The Trading FloorThis is the most figurative of the series, reflecting organisation and order. The painting moves us quickly from the foreground to the 'busyness' about the room, contrasting the vertical standing urgency with the more horizontal rows of monitors which echo the variety of coloured figures and images moving across the screens. Stage three will be to develop the imagery to include deeper contrasts and accents of colour - and at the same time to include coloured numbers and letters which will give the effect of looking through one of the monitors at the activity of the room.

The City Wine BarThe last of the series, at the end of the day (hopefully), the legendary 'City Wine Bar'. Using mainly sweeps with a rag, blobs of paint here and there, a suggestion of a bar stool, head and shoulders or a passing waitress, this is a vague impression of figures and noise and light through smoky windows - an image where the viewer makes out certain things in the painting but very little is really 'painted'.

Probably the last stop in an artist's career before going 'abstract', it perhaps reflects the moment in City life as the drinks and images may merge into a blurred canvas. And as surely as I had said it before about 'bringing the roadside to the City', people were staggered, standing behind me, to see a blob of paint leave the palette as paint and arrive on the canvas as a nose. Once seen, never forgotten.

By mid-morning the first portrait sketch was complete and I was introduced to Trevor Salthouse, Head Butler, who very kindly had agreed to stand in for the next portrait.

I took some photographs at various key moments of both paintings and these help to capture the looseness and apparent chaos in the early stages (in case you were not there to see this) as I aim not for detail but the 'massing' of the lighter and darker areas - the detail coming much later, dropping into the now established structure of the head.

There was a great deal of discussion about the large paintings, how they are progressing, what will be developed, many ideas flowing from all parties and what needs to be embodied into them to give the feel that I was looking for and which the people present there identify with.

It all seems to be a long way from my first introduction to the dealing rooms in August, what I have tried to interpret and what I can add to their way of seeing their working environment."

 

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