Wildlife Art in Urban Decay

For too long I lived in Bangkok. In many ways it is a great place but wildlife is my main interest and a large city is not the ideal site to look for it. But I did manage to find some. It was hiding in all the urban decay. The natural process of weathering had taken our urban surfaces and reclaimed them to produce landscapes in all the forgotten cracked paintwork and rusty corners.

My simple role was adding the wildlife to all those lush habitats. Here are some early examples of what I do.

"Stag" - I love finding an old patch of graffiti that has weathered along with the wall it was painted onto. It often has lovely little patches of textures and patterns. In this case it reminded me of the low woody branching of heather on a moorland hill so a stag seemed like a good addition. Although when flowering heather is a beautiful sight my experience of moors has more often been of a harsh, bleak landscape so the lack of colour in this image fitted my memory well.

"Winter Hares" - this was an early one where I took a photo of weathered white-washed wooden boards and tried to turn them into a winter scene of a rough field sloping down to a frozen lake simply by adding a couple of hares. I like the minimal approach of making the wildlife just a small part of the overall image but perhaps this one is a little too subtle? On the other hand, wildlife in such a scene doesn't usually jump out and can be easily missed. Originally I also put in some ducks standing on the ice but decided that was too much.

"Zebra" - the layered paint on this flat metal surface had cracked in the unusual pattern of producing stripes. It immediately struck me as looking like tall grass, and then inverting the tones produced a matching but contrasting pattern to use to create the zebra. A nice, simple design where I could blend the two together well - the zebra's body and head are obvious but the legs and tail disappear into the grass. This combination of the subject being clear but blended into the background is always the aim.

"Thornbush Giraffe" - elsewhere on the same metal surface the paintwork had cracked in a more typical network pattern and also had a bit more colour. This suggested scrub rather than grass. I used the same trick of inverting the tones to use as the fill for this giraffe, so the background is dark cracks on light but the giraffe is light cracks on dark. In this case it is the body pattern that blends well into the background with the head, neck and legs being clear. Anybody who knows giraffes well will probably immediately notice that a giraffe's socks should really be pale not dark!

"Stoat" - this is one of my favourite early pictures because it is made with such an unpromising background, just a dirty old wall with vague staining and scratches. Nothing striking or beautiful about it but adding that little stoat brings a scene into focus: an animal emerging onto a narrow path through the grass next to the bole of a tree. The effect is much more subtle than the bold patterning of two previous images.

"Standing Tiger" - an example of simplifying the background to remove most of the colour by toning it. This helps the texture of rough scratches to stand out as a rocky, icy slope even through the unexpected choice of green as the toning colour.

"Ticks and Fleas" - another very simplified background, this time of worn wood grain that has a look of hair. I admit it is not an attractive image but then it is not an attractive subject. However, even skin parasites deserve some recognition rather than the usual birds and big mammals! I also like making you scratch yourself.

"Seashore Otter" - this background is a photograph of the back of a road sign on a footbridge over one of Bangkok's main roads. I'm not sure why it had become so streaked but increasing the contrast produced a striking pattern which once turned on its side has made a great beach for an otter to explore.