Assignment Four – Landscape “Urban Regeneration?”

For this exercise, I painted my local shopping centre.  Someone in their wisdom in the 60s decided it would be a good idea to pull down a well-established row of shops and replace it with a pedestrianesed concrete shopping centre.  The centre really is a concrete monstrosity with raised walkways, metal railings and drab paving, built over the service area, from which large ventilation ducts rise like funnels on a steamship.  This link does not appear to have been lost on the authorities, who have decided that painting all the concrete bright blue will make it appear more jaunty and cheerful.  The centre has been very run down now for over 20 years and successive councils/companies have promised regeneration work which has never happened. Consequently, many of the shops are boarded up or have metal shutters down, and those that remain are charity shops, “bargain” shops, etc.  To try to cheer up the centre, local church and youth groups have begun painting traditional shop fronts over the hoardings in at attempt to instil local pride and stop some of the graffiti.

As I know the site very well, I only did two sketches (really didn’t feel comfortable doing so here) as well as reference photos, especially of the graffiti and paint colour.  The first sketch was of two of the painted “shops” in fineliner pen and coloured pencil. 

My second sketch was a portrait orientation looking diagonally down the centre.  It had been raining the day before and so, as per usual, there were very large puddles between the funnels as the water doesn’t drain away.  I quickly sketched in the few figures that were there and coloured in with marker pen at home.  

I felt this sketch included too much bare concrete foreground so decided to widen out the sketch to include the shops further to the left (which are all empty with metal shutters covering the fronts).  While considering the placement of the scene on the paper, I realised that the figures in my sketch (made landscape) would be approximately at the end of the spiral of the golden section (had recently researched this) and so decided to try the proportions of the golden section and drew this first on a sheet of A4.  This really helped concentrate my focus in the initial drawing – I set the figures at the point where the spiral ends and then worked back from there.  I was conscious of the “funnels” dominating the painting, both in terms of scale and colour and so was concerned not to have the larger funnel dead central in the painting. 

As I was happy with this basic layout, I then completed five further studies – testing different colours, figure placement and graffiti markings (notes on each sheet), as well as a tonal study based on the final drawing.

As all these drawings were all small (less than A4), I decided to create a life-size study by gridding up the original (sticking together five sheets of A3!), again using marker pens for speed, so I could make sure the composition still worked on a larger scale, and also to give me a size reference for any studies.  

I created a range of blues in oil for the pillars which, although colour matched to be photos, appeared too bright against a white ground so applied over black acrylic which dulled the colour sufficiently. I also tested areas of texture – the dark boards are peeling and flaking which, again, adds to the feeling of neglect – using masking tape and dragging a paint handle through the wet paint.  For the boards, the masking tape option worked better but will have to be sufficiently thin to achieve the desired effect.

In terms of a support, I decided to use the back of a large mountboard.  Because of the size of this painting, paper would have been too thin and canvas would have given too rough a surface for the effects I wanted to achieve.   To test this surface, I applied gesso roughly using a large brush to add a basic, linear texture to the board and then applied test patches over this (impasto paint, impasto medium, collage (ripped newspaper overpainted) and sanding back paint to give a weathered look.

To begin the finished piece, I applied gesso to the board, followed by a very dilute ground of raw umber to kill the white.  After transferring the image, I blocked in the darkest areas with a “black” created from red/blue/payne’s grey. 

Once dry, very thin strips of masking tape were cut with a knife and carefully applied to the ceiling area to achieve the perspective lines, followed by a layer of impasto medium, textured with the back of a palette knife.  Once dry, a thicker layer of the dark tone was applied, along with the blue reflections from the pillars to blend the edges while still wet.  Once semi-dry, the masking tape was removed which had the benefit of also removing some further areas of paint, adding to the peeling texture.

Progress of the piece below (completed in six sessions)

Assessment of finished painting

I wanted to paint this scene for two reasons; (1) reflecting the contemporary reality of our urban areas and (2) to recognise the efforts of local communities to help themselves.  Local shopping centres are supposed to bring the community together to work, shop and socialise but many are so run down that all they attract are people who want to damage the area.  While there is very little that individuals can do to improve areas such as this (which is very much in the hands of local authorities and developers) at least some people are trying to make a difference, even if only in a small way.

From an artistic perspective, many landscapes still focus on the beautiful (whether rural landscapes or townscapes comprising attractive architecture) while many communities’ reality of their surroundings is very different.  I found this, even now, to be the case while researching this painting; very few contemporary artists actually paint run-down areas.  This is quite surprising when you consider the wealth of artistic possibilities to be found in subjects such as peeling paint, broken architecture and graffiti.

In terms of my ideas of how to express my feelings about this location, I wanted to show the hard, angular “concreteness” of the centre which I felt could be achieved using the linear qualities of all the straight lines and hard angles.  By only including a few people in the painting (which is actually not unusual for the centre – no-one goes there unless they have to) I think I have achieved a sense of alienation that people often feel when surrounded by a concrete jungle.

The colour, although fairly realistic, works to contrast areas of the painting.  Most of the background areas are painted in monotone greys, black and white to convey the dullness of the scene, contrasted with the “fake” bright blue paint on the columns and the very bright, crisp red of the bakery.  I am not sure whether a viewer would immediately recognise that the bakery is actually a mural, but I think the ambiguity would make then think twice about this.  Also, the scale of the bakery is very different to the surrounding shops/figures, and much more crisply painted.

I think the composition works to lead the eye around the painting – the bright red of the bakery draws your gaze first, then stark, dark diagonals of the roof area, followed by the figures, reflected figures and the graffiti.

The techniques I planned to use worked well – the impasto medium for the underside of the roof, the slight texture caused by the thick application of gesso and sanding back (door of the bakery).  Originally, I planned to apply more layers of blue paint to the columns, but after the first application over the original dark tone, decided that the roughness and streaky nature of this first layer worked well in itself to show the layered, rough surface of the painted concrete.

The only think I was (and still am) unsure about was including the lettering in the painting.  Writing always draws your eye immediately, but I felt the use of the words “save” (which actually was a shop called Mega-Save) and “open” would give an express feeling about the painting.