A painting made from sketches drawn on Primrose Hill of a snowy afternoon with people sledging and playing in the snow with views of the City of London and Regent’s Park Zoo in the background.
- Dimensions: 155x110cm
- Media: Acrylic paint, chalk, charcoal on canvas
- Year: 2010
- Sold: Yes
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Read the story behind ‘Sledgers in the Snow’
“Sledgers’ Primrose Hill (2010)
Acrylic, chalk and charcoal and glitter on canvas 155cmx110cm
Private collection
In 2010 I found one of the highest points in the city to take stock of all that happened to me after I’d moved away to live in Mexico in 2008, and travelled on to make work in America, Bangkok, Japan and Cape Town in 2009.
I needed to reflect upon the new London that I wanted to paint.
I’d wanted to paint the view from Primose Hill, with its connections to William Blake, for a long time. The inspiration for this painting was Brueghel’s “Hunters in the Snow (1565). I love the tender way he paints the vulnerability of ordinary people enjoying the ice in the background of the painting, beneath the large ominous crows in the foreground. He manages so beautifully to suggest the way we’re all at the mercy of forces much bigger than ourselves.
A lot happens to a city when you move away. In 2008 the financial systems had spiralled out of control, and uncertainty hung heavy over the city. Looking back, not much has changed for most of us since that time. In my painting, a black crow drifts over the City of London.
I guess we’d all been skating on thin ice for a long time, most of us unaware of the dangers back then, and now the cracks were showing. Colder and harder times lay ahead, and still do, but this painting is filled with ny relief to see the timeless joy and innocence of the sledgers, united in their playful purpose to make the most ot a brief blanket of London snow.
Back in the studio in 2010 I studied the sketches I’d made on that cold day. I began by drawing a spiral in charcoal on the canvas. ‘Sledgers’ was underway, and it was all downhill from there. My last touch was to add glitter to the frosty trees and the footprints and tracks in the compacted snow.
This painting now resides at a collectors’ home at the bottom of Parliament Hill, within site of the place where it was first conceived.