Description
About the Artwork
Rainbow Road is part of the Rain and Shine series, a collection of urban paintings where the weather is playing a strong part in setting the scene and pulling the picture together.
The sun and the rain are forces of nature we cannot escape no matter how deep in the city we go. When the sun shines we stroll around, sharing our stories and ideas, taking time on choices, we see each other clearly and we’re relaxed about it. When the storm hits and the weather is bad it’s quite different, we don jackets with hoods, hats and umbrellas, creating barriers everywhere.
We hurry along without even talking to the people we set out with, things get blurry. There’s less glare in the rain, we see the reflections more clearly and the shadows less and if we actually want to we can interpret what most people are feeling.
About the Artist
When I was little we lived in a very rural part of Wales, there weren’t so many local shops so my parents had the Littlewoods catalogue, this is before the internet. At Christmas my brother would go through it choosing all the biggest, brightest, noisiest toys to put on his Santa list. My list was always the same, felt pens, colouring patterns, paper, pencils but I spent hours and hours with the catalogue each year, endlessly drawing all the models.
There weren’t many real people to practice on out there so my Nan and the Dog were required to sit for pretty much endless portraits too. Occasionally I painted the mountains but generally I preferred walking the hills to painting them. These things haven’t changed much, people are still what I’m most interested in painting (when I’m not making colourful patterns) and when I go to the hills I mostly just want to be.
