crushd tin box

“It’s late summer, and I’m in the American city of Los Angeles, getting around in other people’s cars, taxis and buses. It’s not really a city that encourages walking. The cliché is that walking can get you arrested, but in my limited experience walking is more likely to get you hot, bored and tired. So most of the time I’m in other people’s cars, looking out of the window at a city scaled for private motor vehicles. I’ve got a bit of a problem with private motor vehicles, but in a place like this it’s probably a good idea to keep my mouth shut.

Part of the massive scale of this particular version of hell on Earth involves the many advertising materials employed along the multilane highways that dissect this place. Designed and constructed with the assumption that they will be viewed from fast-moving vehicles by people who are assailed from all sides by a visual cacophony of conflicting messages, these advertising materials are big. Very big, and very brash. I quite like advertising when it’s brash, which seems a more honest variety of the business. I realise that using the words ‘honest’ and ‘advertising’ in the same sentence is oxymoronic.

One of the many advantages of being unable to operate a car is that I am able to pay more attention to my surroundings than a driver, who has to concentrate on, well, not crashing. So I’m in the car with my notebook, and for something to do I’m writing down what all these signs and advertisements have to say. I’m filling pages and pages. And then I realise something else. They’re only using a very few colours, and the colours are bold, brash, and used in very visually compelling combinations. About ninety per cent of the messages that flick past my retinas are using seven colours. I start noting these down, and it’s astonishing. Red, green, blue, yellow, orange, black and white. All made of plastic, all made from pigments derived from the petrochemical industry, the same hydrocarbon trade that has made the city of Los Angeles possible, at least in the short term…
So I’m on Melrose Avenue in the Art Store, looking for acrylic (ie., plastic) polymer paint in red, green, blue, yellow, orange, black and white. I’m going to paint using these colours, straight from the tub. Okay. Red; cadmium red medium hue. Green; light green permanent. Blue; cerulean blue chromium. Yellow; cadmium yellow medium. Orange; cadmium orange. Any old black and white will do, as long as they’re opaque.

I start painting in Los Angeles, and continue when I get back to England. It’s autumn now, and I’m working in a barn in the Oxfordshire countryside. I end up spending my entire autumn and most of the winter in this barn, painting with these seven colours, painting words onto canvases that are a metre and a half square.

Part of what I’m trying to do is treat the canvas as ‘real estate’; I map out a district of a city and then infill with coloured blocks and words. I start with the Pacific coast, and then map the inland areas of Los Angeles. Back in the Oxfordshire countryside L.A. seems rather distant, and in a sort of homage to The War Against Terror I start finding maps of other cities on the internet; Grozny, Kabul, London, Baghdad…

I’m finding it all quite intense. I have to force myself to remember to breathe, and the repetive aspect of using only seven colours is affecting everything I see. Tree=green. House=red. Sky=blue. Or black. Or green. Christmas is fast approaching, and it’s getting very cold in the barn, which makes holding the brush increasingly difficult, especially for painting in the words. Heroically I abandon the barn and travel to a debauched party in London. When I return the next afternoon, clutching my head, I look around at the paintings and realise that I’d finished anyway.”

- Stanley Donwood

D E A D C H I L D R E N P L A Y I N G