ARTISTS
Michael Alford: The Life of the City
"When I travel around London sketching and planning paintings, I take pleasure in the elegance and visual richness of the city, its architecture, its grand monuments and public spaces. I also like the way historic London coexists with modern elements like traffic, street furniture, brightly coloured signage and digital advertising. I find the contrast exciting, but mainly I see London as a stage where human life unfolds.
So, my cityscapes are always really humanscapes, by which I mean, they are settings for figures. The buildings, squares and streets in my work provide a frame for the human element, a stage of sorts where the city鈥檚 inhabitants live out their everyday lives鈥攎eeting for drinks, waiting for buses, chatting with workmates, window shopping, hurrying home through in the rain.
No matter how magnificent or famous a city may be, it鈥檚 the inhabitants who give it life. My aim is to capture a sense of the vibrancy of London through paintings that place figures in the context of the city."
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"When I travel around London sketching and planning paintings, I take pleasure in the elegance and visual richness of the city, its architecture, its grand monuments and public spaces. I also like the way historic London coexists with modern elements like traffic, street furniture, brightly coloured signage and digital advertising. I find the contrast exciting, but mainly I see London as a stage where human life unfolds.
So, my cityscapes are always really humanscapes, by which I mean, they are settings for figures. The buildings, squares and streets in my work provide a frame for the human element, a stage of sorts where the city鈥檚 inhabitants live out their everyday lives鈥攎eeting for drinks, waiting for buses, chatting with workmates, window shopping, hurrying home through in the rain.
No matter how magnificent or famous a city may be, it鈥檚 the inhabitants who give it life. My aim is to capture a sense of the vibrancy of London through paintings that place figures in the context of the city."
Artists on show
