The terrible, beautiful sound of glass crashing into a thousand pieces I can still hear. Every broken window is randomly formed and unique as a snowflake. I thought I knew what a broken window looked like; until I tried to draw one from memory.
Fast forward forty years. The camera pans down a war-torn street at building after building with windows smashed, or with the glass gone altogether, leaving hollowed out apertures. Terrible and nothing beautiful here. Later, many of these buildings will be reduced to smouldering ash and rubble. The fortunate, evacuated to safety. The less fortunate, lifeless and broken among the remains of their former home.
Partly about my response at what I was seeing reported from Ukraine and partly my reflections on the possibility, or hope of meaning and beauty in the midst of neglect and destruction, the piece started out inspired by the aesthetic of broken windows. Not just the unpredictability of their form, but also the randomness of their destruction.
I always need a starting point. Usually, it's a formal challenge. What if I draw a broken window and then cut it up and re-arrange it to create another level of brokenness? A broken, broken window.
I started the piece in May 2022 in oils on plyboard and had to wait about ten days before I could start sawing it up. Like the piece I had completed previously, I didn't measure out any angles. I didn't even score the wood first with my steel ruler. I just sawed and of course some of the lines were not straight. I didn't want the pieces of ply to fit snugly or flush. I wanted unevenness and gaps between pieces, to create the impression of hasty assembly.
It turned out to be far more laborious than I had anticipated but I was now committed to the task, and with months of sunk cost, backpedalling was not an option. I worked hard to get it finished before going on a holiday but had to wait until my return a couple of weeks later before finally completing it.
Although the finished piece got an uptick for looking like a bad repair job after being dropped from a great height, I wasn't pleased with the final composition. For all the raggedness, it lacked dynamism. It looked too much like a broken window. I filed it away as a heroic failure.
In the weeks following, my gaze returned often to it and I saw its continued potential as an idea. I quartered it, unequally and re-arranged the four pieces.
Now I had something interesting. Some menacing black forms crawling into the frame, left to right it seemed to me. Now looking nothing like a broken window, but with the random and jagged beauty that had inspired me in the first place.
Invaders, I called it. A few weeks later that word was unfortunately used for grubby purposes by an especially grubby senior British politician.
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