Introduction to 'Not West Bridgford'

Like jokes, paintings are probably best left unexplained. And like many other creative endeavours, it’s often the case with paintings – at least in my experience – that the ones destined to succeed are completed relatively swiftly and painlessly. The troublesome ones requiring endless alteration and fiddling around with are usually, though by no means invariably, those that are never going to be any good.

One of my favourite recent paintings, currently on show at Bingham library, Notts., that (a) needs little explanation, (b) proceeded easily to completion, and (c) appears to have succeeded, is “Road near the park”.

 

“Road near the park” (greyscale version), © R. Abbott  2015

 

The road in question is Edward Road, near its junction with Crosby Road, and the park is Bridgford Park, in West Bridgford, Nottingham. Visiting the location last autumn I was immediately entranced by the scene, by the angles of the roads, the sunlight on the brickwork, and the tall telegraph pole with its characteristic little curly spike on the top, one of my earliest fetishes of street furniture. Instantly I knew that I had walked into a successful picture, so I took a photograph for reference, and the painting followed speedily and with little effort.

The location is within half a mile of my childhood stamping ground. The road in which I grew up was once described by the local evening paper as being typically suburban, though now I cannot recall whether this judgement was deemed favourable or not. From my perspective I am happy to be associated with such a background, and while aware of the popular sneers against suburbia, I see little that is fundamentally wrong with this component of the urban environment; after all, statistically, suburbs are where most of us live.

Many years of travelling around, in the UK and elsewhere, have widened my knowledge of suburbs, of how and why they came to be, what they look like, how they feel. More than a few, I’ve discovered, remind me of West Bridgford. Several  years ago I had the whimsical idea that it would be fun to put together a small exhibition of images that would be called ‘Not West Bridgford’, photographs of places that looked like West Bridgford, but weren’t. Ideally, I imagined that the exhibition would be a physical collection of photographs and explicatory text, perhaps held in the local public library. Perhaps one day it will be, but for the time being I am proposing something more modest.

 
Instead, therefore, I am planning to post images from this ‘Not West Bridgford’ collection online, at intervals over the next few months. The intention, apart from some mild amusement to those who recognise what the images are not, is to explore some themes of suburban life in this delightful Nottingham district and to consider how they relate to other specimens of suburbia.