I’ve popped into Jen Orpin’s studio at Rogue several times over past years. The first time I was intrigued by a series of paintings in the style of Vermeer, Jen’s comment on the place of women in the home finding space for themselves. But this was an interlude in Jen’s persistent motorway paintings, which have become synonymous with her name. When Ian Hay of the Saul Hay Gallery at Castlefield told me a couple of weeks ago that she was planning to paint live during the weekends of her show there, I was more than intrigued. I’ve written many reviews over past years, but have never heard of any artist brave enough to work whilst patrons visited at a gallery. 

 

When I called in on March 4th, the first day of Jen’s exhibition, I had the opportunity to see a nascent painting and also to talk to Jen about the origins of her now famous motorway paintings. She told me the story. 

 

“When I started at Manchester Met the building was by the Hulme flyover. And so bridges and roads have been in my vision for a long time. But in 2015 my dad suffered a severe stroke and of course I drove straight home to Surrey. During the next three months I drove there and back twice a week. It was an emotional time of course, but it also meant that I was seeing my family much more regularly than in the previous years.

 

What marked those journeys for me were the landmarks of bridges on the motorways. For months I drove the M6, the M42 and the M40, ticking off those landmarks. They were the milestones for me. Dad died not long before Christmas three months later and early in the following new year we went as a family to Scotland, where I was moved and overawed by the Scottish countryside and the drama of scenes like Glen Coe. But my thoughts were on those journeys backwards and forwards. I painted one of the motorway bridges between Manchester and Surrey and found some peace in marking one of the milestones. That was the start of it.”

 

Jen has since completed around 200 paintings of motorway bridges and told me that during lockdown she was intrigued by ‘her’ motorway bridge at Hulme and how the vista changed as green maintenance was abandoned. “The grass and shrubbery grew uncontrolled for many months and changed in its juxtaposition with the concrete. I’m starting to paint closer details, rather than wide views of motorway bridges and their structure.”

 

When I asked Jen about her source gathering she told me that she was a nightmare to be driven as a passenger, trying to photograph bridges and their detail. Images are built up, traffic deleted, Google Earth supplements the visual source. The empty motorways are, as she said herself, almost apocalyptic. But it’s the emptiness which disturbs the viewer. As I said to Jen, the emptiness seems to hint that something dramatic is about to happen. A portent of something to come. 

 

Art is, of course, totally based on emotion. In my experience most artists work on an amalgam of emotional experiences. In Jen’s case the story of her motorway bridge paintings is very specific. 

 

I watched as she plotted the ‘live’ painting with intensely delicate blue pencil lines. Jen will be working on the painting at Saul Hay each weekend until the end of the show, which runs from 4th to 26th of March. A unique opportunity to see a work come to life. 

 

And Jen’s parting shot with a smile: “I’ve not touched the M1 yet. Maybe I need to go for a drive.”