(Due to working away last year I realise that I did not update this site for Fred's JULY9 2023 Exhibition, though an entry was made on the youtube site. This can be viewed by following the link provided below. )
Fred came out of the Army after National service & found himself working as a construction labourer. Not far from home the Midland Electricity board was constructing the great cooling towers of the Ocker Hill power plant. Fred poured some of the concrete & became obsessed with the site. To work on such a large construction naturally provides some nostalgia & appreciation for the achievements of antiquity - I worked on the control tower at Luton Airport & marvelled at the design - strong enough to withstand collision from an airplane apparently. Such a monolith could stand for thousands of years if abandoned. Fred felt that the cooling towers were the same - he put some mysticism to them with the suggestion that the triangular arrangement had some significance & together we hypothesised that Ocker Hill had been a site of great significance in ancient times. We wrote a book called the Secret of Ocker Hill that explored his obsession & some possibilities of what might have been there.
Like Cezanne, who had painted multiple views of Mount St Victoire, Fred set about documenting the cooling towers from different angles. He painted them in blobs with a nod to the Van Gogh Sky technique to produce something extraordinary. Each has a story - he had thought he only had one of them left but on clearing out his loft a few weeks before he died we discovered another & in the vast collection of rolled up unframed canvases were some others that didn't make the grade for what he wanted to achieve.
Anyway, the short film available on www.youtube.com/seismicsecret reproduces the catalogue he made & scans of some of the works - have a look maybe.
Happy birthday Fred.
