Coast with Tank Traps. Courtesy of Sam Huby
Coast. After Desiderio. Courtesy of Clare Cook.
I was born in the city of Hull in 1946, a year after the ending of the Second World War. The city had been heavily bombed and as small children we played on bomb sites. Sometime in my twenties I began to make images of buildings, often damaged or partly destroyed: etchings, drawings, paintings. I did a longish series of paintings of the Reichtag building in Berlin as it was in 1945, and another set of images based on old news photographs of Luftwaffe night raids on the city of Sheffield.
Coast. After Desiderio
Reichtag 1945. Courtesy of Sam Huby
Fortress. Courtesy of Sam Huby
Blitz
There is a small picture in the National Gallery in London entitled the Legend of Saint Augustine: a haunted shoreline with classical ruins. This picture affected a number of my own paintings.
At one point I made a biggish model from cardboard of ruined tenements by the sea which I lit variously with an electric lamp and used as a reference for other, increasingly large, paintings.
For twenty years I continued to make images of this wasteland and then I stopped.
Exploding Car. Courtesy of Meg Huby