1969 Painting

David Robert Jones BA Hons With my current paintings I am very much revisiting the feelings and impressions of living in Arabia during the mid 70's when I was a child. The strangeness of arriving in a place that was still being built, the surreal expanses of concrete foundations for houses, shops, hospitals etc. that would one day form a town, empty of site workers on days off. The call to prayer and the Arabic writing especially struck me; huge billboards on roads next to empty wasteland advertising airline companies with images of avian aggression incorporated into the logo, and trippy, neon flashing adverts for soft drinks on the TV with their analog synth jingles that crudely anticipated the electronic dance music that would come years later. My work draws as much from historical imagery as it does from the visual devices of current media such as advertising, computer games and logo design. Oriental decoration, Baroque tromp l'oeil, Medieval heraldry and Eastern calligraphy influence a preoccupation with Geometric Abstraction. I am interested in how as a culture we categorize phenomena and by what criteria we evaluate and label hierarchies of objects and experiences and to what extent our experience of living is covertly prescribed by the incessant "noise" of modern living.