TIM BAKER

As I’ve spent a lot more time away from the river I’ve noticed more of the architecture in this part of London that edges onto Surrey. There’s a type of architecture I call sarcastically ‘Surrey Gothic’, it’s a McMansion hodge-podge of neo-classical/Roman Villa. bits of ersatz Surrey Vernacular (orange terracotta or slate lapped tile cladding, usually half-way down the wall or on low porches and dormers) mixed with modern brickwork and lots of tiny tiny windows and never used balconies. Rabbit Hutches!

Endless repeating bland decorative motifs that say ‘Keeping Up With The Joneses’ and ‘I have money’ but have as much culture as a garden gnome and about as much originality and unique identity.

The actual 30’s-50’s buildings are usually quite restrained and in keeping in The Good Life commuterland, even the modernist ones. It’s the recent buildings that are gauche and brash and can’t really decide whether they are in Claygate or California.

Even worse are the gated estates which provoked this series, there’s a large estate built on the old Water Works which has a private garden with fountain, sculptures but it’s soulless – identikit buildings surround in this Guildford Wives sequel. And anything different is eyed with suspicion. Expensive housing for those without imagination…apart from fear of the outside, hence the gates and security systems.

I realised they looked like hamster cages or rabbit hutches, rabbit hutches for the rich – hence the name – and immediately started taking mental notes of all the repeating elements – the copy and paste motifs of architecture. Faux classical columns? Check! Small round windows that let in hardly any light and probably don’t even open? Check! Balconies without any access to them or too small and purely decorative? Check!

I stated this series a few days later, as I wanted to explore using Inktense blocks as watercolour/inks with a brush, combined with inks with large brushes. It’s definitely an extension of the Towers series, a reaction to the psychogeography of where I live, a strange mixture of urban and suburban, cultured and ignorant, working class and middle class.

I think #3 is the best, but I like all of them but again I struggled with the ‘kid’s drawing’ thing with Inktense, and the fact they dry very matte and flat if you use them too thickly, a bit like oil pastels. This is very evident in the first one, so I used more water in the late ones. Inktense blocks work better in washes, I think, some colours better than others. Also I had trouble photographing some of these cos of the shine of the Jackson’s ink vs the matte Inktense.

P.S. Do you like the slight revamp? Also we have more galleries and a new look of the galleries- see ‘Work Series’ in the menu above – which means I don’t have to use Jetpack’s buggy tiled galleries and linked Photon/image CDN which kept causing issues and breaking randomly. (Don’t worry if you don’t know what that particularly geeky sentence means…it should mean my images being served from my server quickly and reliably. Fingers crossed!)