Archive / Repetitions

Fly-by-Nighters

Fly-by-Nighters continues my interest in looking towards the sky, but shifts away from astronomical events to those fleeting things that appear above us and are quickly gone. The title plays on the expression "fly-by-night": something transient, unreliable or passing. These paintings are about brief encounters with things glimpsed overhead before they disappear from view.

Before satellite constellations such as Starlink became familiar, I imagined the Mir space station repeated over and over, joined end to end until it formed a continuous ring orbiting the earth. The painting presents an imagined aerial viewpoint: an alien looking down on the patchwork geometry of fields below. Although the fields are ordered into neat rectangles, they are painted to suggest the subtle curvature of the earth, reminding us that even the most familiar landscape belongs to a much larger world.

Batty grew out of evenings spent sitting in my garden at dusk, watching bats circle above the house in pursuit of insects. Their flight appears chaotic, almost random, yet every sudden change of direction follows prey invisible to us. The title also plays on the word "batty", meaning slightly mad, reflecting the apparently irrational movement of the swarm. The freshly mown lawn forms a calm foreground while the distant darkness could be read equally as mountains or a row of garden hedges. Above them, the bats gather into a dense cloud, suspended in the evening sky.

Coppers' Choppers was inspired by time spent on the roof of my studio in Sheffield city centre, looking across towards the Norfolk Park estate and Sky Edge. Police helicopters seemed to appear with remarkable regularity. A plume of smoke would rise from the hillside—often from a stolen car set alight—and before long the helicopter would arrive, circling overhead. In the painting the helicopters function almost like the pieces of a children's mobile, endlessly revolving above the city while the landscape below remains still.

Although these paintings depict very different subjects, they all share an interest in fleeting encounters. Bats emerge only at dusk, helicopters arrive unexpectedly before disappearing again, and satellites silently pass overhead beyond everyday awareness. They are ordinary yet elusive moments that reward simply looking up.