Train to London Bridge

• Dimensions: 61cmx61cm
• Media: Acrylic paint on canvas
• Year: 1999
• Sold: Yes

Train to London Bridge was an early painting from around the year 2000 made in a small shared flat on Brixton Hill while I was a school teacher, teaching art in a Peckham secondary school.

I’m not sure where I was going on this journey, and the view outside the window is a construct of a memory of the city. I’ve always liked the way proximity exaggerates perspectives in train carriages, making limbs, heads and hands seem suddenly massive, like sometimes when you wake up from a dream and you don’t quite know where you are because the scale of everything closest to your eyeline becomes unreal and disorientating.

I’ve since painted quite a few train carriages scenes on the London Underground, the New York Subway and the Tokyo Metro. Train stations have also become a great theme for me. Writing in 1948 in a short story called ‘The Summer Farmer’, the great American writer John Cheever sums up the attraction of the railway carriage for the flaneur here….

‘It is true of even the best of us that if an observer can catch us boarding a train at a way station; if he will mark our faces, stripped by anxiety of their self-possession; if he will appraise our luggage, our clothing… if he will listen to the harsh or tender things we say if we are with our families, if he can judge sensibly the self-importance, diffidence, or sadness with which we settle ourselves, he will be given a broader view of our lives than most of us would intend’ John Cheever, The Summer Farmer, 1948

Train To London Bridge belongs to an old and very dear friend, a teacher that I was fortunate to work with and learn a great deal from. Ted was an early collector of my work. He’s still teaching in the same school, as a volunteer now, which is not so remarkable, except that now he’s over nintey years old.