Aero Soul City

The urban experience forms my identity as an artist. From an adolescent painting graffiti in the night it was on the railways lines or in the alley ways where I discovered my self and my raison d'etre. I would later come to call my style of painting 'urban realist narrative painting' with a focus on the marginalised human subject. The city does marganilise people, but as a homeless youth traversing the city, opportunistically seeking shelter, food, and paint, I did not feel marginalised. Rather I felt alive at the challenge to survive and to nourish and form an identity. The lessons of the street can be hard, but one adapts quickly, and the graffiti artist is generally a resourceful and elusive shadow in the night.

That motivation to walk the railway line each night is the same spirit that drives my studio practice today. Except now I have walked the streets of many of the world's capitals, navigating the underground, and traversing concrete under the illuminated neon. It can be an alienating place amongst the crowds, and the exchange or the acknowledgment of a glance in the metro is momentary. This individual in the context of the city becomes the main subject of my painting, articulating a human dignity and complicity; a glimpse of the sacred within the grit and the profane.

A mist of aerosol lacquer evokes many memories of my youth and the rite of passage into the night. The memories, like many of the vibrant artworks themselves that once gleamed in the shadows, have now faded or have been covered over. The aerosol can is still my preferred medium, except along the journey I have stepped out of those shadows to see the city in a different light, in turn rendering its forms and impressions onto my canvases.

The city for me has continued to be a vital source of inspiration. As the city continues to expand and mutate, and artists continue to navigate and contemplate its space with its potential and limitations, the written dialogue continues. The peripheral and abject aspects within the city such as the graffiti on the wall or the homeless man in the alley is where, for me, the most meaning is to be found.

James Cochran, 2009