I have an exhibition of never-seen-before paintings and drawings at the Saatchi Gallery, which closes on the 21st November.

Half of the show consists of brightly painted canvases - Sacred Landscapes - that depict in a hybrid cartographical/topological form the ancient landscapes that surround such mysterious sites as Stonehenge, Wayland’s Smithy, the Cerne Abbas Giant and several others. These are not mystical, New Age depictions but rather brash, bold colour fields showing centuries-old field boundaries, trackways and paths - but as if the English countryside had been scooped up and dropped into California then drenched in psychedelic drugs - and the bright pigments that are derived from petrochemicals.

The other half of the exhibition is quieter, more reflective, and much more sombre. If Sacred Landscapes show the ancient transformed by the modern, Modernland is the aftermath. These large drawings, scrawled  onto and sometimes torn into heavyweight paper with soot, charcoal, graphite and chalk are a brutal contrast. The acrylic paintings make the ancient, mysterious landscapes of England into a loud, raucous celebration - but the soot and charcoal melancholy of Modernland is what is left the morning after, when late-period capitalism has had its fun, and there’s only the reckoning ahead.

Follow the link below to the Saatchi shop, where you will find a cornucopia of items; some large, some small. Most wallet sizes catered for.
Saatchi Gallery is at Duke of York's HQ, King's Road, London, SW3 4RY.

Following the end of the Modern Landscapes show at the Saatchi, I have another exhibition opening a scant three days later on the 24th November, at Jealous Gallery in Shoreditch, entitles Sacred Cartography.

The title relates to the subject matter, which are eight large screen prints, artwork for which is shown above. I made these pictures by a close study of Ordnance Survey maps, which are very detailed maps covering the islands of Britain. They show everything - pylons, hedges, parish boundaries, everything. I photocopy these maps and then white out everything that's text, any words, any numbers, then set about erasing the present, kind of digging into the past, removing industrial estates, motorways, houses, and keep going back, until all that are left are the oldest trackways, the burial mounds and barrows, the stone circles and earthworks that are all that remain of the people who came long before us. I've tried to excavate what remains of what was sacred to those people; the lay of the land, the hilltops, the grave-mounds, the corpse-paths.
When I started this work I became fascinated with the relationship between land and sky. Rather than seeing the land and the sky as separate, I saw them as two halves of the same interconnected whole.
The idea is that the land and the heavens are intimately connected, both physically, through transpiration and evaporation and precipitation, but also in other, hidden, mysterious ways. It’s not for nothing that people have always worshipped the skies, that our gods dwell above us. So in my paintings of sacred landscapes, each carefully delineated field pours its colour upwards, up into the black heavens. 

The link below will take you to the Jealous Gallery; Sacred Cartography will run from 24th November until 24th December.
Jealous is at 53 Curtain Rd, Shoreditch, London EC2A 3PT.