Urban Icon's photostream

The Urban Icon Project is a new series of limited edition prints from emerging artist Paul Morrison.

Paul Morrison creates striking town and cityscapes using watercolour, photography and digital art. His latest work sets out to capture the ‘personality’ of our city streets, with views both familiar and unexpected.

New urban portraits
“I aim to create urban portraits - images that simply capture the personality of a place. We all have strong emotional bonds with the cities in which we live. My goal is to tap into these personal relationships.”

Paul’s focus ranges from intimate street scenes to panoramic cityscapes, and takes inspiration from a range of sources including the Italian 'veduta' school, the lithograph travel poster, and contemporary artists such as Paul Catherall. ”Cities have so many faces. You can encounter a whole range of moods in just one street. The challenge is to find the view that -without being a cliché - distills the spirit of the place.”

Pride of place
As a London-based artisit, Paul's work initially focused on the capital but has now encompasses towns and cities in the UK and beyond. Currently the series focuses on three types of location:

- London Icons - City, Westminster, West End, South Bank, Shoreditch, Chelsea, Greenwich, Hampstead, Richmond, Barnes

- UK Icons - Belfast, Bournemouth, Bristol, Cambridge, Coventry, Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford, Warwick, York

- World Icons - Berlin, Budapest, Chicago, Florence, Istanbul, Milan, Naples, New York, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Mumbai, Shanghai, Venice

The series is under continuous development and will expand to cover a range of additional locations.

Technique and format
Urban Icon images are in mixed media. Each picture starts with one of Paul's original photographs, which is then digitally modelled to refine composition, colouring and contrast.

“I like to work with strong contrast between light and shadow, to accentuate the structure and depth of the street scene. The final stage is to simplify the palette in each picture, enabling me to build up bigger, bolder blocks of colour.”

The resulting images are striking cityscapes, a fusion of architectural sketch, linocut colour, and photographic realism. The pictures are produced in limited editions, in a range of sizes from A3 up to A1 size or larger.

Finding out more
If you would like to find out more, see proofs of existing images, or propose new local views, please contact Paul on:
paulmorrisonmail@yahoo.co.uk
Mobile + 44 (0) 7747 865 955
Office +44 (0) 208 878 0557

or visit:

LondonArt - www.londonart.co.uk/sales/view_art.asp?ArtistID=5394