This piece is an example of how my work can be used in a way to make personalised portraits. From a distance, this image look like a soft pencil drawing of a persons face which is easy on the eye. It works well as the backdrop to a living room or meeting place. However when one moves closer to the piece, the portrait is in fact a 1:500 scale architectural section through a megastructure. This image is of my wife and everything in the image is relevant to our relationship. Hotels we have stayed in have been drawn to scale, and restaurants we have eaten in occupy entire floors. This piece is drawn with HB pencil and would be 293 metres tall if it existed in reality. Like all of my work, this is a maze and can be followed and it starts at the bottom left hand corner.
The main entrance to Hotel Perpetua, a miniature version of the drawing hangs in the lobby.
The eye follows the path along the ground floor to a spiral staircase that leads up to a variety of corridors, rooms and mazes. The view can follow the path or simply look at the different bits of the drawing as a whole. Most of the drawing is made up of hotel rooms, all 7mm square which contain a door, small bed and a picture of St Pauls Cathedral hanging above said bed. These rooms were used as a way of shading the image, for example the shaded areas are represented by rooms whose doors are open and which have night views of St Pauls Cathedral. Lighter areas are represented by larger rooms or even massive voids many storeys high.
London bus drawn to 1:500 scale, some hostel dorm rooms are visible to the bottom right corner.
The drawing is A2 in size and took 6 months to complete although this was including balancing a social life and full time job. Talking of social life, I also including images of film posters and advertisements for shows me and my wife had watched together. The image below shows some of those posters. the popular bungling cartoon James Bond called Archer is depicted to the top left, Javier Bardem is to the top right (No Country for Old Men) and Peter from Family Guy is of course recognisable to the bottom right. The ruler to the bottom left shows the true scale of the piece. Bardem’s portrait is only 4mm by 3mm for example.
Lastly, because this piece is consistent of hotel rooms (great for shading pixels as mentioned above) and my wife’s mother is called Perpetua, I thought this would be a fitting name for this piece.
Architectural Maze Museums 