Nothing beside remains

There are a couple of things that feed into this. The first is Tal R again. There’s a video of him talking about his series of Copenhagen paintings. In it he says in any city, any town, there are places that haven’t been tidied away by history. Places that no longer have any purpose, any meaning. They are the realm of the dead. They are the places where we feel the dead walk among us.

The second thing is Landscape. I’ve not really done any landscape. I’ve always felt I’d do landscapes when the Nazis take over. A bit like Otto Dix. Maybe they have taken over now. But I wanted to take landscape and put it in an extreme portrait format. Kind of Marine tipped on its end. And abstracted somewhat. So I’ve got room to get out if I want.

What we have here is the gable end of the Alex. The remains of the house next door left after it was demolished for redevelopment. The lamp that I think lit an advertising hoarding that was there for a while. The gated access to the dead space at the side of the car park next door. The world of dead people.

I wanted to call this, “Only dead people understand” but my wife didn’t like it. In the end I decided on the line from Shelley’s Ozymandias. Conveys some of the same things I think. I’ll put the poem here to save you having to look it up.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

PS Image is cropped somewhat top and especially bottom cuz I can't fit it in the scanner. I'll work on getting a better image anon,

PPS Here it is