Generations and Nations

As a first MA group show we were tasked at very short notice (less than a week) to create a show in the R03 Fine Art project space a group show using the title Generations and Nations.  The basic concept  was introduced on the theme that each student would find an object or image from Farnham town centre and create one piece of work from that, this would then be shown in two iterations on the same day, a basic install and then after a group crit a more measured and refined install.

The image I chose was from the October 2019 issue of the Surrey Life Magazine from an article about the Guildford Town Crier David Peters talking about the history and traditions of the town crier and how it started in England but spread around the world in centuries past. The image was a full body shot in colour of the crier standing at the top of Guildford High Street in full traditional costume holding his official bell of office. The image was a slight undershot giving the figure an autoreactive stance added to the linier perspective of the buildings and architecture combined with the cobbled road in the foreground.

Initially I painted a rough watery oil sketch to be used as an underpainting, this was then quickly abstracted out to create a block geometric design eliminating the physical appearance of a human figure but keeping it as the main central image. The back ground was blocked out in a variety of bold colours and shapes but keeping some of the original perspectives of the buildings. The foreground was shown with brush strokes.

The feeling behind the interpretation of the show title was that the tradition behind the office of town crier dating back some 500 years and the history of what the town crier did in the way of public service and announcements in an era before literacy was common place, the invention of newspapers or television and social media where all news was slow to spread and often misrepresented or biased, this of course has a familiar note today but on a global scale, news is often biased and misrepresented but due to its instantaneous availability, 24hr a day,  news feed coverage is now limitless. The modern day town crier is just a ceremonial figure announcing royal weddings or local public events, it is a tourist friendly photo opportunity which bizarrely will end up on personal social media pages before the speaker has actually finished talking. His loud colourful flamboyant presentation of local information to a handful of tourist standing a few metres away will be available to millions of people at the click of a button. The disconnect is not the news itself, whether it be political, social, local or indeed playful but in the way it was reported… OYES! OYEZ! OYES! has become beep beep on a mobile phone.