I am fascinated when artists manage to capture something of the world-building of construction. One such artist is the painter Frank Auerbach, who died this week. He is known for his style of quickly building up very thick layers of paint on the canvas. His portraits took many sittings as he added and removed layers of paint.
But what sticks in my mind is his large canvases of construction sites. Twenty years ago, I saw an exhibition of these construction site paintings at the Courtauld in London. One was of the hole in the ground that would become the Shell Building behind the Southbank Centre. A second was of another large modernist construction, the John Lewis Building on Oxford Street.
His style of thickly applied paint lends itself so well to capturing the scale, the volume, the cleave, the texture, and somehow even the smell of deep excavations. For most of the life of a city, a building is either not there or there. But this incredible, transforming, transient moment – when it is half there, being excavated and then built up – is fleeting, even for large projects.
Frank Auerbach captures something special about this ephemeral moment.