Alone and Together: Brunel's People

Juliet Wood, acclaimed British portrait painter, presents her personal project she has been working on over the last ten years.

In our ever faster moving world, Wood sat still in the public space of a fast food restaurant and recorded many, many separate moments for over a decade, gradually bringing them together in this impressive series of paintings, perhaps best described as modern-day genre scenes.
Wood was captivated by the breadth and diversity of activity and people she encountered there and, as unofficial artist-in-residence, created thousand of sketches from which she developed these finely crafted portraits which reflect the changing face of a town, Swindon, and its community.

The compositions dispel myth of a fast-food outlet as being a place of transit, merely functional and impersonal. They contrast the hub of everyday life in a busy fast-food outlet and the stillness of the individual vignettes which slow down the pace of life or preserve a moment, highlighting individual experiences of, for example: loneliness, romance and young love, parent-child, a quick lunch-break, the highlight of the day, regular visits, fast-food/slow-eating.

Compositionally the paintings are made up of real life observations (The artist made thousands of sketches from real life ‘artist in residence’) and formed her compositions from these separate drawings to create new groupings or frames that convey her particular sensibility towards the place and people.