Industrial Disuse. 1972.

My painting was for a question in the CSE Art Exam, the pictorial composition part, at Hoole Secondary Modern School in 1972. I think that we had two weeks to complete the composition. The question that I chose to illustrate was I think just called, ‘Industrial Disuse’. Just a few years before, for my birthdays, my parents gave me some money for each birthday, so for each birthday and as I like railways, I bought a railway book, ‘Wales and the Welsh Border Counties’ by H. C. Casserley and ‘Great Western Branch Line Album’ by Ian Krause. The books were illustrated with black and white photographs of railway scenes and I was particularly taken by the pictures of industrial South Wales. As my brother and I were growing up our parents took us to visit various places in North Wales and I was always struck by abandoned industrial buildings that I saw in passing various places including Maeshafn, Rhydymwyn, Southsea, Coed-Talon. Those pictures and places just fired my imagination to be able to compose ‘Industrial Disuse’. I found a rectangular wooden board and white primed it. I did a couple of sketches from my imagination for the composition, squared one up and transferred that to the wooden board. For my picture I used black, white and grey water based poster colour, inspired by the black and white photographs in the railway books. At that time there was a scare in the country regarding dumped drums containing cyanide, so I painted some dumped drums into my scene and labelled them ‘CYANIDE’. Several years later I did some tidying up of the picture.