Alan Halls' Scrap Yard Painting

Rebecca Cains RBA RWA was selected to train as a dancer at The Arts Educational Schools, London in 1985, where she studied ballet, contemporary, Jazz, tap, choreography, singing, drama and art. After graduating in 1988, she embarked on a professional dance career working and touring in both the UK and Europe. Some of her dance work includes contemporary company Dancers Anonymous, performing at both the Edinburgh festival and in Germany and dancing for leading U.K. choreographer Pat Dennison. Her last engagement was a tour of Italy, dancing for leading Italian choreographer Gino Landi in Cole Porters musical Can Can. During this time she began to paint again and studied the masters at first hand. A knee injury led to a change in career and she concentrated on painting which had always been of parallel interest to her dancing. She then went on to study for a degree in Fine Art Painting at Bath Spa University.I am a representational artist and my paintings capture the less fashionable areas of towns and cities where I grew up and have revisited with renewed vision. They are places in a state of decay, often unnoticed but part of our everyday lives. Much of my work has been based at a local scrap yard where I am visually interested in the haphazard shapes, textures and colours of decayed vehicles stacked together like forms of sculpture. My paintings are devoid of people with the wrecked vehicles taking on a personality of their own. They depict todays throwaway society and are heightened by the urban environment juxtaposed against a rural landscape. My paintings are of the here and now and can be located in time due to the depicted material and deterioration of the objects. They are undocumented areas capturing todays society which in the future will change or be lost forever.I paint in oils using a limited palette to capture the subtlety and subdued colour of my chosen subject matter.