Los Dave: Eric Rimmington - Trafalgar House

One of the fastest turnaround murals I've been commissioned to do - less than 24 hours notice from first contact to starting to paint with a very particular brief, with a super tight deadline... and at a 45% discount on my standard rate to meet the budget... I do this to myself, why?

The Trafalgar building in Fountain Street is a former Naval officers club now in the process of being converted into student accommodation. The street level is a Wetherspoons pub that has on its back wall a post-war mural painted in 1949 by the artist Eric Rimmington who studied in Portsmouth as an ex-serviceman in the 1940's. Following his studies at the Slade School in London, Rimmington became well known as a masterful still life painter, often incorporating and combining aspects of both still life and landscape or seascape into his paintings.

The mural he painted in The Trafalgar was fought for and conserved by the Portsmouth Society, and is now listed as a scheduled part of the architecture, meaning that it cannot be taken down or removed. You can read the artists personal account of his mural HERE.

Trafalgar House Mural - Eric Rimmington 1949

For my mural, upstairs in the students refectory, I wanted to echo various aspects of Eric Rimmingtons' mural. His panorama of Portsmouth and Southsea is divided into three sections with his portraits of local working class men and women viewing their 'historical landscape' from the platform of an imaginary railway station with stairs leading down [from the past] and up [to the future].

I've incorporated the full panorama of Portsmouth's landscape and the Solent in an almost 360 degree view from Fort Cumberland at Eastney to the Defra defence research establishment on Portsdown Hill, including the Solent Forts, the bandstand, Southsea Common, the Skatepark, Clarence Pier, the Square and Round Towers and the Spinnaker.

The monochromatic sepia tones evoke earlier ages, while the students sitting in the room themselves take the role of Rimmington's ordinary, everyday people observing the scene and the broad historical landscape in which they sit.