A LONG WAY FROM HOME?

3/10/2006

“With some of my paintings, I’m building a monument to the working men who no longer have jobs. The ships aren’t built in my town anymore; the steel and iron has gone. The men are now unemployed. I’m putting that precious history down on canvas. I want to capture the passion of when they did work; the molting of the metal, the sound of hammers on the steel. There was a pride, a beauty in these men. Their lives were hard, but they worked even harder and were valued and had a sense of purpose. Now some of these proud strong men have not had a job for twenty years or more, their heads hang down, they don’t use their strength, or their arms. In some of my works you will see their arms are gone, unneeded. It’s tragic and cruel, these men want to work but the jobs are no longer there for them.” Mackenzie Thorpe

When you live away from your home country, at times the feeling of longing, for anything that is familiar, visits us all.

No matter how happy you are with your new life, we all experience those occasional nagging yearnings for memories of our past. We've all bought the packet of biscuits we would never dream of buying back home, just to get that fix. We watch British TV programmes with a previously unknown fondness and reminisce. The perfect answer to quell this constant craving is to acquire one of Mackenzie's works. Wherever you come from in the UK, his work is so quintessentially British that there literally is something for everyone.

Images such as 'Where's all the Beer Gone' or for football lovers ‘Mrs Can I Have My Ball Back' portray the familiar and varying social landscapes of our culture; Traditional landscapes (Through till dawn) show the stunning beauty of our land, even the great British humour is apparent in works such as 'Drying Day' our love of the naive is obvious in 'Love Is Everywhere'.

Enjoy looking, you will find a part of yourself and your life reflected in Mackenzie's work

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