The Athens series

This work celebrates the exuberance and innocence of children at play – something shared across generations and cultures, providing hope in a broken world. As he stood in a shadowed lane down the slope from the dusk glow of the Acropolis, the artist imagined children playing there millennia ago whilst Greek philosophers debated up on top of the hill. Bilby’s photo of this ancient lane was the reference for his digital illustration (using the geometric shapes of a Chinese calligraphy grid) which was filtered in photoshop to provide iterations of colour and abstraction for all the backgrounds. Although the pencil drawings are based on western twentieth century archival photos, when combined with the abstracted backgrounds, an exact sense of time or place is indeterminate.

(This series of 21 works was part of ‘The Spacious Palaces Of Memory’ exhibition.)