Facelesss in the Tube

For the past two years, I have spent a couple of hours each day on the London Underground, producing hundreds of digital drawings. During this period, the Underground has clarified my perception of myself as part of the city and among its inhabitants.

At first, I found the lack of interaction in this environment alienating. The shock lasted for several months after I began making these journeys, and it was one of the reasons I turned to drawing. My first sketches began with exhaustive reference lines over a coloured background. I would then add detail using heavier digital brushes, carefully recording the individual characters within the carriage. Some of those guidelines remain visible in the finished drawings. The works were colourful and lively -in a way, therapeutic – but they never truly reflected the place in which I was living. They were too happy, too contrived, too humane.

Gradually, I felt more prepared to confront the livid, monochrome passengers and began to forget their subtleties. I no longer searched for some latent desire for interaction, perceptible only through brief eye contact, seemingly casual adjustments of posture or fleeting expressions of judgement. Their initial stiffness and apparent indifference were no longer a seductive barrier to overcome. I lost the impulse to impose colourful, fictitiously vibrant scenes. Instead, I could simply begin painting the faceless, without dwelling on colours, tools or brush sizes. I was coming to terms with my new ecosystem.

By the end of this journey, I feel that my most recent drawings offer a far more accurate depiction of what the London Underground represents to me: a place of collective solitude, spectral and homogeneous, where only a vaguely sympathetic glance – or a brief interval away from the smartphone – reveals the inner despair and perhaps imaginary need for connection that bring these figures to life.

I no longer need to look up furtively from my iPad. I can sense the loud, insistent feelings of Londoners pouring through their grey interfaces in full colour, while I wear my headphones and keep my head lowered to draw, pretending that no one is paying attention.