The Two Sided City

Anyone will tell you that Bristol has two sides. It is a city of contrasts, every rich area has a poorer area sitting right next to it, the postcode lottery to get into what are perceived as good school versus those always on the brink of special measures, the race issue, the conservative, conformist side versus the artistic, indie side. Nowhere is it more prevalent than in the difference between the green spaces (I don’t mean the city parks) which predominantly sit in the North of the city and the ever-growing built up areas. There are many boundaries between these areas but the most obvious is the Clifton Suspension Bridge, not least because it bridges the divide rather than separating it.

I agonised long and hard about whether to paint this picture. Was I painting an icon or a cliché? Could I do it justice? Could I do anything new? I looked at what other artists did. Debbie Bird has painted it on silk and then embroidered over the top which gave it a whole new look. I studied photos taken from the air, from afar, from underneath but still I agonised.

In the end I decided it is a rite of passage of living in Bristol. If I didn’t do it I would always be asked whether I had so better to get it out of the way and free myself from the worry. I started the painting 9 months ago, although not in its current form and it was soon abandoned as being “not up to scratch”. Then two weeks ago I went to Bristol Fine Art where they had lots of canvases on sale. I bought the canvas, returned home and just started painting. Easy really and painless.

Or not. After painting the sky I started at the back and worked my way forward on the left. Loved it. It was great, everything was going so well. Then I started painting the water. Again, it went well. Then I started the right and everything came apart quickly. I had forgotten to paint the bridge and all of a sudden my point of reference for scale was all over the place.

It taught me one thing (apart from not painting cityscapes again!) – You can always fix it. You can paint over it, sand it down or just alter it in some way, and no-one notices it. The only person to ever sit there with the original photo doing a pixel by paint drop comparison is you and you aren’t painting a photo. You are painting what the photo wishes it could be if it didn’t capture every blemish, every speck of dirt and every flaw in an otherwise impeccable scene.

So that is what I and other artists do. We paint perfection.