Lights off at Brighton Pier Painting by Jen Gash

Painting: Acrylic, Oil on Canvas.

One of several paintings produced as part of my final challenge in the Sky Landscape Artist of the Year 2018 competition. I became fascinated by the underside of the pier and its structure, shapes and colours. I really started to notice the difference between the fun, musical, pretty topside of the pier we are presented with, versus the dark, slightly eerie, disturbing underside. I explored this contrast in all of the subsequent paintings of the pier, feeling that the word “underbelly” captured this nicely.

In this painting, the lights on top of the pier were off, as if in the middle of the night, however it still feels lighter than the dark, underbelly. The underside or “underbelly” which is dark and is often a place for teenagers to hang out and retreat from the world.