An epic project conceived and curated by Jessica Tibbles of Electric Blue Gallery, sees the gallery space extended beyond its traditional white walls and out onto the blank canvas of eleven surrounding streets. Myself and artists Ben Eine, Zevs, D*Face and others to be confirmed, are painting the shop shutters of the East End so that when the shops shut for the day, the streets surrounding Petticoat Lane market are transformed into a free gallery of world-class contemporary art. Over a year in planning, by completion it will be one of the biggest permanent public installations in the world.
Painting New Goulston street's shutters with animals that could have lived in the area during the last ice age, is my contribution to this project and seeks to remind us that before there was a busy, grimy London there was a wild land of Wolves, Hyenas and Mammoths where Humankind was the minority, hiding from the cold in caves while huge beasts roamed the hills, plains and forests.
Best viewed after 7pm or on Saturdays (Sundays see a busy market where all the shutters are up and out of sight) New Goulston street E1 is just a short walk south of Spitalfields market.
Having put down the phone after being asked to paint a whole street of shutters, I then had the problem of working out what I was going to paint.
It had to be simple enough to be achievable and preferably have a running theme.
It was important to me that there would be a strong concept.
On a number of occasions I have visited cities in the new world, like Sydney and New York, and beacuse of their relative youth (as big cities go) I have felt much closer to their history, or rather, the history of what was there before any european settlers landed on their shores. And those histories tend to have gone on unchanged for many millennia almost since stone age times.
I wanted to take viewers back to ancient britain, before there was any London, before there was even a small village that would become London, when the first settlers arrived, migrating up from southern europe. So I decided to paint animals that would have been roaming the hills and forests of ancient Britain around the time of the last ice age.
I set about researching what animals may have been in living in ancient britain and having got a shortlist, started to plan it all out. I decided I would have to use a grid to scale up my designs to fit the shutters.
Each animal was sketched out then painted in good old fashioned gloss paint using brushes. I wanted to deliberatly steer clear of the ubiquitous spray can!
It seems there is often some conjecture as to what did actually live here during the ice age, sometimes it's easy - they find fossils, but sometimes it comes down to interpreting what little cave art we have here in the UK.
Saber Toothed cats could have been here, but more than likely there would have been a cave lions. So, I might have to go back and shorten this ones teeth and give him a bit of a mane!
Cave Hyenas
Woolly Rhinoceros and Mammoth
Irish Elk
Grey Wolves
Musk Oxen