Ordinary Lives

Ordinary Lives – Tony Alcock

This exhibition at Woburn Mosaic is the fruit of work produced in the studio over the past 18 months.

The paintings are based on numerous individuals. People I see in the street, meet on buses, sit opposite on the Underground, of friends and family, of strangers and media images. They are not portraits and they develop as the work progresses. Some remain recognisable others do not.

These lives are observed not posed. Once a feeling or character begins to establish itself, I go with the flow and the images generally tend to find themselves. Forcing a character or an idea on the image doesn’t usually work for me. What interests me is who they become through the process of painting.

I work on several paintings at a time, so they feed off each other and grow. Some come to a conclusion quite quickly while others develop over weeks. Keeping them fresh and spontaneous means a painting can sometimes be repainted several times before it is finished.

“Lockdown Tower, 8:23pm” is the extension and culmination of an idea I have developed over 15 months. The original concept was the lives of people living in a tower block of an evening but the arrival of the Covid 19 pandemic has brought the idea up to date in a more relevant way.

The paintings are the windows of the building. The people depicted within carry on their lives despite or because of Covid 19. These “windows” are painted with a colour palette that evokes the electric light of an evening room. Some windows have specific images relating to coronavirus that are based on drawings on street houses in my own town. Some of these images are made by children.

I would particularly like to thank Johann Bester of Woburn Mosaic for making the installation of the Lockdown Tower in the gallery possible.

Looking now at the body of work, two words seem to come to mind; vulnerability and fragility. Perhaps ultimately these are what give us humans our strength.

October 2020

This exhibition has now finished.
The Ordinary Lives exhibition was on between 14th October - 1st November 2020.