The Waste Land

The Waste Land was inspired by sketches I made in the Business Lounge at Hong Kong International Airport during the height of the COVID lockdown. I was travelling back to Australia on one of the very few international flights operating at the time, and the normally crowded airport was almost completely deserted. An environment designed for movement, connection and constant human activity had become strangely silent and unsettling.

Rather than recording the airport literally, I became interested in what remained in memory: the enormous areas of darkness, the geometric architecture, the cold light from outside and, above all, the intense shaft of artificial light breaking through the gloom. A solitary figure provides the only real sense of human presence.

The title is a quiet nod to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, whose themes of isolation, fragmentation and a world temporarily stripped of meaning seemed appropriate to that extraordinary moment.

The painting also reflects something I have increasingly come to understand about my work: light defines a place; memory shapes the way we depict it. What remains in memory is rarely the complete scene. It is usually a few fragments of light, colour, form and atmosphere. Sometimes those fragments carry more meaning than all the information that surrounded them.

At 12 × 12 inches, The Wasteland is a small painting, but I think its subject is larger than its physical scale. The emptiness is not simply an absence of people. It becomes the subject itself.

Follow

I loved to draw and paint from a very early age. I was fascinated by the capability of artists to bring to life the world around them; to represent form, light and shade; to create three dimensions within two.

Simultaneously I was drawn to photography. From my earliest self-processed black and white prints to the sophistication of modern digital manipulation, I have always taken pictures.

In my professional life I established and ran successful creative businesses in London, Luxembourg, Malaga, Berlin and Sydney. I held senior roles in prominent design practices and advertising agencies, including the creative directorship of Europe's first online service.

More recently I taught design at universities and design schools in Sydney, Australia and Southern Spain with particular focus upon sustainable design thinking, human-centred design and developing successful design practice.

I began my career as a junior illustrator in London. It's therefore appropriate that with more time on my hands these days I should return to my first love.