Description

Description of Bristol Street Underpass:

Bristol Street Underpass is a dramatic Birmingham cityscape. It’s a painting that captures the intensity of traffic streaming through one of the city’s busiest roads. Painted in oil on textured oil paper. The work depicts the glowing orange underpass in striking contrast to the cool blue tones of cars, buildings, and the night sky.

Cars hurtle towards you on this busy arterial road, taking the occupants away from the city centre to the suburbs. The underpass glows orange, contrasting with the blue vapours of the cars and the surrounding buildings. The car’s headlights cast dancing reflections on the sleek, vertical metal barrier which edges the road. There is a slice of the Radisson Blu hotel on the right, where a whole floor is glowing yellow from the lights within. Cars are racing right to left, above the underpass, at the Pagoda roundabout. The city is alive.

Inspiration:

My happy place seems to be getting myself into a rather precarious position. Positioned relatively near the raging traffic, and of course on a wet, slippery night with an expensive camera! It was the dynamism of this traffic, but also how one set of traffic is moving, on top of the underpass and towards a different direction, which appealed. The orange, red glow of the underpass was so enticing, drawing your eye in. The cars are changing scale very quickly as they whizz towards and past me.

Techniques and media used:

Keeping the camera steady and looking down onto the underpass to achieve a ‘frame within a frame’ composition was essential. Again, lots of sketching and drawing occur before I reach the best, dynamic layout.

Working on a slightly textured oil paper is also fun. It has less texture than canvas, which can make the image look pixelated if the painting is not too large. Oil paper allows the paint to flow more freely. Using thin glazes, in a way like a watercolour (but far more time consuming!), allowing the white of the paper to shine through in areas like the glowing underpass, but also adding more texture by layering up the foreground with titanium white oil, which does take a long time to dry! And then adding the subtlest yellow glaze at its edges to emphasise the light trails from the cars and the glowing road and side panels, giving the image vitality and momentum.