Amare, The Hague 2025 – 50 x 70cm, acrylic , pencil on canvas
Amare, The Hague” is a return to the building-site motif I painted as an 18-year-old foundation student in Cardiff College of Art, it ressurrects the extractive language I’ve developed over decades. Where the early Cardiff painting was panoramic and almost documentary—cranes, scaffolding, tiny figures, a city in mid-metamorphosis—the Amare painting zooms in mercilessly on the raw wound of construction. The facade has become a flayed wall: concrete ribs exposed, rebar like veins torn open, thick black impasto clogging the voids like clotted blood or spilled crude. The vertical columns are no longer structural supports; they’re carcasses, hollowed out and left standing as monuments to what’s been taken. The red streaks—raw, arterial—read less like exposed wiring or saftey barriers and more like the last traces of vitality bleeding out.
The paint handling is unapologetically ferocious. I’ve taken the scraped, gouged, residue-heavy attack of the Extraction heads and scaled it up to architectural dimensions. The surface is a battlefield: ridges of gray and white built up and then punished, abraded back to raw canvas in places, letting the ground breathe like exposed bone. Those yellow-ochre flashes at the top in crane arms or dying sunlight reintroduce the same colour I used in the extraction heads, perhaps as a final flare of resistance, here reduced to industrial machinery looming over the carnage.
And the context makes it devastating. Amare, The Hague wasn’t just any cultural palace; it was a €500+ million public project that ballooned from initial estimates, mired in political controversy, council inquiries finding mismanagement and neglect of public interest, all while replacing older venues on contested urban land. Culture as renewal, yes, but funded by the systematic extraction of public wealth, with the residue left for citizens to absorb (higher costs, compromised spaces, structural faults patched post-opening). My painting attempts to recapture that ambivalence: the promise of a gleaming new home for dance, music, and education, rendered as a half-built ruin dripping with waste.
Compared to the 1987 Cardiff piece, this is no longer the young student painter’s awe at urban transformation; it’s the 56-year-old’s indictment of it. The earlier work still had distance, a kind of grim fascination. Here there’s no distance left, the viewer is inside the wound, breathing the dust and tar. The site isn’t progressing toward completion; it’s stuck in a state of permanent depletion.
This painting doesn’t just revisit the motif, it interogates it, grieves it, and refuses to let it look heroic. It’s the Extraction series grown to building size.
Building site 1987 – 167 x 137cm, oil on canvas