<                             >

L.A. FROM THE HILLS

L.A. FROM THE HILLS.
ACRYLIC ON BOARD 160CM X 107CM

I visited California just before the pandemic to hear my childhood friend David Lockington conduct the Pasadena Orchestra. We visited his sister in law, herself a successful film director who lives in the Hollywood hills. As the sun fell low in the sky over downtown L.A, I felt as if I had arrived in some fantastical modern day Roman Coliseum, an endless suburb of propagandist media dreams carved out of a desert by untold wealth. Looking towards the skyline one sensed the centre of Empire, a final (sunset) moment of pomp where on this plane, the temporal imagery of the moving picture conquered the written world and perhaps even flattened intellectual complexity. As in many of my works, the human scale and the city are juxtaposed. It felt as if the desert foreground was waiting quietly for the day when the sprinklers will stop and the tumbleweed returns. 50 years ago this would have seemed crazed speculation; now however, with changing global climates and political order, it is not so strange. There is then a beauty a magificent fin d'une époque feeling about the scene.