110121 is an urban landscape of a small cut-through street I see every day, near my home and studio in Loughborough Junction, South London. On this day in January, I was standing outside the cafe where I was picking up my lunch. The light was strong. It suddenly transformed colours and shapes after a morning of downpours. The overbearing railway bridge, normally weighing over the brick walls and workshops seemed to float, carried by the shadow it projected over the neighbouring houses.



110121 was painted during lockdown in January 2021. This painting belongs to a stream of work I have been developing since 2018, where urban landscapes show the interplay between the hard lines of architecture and the momentary light, shades and colours happening in a given moment. A collector once remarked about my series of urban landscapes that "the absence of figures evokes complex feelings - as if we are aware of something that has just happened, or is just about to happen". This comment was made in 2019, before any of us could imagine the world would change so dramatically due to Covid 19. This painting, which concentrates on the permanence of the built environment as opposed to the people and cars that interact with it on a daily basis, obviously takes on a different meaning today. We have now all experienced these empty streetscapes, their eery quality, their silent beauty, their stillness of being. However, this painting is not a reflection of the isolation caused by the lockdown. It merely celebrates what is there, at all times, and which we do not always see in our daily activities: the interplay of light and shadows with the architecture, the perspectives of roads, the promise of what is coming next.