The motorway bridge can be a thing of beauty, as artist Jen Orpin proves in these mesmerising paintings.
Have you ever stood back and properly looked at a motorway bridge? It's a difficult thing to do. These structures are usually glimpsed at 70 mph. To pull over and have a gawp would be dangerous, and illegal.
Luckily, we can admire their beauty in the work of Jen Orpin. Motorway bridges are very much her thing. Over the years, she's made around 800 paintings of comely concrete spans and oblique cross-carriage slabs. This vast body of work covers bridges all over Britain (and beyond), but we've reproduced paintings from the London area in this article. How many can you identify?
Jen's unusual muse came from a very personal place:
"The reason I started painting them in the first place was because of a journey I made in 2015. My dad had a stroke and I drove down to Chertsey, Surrey and back to Manchester every week for three months to be with my him and family in the ICU. The journey became a really important part of the process and time in the car was time to process what was going on. The bridges became my friendly faces along the way, telling me how far I'd gone and how much further I had to go."
Sadly, her father died just before Christmas that year, but those journeys left a deep impression on the artist. She has painted motorway bridges ever since.
As well as her emotional and personal connection to the subject matter, Jen has also grown to love the bridges for their "form and function, their sturdiness and stature." She tells us:
"The way they sit in the landscapes, some are almost like social sculptures punctuating the liminal spaces on our journeys. Curved concrete is especially beautiful and when nature has taken hold, creeping and climbing over and the structures are becoming one with the landscape, this is also very appealing to me.
"Then there’s the motorway bridge as a platform for protest with political slogans and graffiti. The risk involved by the person in writing something that means so much to them to be seen by so many... this also acts like a time stamp, once removed, the slogans are gone forever but live on in my paintings."
Millions of eyes see these structures every day, but how many truly register the scene? Now, thanks to Jen Orpin, we can all appreciate the unexpected beauty of the motorway bridge.
Jen Orpin's solo show We Left Nothing Behind is at Union Gallery, 94 Teesdale Street, Bethnal Green E2 6PU from 2 November-7 December 2024. It includes a new body of (non-London) work, with 13 paintings, five of which are based on bridges in LA. Catch the artist on Instagram, or buy her work via her website or Etsy. With thanks to Tim Dunn for the tip.
