town with that older architecture of the earlier half of the last century preferably somewhat run down.
These paintings enable me to incorporate a subject that I am becoming increasingly interested in painting - clouds and skies. I have always felt that the sky can set the mood for a painting and with these pictures they not only do that but are also very much part of the underlying theme that I am interested in. I have finally also been able to include a penchant of mine for huge single storm clouds that previously didn't go with the subject matter of the painting as it always looked too apocalyptic - now it fits! The clouds will never be atomic explosions as such, they will always be storm clouds, it's just about suggestion. I like to keep the scenes empty and deserted which gives them a surreal and nightmarish quality although an abandoned car here and there adds to the possible narrative... what has happened? Somebody has suddenly stopped their car in the middle of the road and ran for it... what is that looming shadow in the foreground all about? Is it an invasion of alien machines like War Of The Worlds?
There is a feeling of nostalgia in these pictures which I have been amplifying by using colours that have a quality of those old colour photographs shot on Kodachrome that people of my generation still have from those days.
The cloud from a nuclear explosion like the cloud of ash from a volcano or an approaching storm have been described as having a terrible beauty and that is what I'm aiming for with these paintings - maybe beautiful in terms of colour etc but mixed in is the dread of Cold War extinction. That's the kind of picture that I like to paint. beauty tinged with darkness and mystery...

Whiteface

Ice

Adult Books

The Last Stop sold

An older small painting of mine has just sold through Artfinder to a buyer in the USA. I seem to remember that I was really into red when I painted this and was looking for any excuse to use it in a painting. I still am into red, it's quite a tricky colour to use because it's actually quite dark and if you want it to stand out you often have to darken the colours around it and/or use a complementary next to it like green.
Oil on board 12" x 12".

Whiteface

Another painting in my Roadside Apocalypse series this one is located in a small town called Whiteface in Texas near Route 66. I am close to finishing a write up on the underlying themes to this series which I will post separately. 
I wanted a more contrasty look to this one and decided to base it around a blue/green - red/orange complementary the only other colour used being a small amount of violet. 
These paintings are all about a number of visual clues that hopefully together add up to an implication of something apocalyptic has happened or about to. I am looking for a bittersweet kind of image that in one one way is a painting with beautiful colours and lighting yet is of something cataclysmic. The terrible beauty of a nuclear explosion. I have always liked paintings that are beautiful but within them is a darkness, kind of yin and yang, darkness and light.
Anyway I will explain all this better in a separate post.
On the surface this is just a deserted small town in America with a storm cloud in the distance...
30" x 20" oil on linen.
There is a step-by-step progress through this painting in previous posts on this blog.

Whiteface - stage 5

This will be the last post before the finished scan that I will post in a couple of days. I have worked over all of the painting now and hope to finish it tomorrow. I have kept the colours within the blue/green - red/orange complementary apart from some yellows and a tiny bit of violet. Also trying to make this one have more contrast than usual. Really need to finish off writing the background to all these paintings in the Roadside Apocalypse series and post, hopefully at the weekend.