If you look hard, in a Where’s Wally kind of way, at artist Claire Douglass’s fabulous painted imagining of Birmingham street life, you will find our guest editor, Joe Lycett. He’s in a rainbow-coloured coat, clutching a Tesco bag. Speaking about Douglass’s last large-scale canvas – that one a distinctly Brummie take on Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights – Lycett suggested he was more than thrilled to have been included in the latest depiction of his home city. “I was a fan of Claire’s before this happened,” he said, “but I am so proud of the fact that I’d been considered part of this community and culture.” And, not least, “because that is basically what I am doing most of the time, wandering around in a faux fur, carrying a plastic bag”.
Douglass’s painting, Souvenir from the Anthropocene, will be included in this year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. This photograph of the work was taken in Douglass’s studio in Erdington, north-east of the city centre. The painting captures something of the defining character of Birmingham, which Lycett describes as “never pompous, or self-regarding”. The work started out, Douglass says, “as a simple look at our working lives,” but it has evolved “to become a tableau of late-stage capitalism during frightening and turbulent times”. She imagines her paintings with a distant future audience in mind, trying to learn the ways in which we lived and worked, before climate catastrophe altered our world for ever. “That’s why,” she says, so much of her time has been spent “depicting the minutiae of litter in the streets, protest signs and cleaning tasks. I’m not even sure this is art any more,” she says, “I think it might be historical illustration as epitaph.”
