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Description
I've tried to capture a 1930s fair in my own town of Stoke (Stoke on Trent). The area is known as 'The Potteries', was a world producer of ceramics but is now, tragically an post industrial wasteland.
I have painted a monochrome city scape of home, church (St Peters, Stoke) and work, the distinctive bottle kilns that fired the clay. The drabness of the town betrays the fact that like Dorothy's Kanas in The Wizard of Oz, 'There's no place like home'.
The fair or 'Wakes' took place every summer on waste ground outside the town. I have painted traditional fairground attractions of the period and tried to represent the people not as stick like automatons but those that interact with their surroundings. The view is from a Ferris wheel.
The theme is the emasculation of the working class male, Strong Man, Shooting Gallery, Test Your Strength and the Ghost Train.
My influence for the painting was William Hogarth, Pieter Bruegel and Oliver Postgate

Description
I've tried to capture a 1930s fair in my own town of Stoke (Stoke on Trent). The area is known as 'The Potteries', was a world producer of ceramics but is now, tragically an post industrial wasteland.
I have painted a monochrome city scape of home, church (St Peters, Stoke) and work, the distinctive bottle kilns that fired the clay. The drabness of the town betrays the fact that like Dorothy's Kanas in The Wizard of Oz, 'There's no place like home'.
The fair or 'Wakes' took place every summer on waste ground outside the town. I have painted traditional fairground attractions of the period and tried to represent the people not as stick like automatons but those that interact with their surroundings. The view is from a Ferris wheel.
The theme is the emasculation of the working class male, Strong Man, Shooting Gallery, Test Your Strength and the Ghost Train.
My influence for the painting was William Hogarth, Pieter Bruegel and Oliver Postgate