“Interchange”

Yesterday afternoon I hung in our dining room the biggest painting I’ve ever done, 60 cm high by 80 cm across, oil on canvas. Not huge by conventional standards, but it’s taken me longer than anything I’ve done before. “Interchange” is its working title.

 

“Interchange”   © R. Abbott 2018

Mostly I avoid working too closely from photographs, as that can lead to pictorial sterility and other difficulties, although as in this case I sometimes have photos to hand for reference. For “Interchange” there was quite a lot of detail I needed to capture, and the perspective was a bit of a bugger – a technical expression used by artists. Briefly I contemplated a photorealist approach, but that’s not really me, and I couldn’t be doing with all the faff, and so the end product looks more impressionistic, but is consistent  with my other efforts. Yes, I think it looks like one of mine and, though paintings rarely turn out as well as one would hope, and the accompanying photograph does nothing to flatter it, I’m not too unhappy with the outcome.

The subject is a panorama of the District Line platforms at Earl’s Court station in West London, looking in the direction of Warwick Road. Earl’s Court is notoriously one of the densest, most opaque, and most unwelcoming parts of London, on the axis leading in from Heathrow. “Cosmopolitan” would be a naff descriptor that seems to have fallen out of fashion. It has for a long time been popular with ex-pats and transients of all sorts, agencies of many kinds, hotels large and small and occasionally dodgy, students and the reclusive elderly, enthusiasts for specialised forms of sexual fulfilment, television sitcom actors, and it presents an overall atmosphere supportive of the popular notions of loneliness, anonymity and alienation in the big city. An area characterised by single occupancy, it is one catering also for large exhibitions and mass entertainment. The station, though a frequent point of transit for inhabitants and visitors alike, is quite different. Sub-surface,  it is, as it were, atmospherically detached from and immune to its immediate surroundings; it could be somewhere else entirely.

A glance at the diagrammatic Underground map will show that, besides its connection with the Piccadilly Line which runs beneath, the District Line (the green one) has its off-centre focus here, its systemic nodal point. This greatly affects the nature of the station’s usage. Assuming one is not alighting here, but is merely passing through, typically one arrives here from suburbs like Wimbledon or Putney, Ealing or Richmond, comfortable, sporty places to the west and south-west of the city – indeed, green places. At Earl’s Court, depending on the origins of one’s journey,  one may need to change, probably crossing conveniently to the adjacent platform, or waiting on the one where one has just arrived, in order to continue onwards towards Kensington, Paddington and Edgware Road, occasionally to the exhibition spaces of Olympia, but most probably to head for the West End or the City, or even further on through East London to Upminster, half way to Southend-on-Sea. One will be aided by ancient and very unusual destination screens, blue, with electric white arrows. Interchange is a principal function of the station, hence the title of the painting.

 
Because of the proximity of several affluent retail areas – Kensington, Chelsea, and Knightsbridge – over the last century or so Earl’s Court station must have featured in the pleasant shopping trips of millions, especially in the season leading up to Christmas. I feel this place to be very English, rather feminine in its clientele, self-contained and psychologically safe, cosy, with happy associations and connotations, and a sense of historical continuity – indeed, it is somewhere that has often made me feel very good to be alive, and to be in the capital city. Slightly pretentiously I could call the painting something News of the Worldish like “All human life is there”, or “Life Itself”, but I won’t. It’s a valid implication, though. While not specifically representative of the pre-Christmas period, that was the time of year when I painted most of it, although it took me into the new year to finish. I hope and believe that I’ve caught some of the atmosphere I wanted. I hope you like it too.