Thinking of times passed, and now working all over Yorkshire as a Locksmith Leeds city center technician, having recently moved from Sheffield where I was one of a few locksmith Sheffield has had, this piece is a conceptualisation of the memory of times now forgotten. When festivals weren’t cancelled, where you would bump shoulders with hundreds of people a day all packed together in a compact crowd, where all of your shops, restaurants and cinemas didn’t have their doors bolted shut by steel barriers.

A sense of community… a shared love of a single passion. Something we now are starting forget the longer this wades on, but also something we can look forward to being absolved. Remember the Hive.

Stuck inside as we all are, filled with dread, I created this piece which I call “Magma”. It’s inspired by recent events and the concept of panic. I had just watched a documentary about Mt. Vesuvius at the time, and noted a correlation between the events happening in the world today, and those that happened in Pompeii. Although the magma runs hot during the beginning of the eruption, it fades from the blistering heat and eventually becomes ashes. Dust that is scattered in the winds of time and lands in the fire-pits of history.

I would have loved to display this piece at a local gallery, for all to see, but with the difficulties mother nature has bestowed, it seems impossible. I moved to this country as a silly yank, clueless of UK culture and whose only skill other than Art was fixing people’s doors as a Locksmith experts in Bradford and then a Bristol based technician. But the concept, I feel, runs deep regardless of the country your originate from. The idea of something that has the power to decimate your home and community is something we can all relate to.

Any artist’s work is open to interpretation, so I have reservations about disclosing my muse to those who are having their first viewing, but hopefully this will help any budding artists out there who are struggling to find one. This piece is simply about life. It’s my best attempt at simplifying Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam”. I have no qualms about taking inspiration from art that I enjoy, and neither should you. It’s not as if I am a restorer of old paintings, or a Mr. Bean type trying to fix Whistler’s Mother. Inspiration can take many forms.

Despite it’s simplicity, I had been working on this piece for an embarrassingly long time. Many canvases were rolled up and thrown into the trash, and every time I came home after working as a lock experts in Doncaster and looked at the latest reiteration I found myself disliking it more and more. The blue represents man, and the pink, woman. The ‘essence’ of life. At least how I interpreted it in my earliest and most simple memory of the concept.

I always find it hard to title my work. After completing it, I find myself every day thinking up various long and extravagant titles that sounded great in the moment but then I later think to myself, maybe that’s a bit too much, so This year, I’m making a pledge to try and go with single word titles. As a man with a limited vocabulary, I think my best approach would be to name every creation by looking at it a couple of days in a row, and to try and encapsulate it’s feel in a single word. This piece uses colors you would rarely see in nature, and as a result I decided to name it “Plasma”. Maybe I’ve been watching too many Sci-Fi flicks. I’ll let you be the judge.