"Fancy Dress Party" Collage

This artwork - the 40th in my expanding dedicated series loosely based on the fortification designs of Vauban - uses pre-assembled sheets of Canson Mi-Teinte forming stripes, plus painted sheets of Canson art papers as well as some old music scores and French road maps… all as a collage on canvas. The sheets were marked-up and cut out as angles, then applied to the black painted and scratched 100 x 100 cm canvas revealing the red/yellow undercoat background. I made matching pairs of angles… those with pointed ends to represent males, the ones rounded as females… their different graphic appearances representing pairs of people intermingling or dancing at a fancy dress party. 

To recap, all my recent artworks using painted or applied elements of carefully drawn angles originally based on the works of Maréchal Vauban, or Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), who is considered one of the greatest military engineers of all time. In his life he was responsible for the fortification of over 160 places in France… but his major contribution to warfare was his methods of attack, which revolutionised siege warfare. However, the shapes and angles of his defensive walls surrounding many French towns and seaports have influenced the design of my more recent artworks.