Bleak House

'Drive Thru', oil on canvas, 120 x 150cms, 2026

After the stresses of the ‘Autofictions’ exhibition it has been nice to step onto the other side of it, feeling a renewed sense of focus and purpose. The experience had been the cause of a lot of reflection, and with that I recently went on a night walk alongside a short stretch of road between West Bromwich and Oldbury  populated with various factories in old and new buildings, lorry and container parks and scattered in-between the imposing architecture of these places, ordinary residential houses that I find myself wondering about and thinking what it must be like to have some of these buildings literally in your back garden. I drive along it frequently and have meant to explore it with my camera for ages. 

At the small town of Oldbury itself there is a huge Sainsbury’s supermarket surrounded by the usual big name shopping outlets in these out of town non-descript and identical landscapes I refer to as the ‘geography of nowhere’, after the book of the same name by James Howard Kunstler. At the McDonald’s drive thru, from a distance, I took some photographs intrigued by the abstract compositional qualities of the grids, squares and numbers of the windows, as well as the details of screens and strange equipment. With the workers half-seen inside and the car gliding up to the window, with the equally half-seen driver distracted by his phone, these interactions and ingredients all added up to a compelling scene of contemporary life that I tried to later capture in this large painting, ‘Drive Thru’ at the top of this post. 

'House', oil on canvas, 100 x 120cms, 2026

I walked on from here to the road that I was seeking and found myself photographing a range of subjects that included huge lorries parked up behind broken wire fences, suspicious and bored night watchmen in sentry boxes, and empty, quiet streets that in the buildings I walked past carried signs of their industrial past and history juxtaposed with more contemporary details of dirty and changeable signage and billboards that hinted at their use now.  

At night it was difficult to capture that much on my phone camera, but my intention has been to come here on a sunny day with my DSLR when the light breaks up the architectural forms with dynamic, geometrical shadows that I hope will provide some good reference material for further paintings of this post-industrial landscape. 

At some point I found myself in front of a large house with two front doors and two bay windows that indicated that it was divided into two dwellings. It also looked like it had once been part of a larger run of terraced houses that had strangely disappeared, and it now stood isolated from its surroundings of flattened wasteland on both sides. Looking up at the lighted window on the first floor I could make out a man sitting in his room staring at his phone sitting on the edge of his bed. Other lights in the building indicated other people living here in this bleak, neglected place. Being someone who grew up in the Seventies and Eighties on a council estate not far from here, when council housing was plentiful, cheap and council estates were relatively safe and warm communities,  I am often reminded by sights like this house of the absolute desperate housing situation in the UK now, especially for those at the bottom, in the tawdry, insecure and extortionate world of private landlords and renters. This house stood as a powerful symbol of the abject poverty and alienation of so much of contemporary life for far too many. 

When I crossed to the other side of the street to take a photograph of it, the headlights from oncoming traffic illuminated and shattered its flat façade with an array of strange and exciting colours, making the building even more unreal. I tried to capture this in this other painting I have made from this night’s walkabout. It’s all out there to see if you just look, but most of us don’t. As David Hockney says, ‘looking is hard’. Looking can be hard, and that’s why so often turning away can be the easier option.