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l’Arrivée. Alll oil on canvas |
Great forest of King’s Cross
Painter Wanda Garland tells Dan Carrier how she finds rural forms in a city landscape
HER first brush stroke came not long after the first ton of concrete had been poured into the ground. Now, with the restoration of St Pancras train station finished, work on its sister terminus at King’s Cross about the to start, and the 67-acre railway lands also due for development, artist Wanda Garland’s visual record of the changes in the area is finished.
The artist, a former Carlton and Netley Street school teacher, retired in 1997 and has been painting ever since. She decided to chronicle the restoration of St Pancras and the building of the cross-Channel rail link, and has spent the best part of six years with her sketch book watching the builders at work.
The project started in 2003 and now Wanda has more than 70 studies to choose from. The exhibition at St Pancras hospital is called Works In Progress, Works Completed and follows on from a show by the artist at the German Gymnasium by the train station. Previously her art had shown construction in full swing. Now it includes pieces that show the work finished.
“I did not start these works because of the historic station or the size of the renovation or to chronicle the development of the area,” she says.
“I respond to this aspect intellectually, but this did not prompt me to paint.”
Instead, it was remarkable moments when the Victorian St Pancras and the modern station were overlapping.
“When the brick arches began to be pulled down it was just such an extraordinary sight,” she recalls.
“They were covered with large doors and when they were pulled down you could see inside. They were like caves, with marvellously intricate old brick work. It was just extraordinary.”
Wanda had been a landscape painter but she saw similar qualities in the grimy industrial vista that was gradually uncovered as the work progressed.
“The mounds of bricks, the mounds of earth, it was visually shocking, with little figures and machines scrambling over them. I had concentrated on landscapes – I had never drawn a digger before – but I saw so much in the forms and shapes there.”
She said the project had so many visually exciting facets.
Wanda studied art at the Hornsey Art College and then St Martins. She designed textiles before turning to teaching – and her art shows an eye for rigid patterns. Scaffolding, girders, columns and pillars are the vertical and horizontal shapes she has picked out.
“People think of building sites as drab and grey, but I found so much colour, so many forms. The scaffolding was like a huge forest.”
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