Drawing The River Part 2: Leon Morrocco

My 2013 exhibition, Drawing The River, had focused on that section of the Thames stretching west from Tower Bridge to Battersea Power Station. My fascination with the river, led to a further body of work up river, roughly between Kew Bridge and Isleworth, initially concentrating on Brentford with its jumble of boat repair yards and its Dutch barge community and this spring on the activity along the Grand Union Canal. Unlike the first exhibition which reflected the rapidly changing skyline and the extraordinary vitality of corporate London the new work shows an altogether more intimate view of a

part of London’s waterways that remain almost in a time warp. A chance remark by a friend led me to Brentford and to John Watson’s Boat repair Yard on Lots Ait, a tiny island in the river opposite Kew Gardens. Tightly packed with large Dutch barges and with a vast boat-shed and an outside working area strewn with boats and marine equipment it immediately attracted me as a place for drawing. In fact the weeks spent there during the long hot summer of 2013 were amongst the most fulfilling and exhilarating of my recent working life. I was given complete freedom of the boatyard and made to feel at ease by John Watson, by the barge dwellers and by a diverse group of craftspeople working there. Brentford in the 18th and 19th centuries was a major centre of water borne trade and the work I have produced is a kind of portrait of a community that is carrying on some of the activities historically associated with this part of the river Thames. All the Lots Ait paintings were produced on the spot; a departure from my normal approach where working drawings done in situ are translated into paintings back in the studio. Some of the larger works took 2 or 3 days to complete and with the addition of colour are more akin to finished paintings than studies, although I tried to retain linear and graphic elements to keep the sense of place and immediacy.

 

After Lots Ait I moved north on foot and started to explore the waterways between Brentford and the Paddington Basin. The Grand Union presented a very different world of decorated narrow boats, reflections and landscape that I felt could open up new possibilities as larger studio paintings worked up from sketches. It is a new direction in the work but only the start of the latest chapter. My slow, meandering journey across

London has been stimulated by constant surprises and discoveries and any exhibition can only offer a momentary pause in this ongoing fascination with the city.

Leon Morrocco