SUB

FEBRUARY - MARCH 2026

54 DIGITAL SKETCHES ON THE THEME OF SCREEN TEXT AND PICTURES

Sub stands for subtitle or subtext, subordinate or substitute, amongst other things. This series is about the relation between text, other graphics and pictures. Which subs which? Hopefully the importance of text to these works is obvious, as is its ambiguity to context and humour. And while there are many precedents in my work, here I was particularly interested in the kind of captions now common on screens, either as translations, substitutes or responses to aspects of the pictures, guided by text, so to speak. Actually ‘Guided by Text’ would also have made an apt series title.

The territory inevitably recalls Pop Art and the painting of common print norms, these now exchanging hard copy for screen life. In other respects, working digitally has clear parallels with music sampling and techno permutations. I sometimes think of myself as more of a DJ than a designer. A designer that has gone off-brief or rogue.

More notes at the bottom of the page.

NB – click on images for enlargements.

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My initial inspiration came from watching television in doctors’ waiting rooms and pizza takeaway parlours. There’s possibly a subtext about my life there. Subtitles were always provided, even when the audio was clear and in English. I later learned there is a trend in 18–25-year-olds to watch everything with subtitles, for some reason. To me, it distanced the content, lent itself to comparing text with audio and judging the translation as adequate engagement. This detachment ran parallel with a heightened sense of artifice or theatricality to events represented, both in studio-based programmes like news and weather and to exterior scenes, an exaggerated reverence or plausibility. It was, above all, a reassuring world. Things happened there in an acceptable, ‘objective’ way. They were supremely credible.

These two aspects led me to think about people as basically actors or roles and to think about their places as both staged and yet steadfast or solid. One the one hand, events were manifestly fake, on the other they were undeniably factual. I imagined the dichotomy extending all the way from the foundations of our culture, of a heritage symbolized by palaces and castles, for example, and inevitably tourism, to the most trivial updates on student travel or social gossip, for example. That is one thread running through my choice of settings for characters. The characters themselves are basically stereotypes or archetypes, of youth and beauty or age and wisdom, their many vicissitudes. It seemed a crude way to navigate the world, or perhaps a crude world, only to be navigated thus.

As with all of my mature work, the crossover from form to content, from style to substance is paramount. In Sub, I stylise stereotypes in ways that undermine or ‘deconstruct’ their role. That is, works aim to exemplify this construction. And this can only be done by invoking pluralism, of multiple versions of a true world, multiple worlds of a plausible universe. The metaphysics have a distinguished literature, it is enough here to flag – once more – my allegiance.

I also wanted to note related themes in earlier work. Attention to dress or costume follows on, most directly. from Fashion, while use of dance or choreographic poses recurs in a number of series, notably Your Turn, Vigilantes and Robo. And lastly, sources in movie stills continues from my student days to find firmer treatment in Good-Luc Godard and Decline.

Such affinities are hardly surprising at this stage, when 45 series since 2000 propose adjacent themes, comprising 2,258 works (adding this post) from a career total of 2,553 works. In my seventy-fourth year, some consolidation is only to be expected.