Walk

Overview of a crossing in Aldersgate Street near Barbican Station. A vehicle has just passed on the right side and a few pedestrians including a male figure in the foreground stands out and looks behind. It’s the largest painting in a series on the same subject from 1995. As the artist wrote on a fax to the Gallery in 1999: […] ‘I like the split second, intuitive choreography which groups such as these devise to solve the problem of getting across the road with varying combinations of speed, direction and willpower. The foreground figure, like the viewer of the painting, is quite still for a moment, a foil for the activity behind him’ […]. The artist works from photographs to capture moments in the city environment. He makes use of chalk drawings on black paper to eventually create the composition for the canvas.
Oliver Bevan was born in Peterborough in 1941. He studied at the Royal College of Art from 1960 to 1964. He first created Op-Art paintings and then moved to an urban realism in the 1980s. Bevan has exhibited in many institutions in London such as the Barbican Centre and the Royal National Theatre, among others.