November 2015

"It's a Braw Bricht Moonlicht Nicht The Nicht"

Our next brief was "The Stranger". I looked for inspiration in my past, when I might have felt like a stranger myself. This took me back to my family's move to Scotland in 1972. I arrived in Scotland at the age of 12 years old and felt very much like a stranger in a foreign land. I was already a shy kid and being plunged in to a small local community in the middle of Ayrshire was, to say the least, a shock to the system. My then Blackpool accent was something to be mimicked at school, and I became very concious that I was an outsider.  And then there was the issue of the dialect in this part of Scotland (Darvel / Newmilns), which was (and I guess still is) fairly broad even though the major towns of Kilmarnock and Ayr were not far away.

"It's a Braw Bricht Moonlicht Nicht The Nicht" was a phrase that the locals tried to get me to repeat. I was a shy 12 year old English kid, and it was obviously a bit of fun for them, and I don't think they meant any malice in the request. However the result was that it just made me feel even more alienated, self-conscious, and that I didn't fit in.

Anyway, to cut a long story short my artwork for this brief emerged as a protest poster in a Russian Constructivist style.

Detail from the artwork.

The work is constructed from 3 colours of card, which is layered to achieve an almost 3D look