Thomas Dowsdeswell

The Battle With The Boys in Blue

by Thomas Dowdeswell

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The Battle With The Boys In Blue

by Thomas Dowdeswell

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The Battle With The Boys In Blue The Battle With The Boys In Blue was construed in the aftermath of the 2011 Stokes Croft riot as a direct response to the artist’s view of heavy-handed police tactics employed against what was in its inception a peaceful community-led protest.

It aims to bring into question the rights and responsibilities of the police, figures of authority and those who proclaim to uphold the law but who are too often reactionary and oppressive in their responses. By addressing these issues ‘The Battle’ also demands that we consider our own rights and responsibilities as individuals and communities in order to respect our channels of expression and demonstration and not let them be devalued by the needless violence of the few.

In broader terms The Battle is also a vehicle for discussing the erosion of civil liberties and the marauding iron heel of governments which seem intent on stamping the life out of the country and its people through misguided, short term political scaremongering.

The image itself is a fluid, frenetic maelstrom of activity with bodies falling from the sky, innocent captives being pummelled to the ground, policemen wielding batons and fists and limbs flying indiscriminately about the canvas. The abstract juxtaposition of shapes and colours are employed to capture the frantic confusion of the riot whilst also inviting the audience to inspect the painting in closer detail in order to uncover the smaller stories unfolding with the context of the battle as a whole.

Thomas Dowdeswell “Three years ago in Paris I got out of a ‘metro’ train at La Concorde, and suddenly saw a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find the words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion...but there came an equation...not in speech but in splotches of colour...a ‘pattern’...It was a word, the beginning for me, of a language of colour”. Ezra Pound.

My work draws its core inspiration from the early Twentieth Century British art movement known as Vorticism. Within this movement I found a classification of art and everyday life which made sense to me; all creative form being a vivid exploration into the most primary projection of what is possible or as Pound suggests, “to convey an emotion by means of an arrangement of shapes, or planes, or colours”.

It is my goal to deconstruct common everyday interactions between groups of individuals until the emotions and conversations pouring forth are represented by striking, definite lines made even bolder by the implementation of the most vivid colours and the purest pigments. These are pictures of humans, animals and ideas which I have broken down to their most primal form so they are most accessible without the corruption of over-thought or overindulgence.

Thomas Dowdeswell

The Battle With The Boys In Blue

by Thomas Dowsdeswell oil on canvases 1.5 x 4.9 metres (total dimension of 12 canvases) ÂŁ18,000

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