The streets of Kentish Town have long provided the inspiration for pop songs, graffitti, the odd novel and the poetry of laureates. Tufnell Park-based artist Nick Offer infuses his large oil paintings with heavy doses of NW5’s urban topography too.
Strangely familiar, yet difficult to place, his work draws on an amalgam of local views, often snapped on his camera first and assembled as a collage before work on the main piece gets underway.
Take a look at the image (above) also featured on the cover of our November print edition, entitled Dog Barking At Car Reflections. The foreground, including the cars, is the courtyard of a council block off Grafton Road, near the City Farm. The houses in the background run along the railway near Junction Road, while the iron fence is from the canal path north of Regent’s Park. And the dog? A photograph Nick took on Hampstead Heath.
“I’m interested in combining unusual – but convincing – elements in a banal context, hopefully to unsettling effect,” he says. “I’d been thinking about how inscrutable dark shiny cars are. You only see reflections – rarely the interior – and this lends a sinister aspect to them. I wanted to contrast this cold technology with something sentient; so an animal, in a banal setting. A dog works well as a metaphor for instinct – in this case fear of the unknown.”
Nick settled here with his wife and daughter five years ago after a prolonged period in Barcelona once he’d got his MA in Fine Art. And now his first solo show takes place in Shoreditch and features 20 pictures containing elements of K-Town, other parts of London and the Scottish Highlands.
“I’m a huge fan of Kentish Town,” he says of the area that shapes much of his art. “Living here, you find it doesn’t have the self-conscious attitude found in east and west London. It’s refreshingly unpretentious.”
Other local elements to spot at the show include a painting depicting the Iron Man character standing by the Heath on Highgate Road, looking “a little unsure of his position,” and a striking image of grand terraced windows along Kentish Town Road reflected in the glass of a Leverton’s hearse (see pic above).
“If I believed in the afterlife, this is what I have a hunch it might look like,” Nick explains. “A rather depressing vision of cold and anaemic compartments.”
Seeing our immediate environment depicted in his often almost supernatural images adds a strange and deeply personal layer to their meaning. You may well not look at Kentish Town in quite the same way again. You’ll certainly feel a little uneasy walking past that menacing pack of parked cars up Grafton Road.
Nick’s debut solo show opens tonight – all welcome – and runs from Nov 21st to 24th at the 5th Base Gallery, Heneage Street, E1 5LJ. For more info on Nick visit nickoffer.com.
