Fionn Wilson

This is where my painting really began, in 2011-12, with Southgate tube platform. It’s the first painting I sold and the first painting which I felt was a successful, complete piece of work. It was sold to the general secretary of the Friends of the London Transport Museum, who wrote a small piece about it for their magazine. He was very supportive and encouraging of my painting and I haven’t forgotten that. He also suggested that I paint more tube stations.

Again, the influence of Munch is obvious to me here, with themes of existential alienation, loneliness and despair, but within the context of an urban landscape.

I painted a similar work, or at least along similar themes, seven years later in Southgate bus station (2019). Again, there is only one desolate figure, this time standing. The work was completed a year before the Covid pandemic and lockdown and, in hindsight, seems strangely prescient. The painting is now part of the collection of the Museum of Enfield. I’ll soon be starting a series of paintings of tube stations in the area, all modernist masterpieces by architect Charles Holden, which will also become part of the public collection of the Museum of Enfield.

T.S. Eliot (extracts from Four Quartets):

‘Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Dessication of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.’

‘O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant […]’

#painting #tube #underground #london #figurativeart #figurativepainting #munch #art #urbanlandscape #alienation #southgate #enfield