User:Iancaleartist/sandbox/Ian Cale

Ian Cale, born in North Yorkshire in 1970. He studied painting at the Norwich School of Art and graduated in 1991. He now lives in Manchester where he is a Lecturer in Fine Art. Growing up in the 1970's he would spend hours watching War Films on TV. They often trivialised conflict and turned the horror of war into the stuff of children's toys. He would watch public service announcements on TV explaining how to survive a nuclear attack.

OST: Architecture Conflict Occupation OST: Architecture Conflict Occupation is a ongoing project by Ian Cale that documents locations in what was the DDR, questioning the contemporary role of architecture that has direct links with the conflict, Soviet occupation and the historical events of the 20th Century. It has become an important social document recording how individuals, the State and Germany as a whole choses to acknowledge architecture that has direct links to conflict and occupation. This is done predominantly through photography, painting, observational drawing, and the collection and documentation of found objects.

Major influences in the semi abstract paintings are domestic interiors and things from everyday life like a photograph of a loved one still stuck to a wall of a bunker, a scrap of wallpaper or discarded furniture. Neglected buildings with their damaged and aged facades are also looked at with their decaying surfaces, flaky paintwork, cracking 1960's concrete, exposed brickwork, Russian graffiti and rotten floorboards. Influences from the city make it on to the canvas as both subconsciously and consciously motifs appear - it could be a small area of text in the painting or the shape of an air vent from an old building.