John Sims and the art of ‘useless maps’

Maps are deadly serious things, the painstaking product of the cartographer’s scrutiny. Not so, for John Sims. He challenges their status as functional, documentary or even decorative artefacts. Why do so many people put them on their walls? Why, looking out to sea, does Sandgate seem more of a bay than the map suggests? What would a place look like if you fell on it from the sky? Well, John’s maps could provide the answers, or none at all. After all, they are ‘useless’.

As John says: ‘I love the way that at first glance they appear to be real maps, look closer and longer and you see that they are more or less abstract paintings… just marks, colours and lines…’

John’s inspiration for his map-making came from the time that he was Artist-in-Residence at the Cyprus College of Art. Working with archeologists, he would make oil-pastel reproductions of ancient finds from memory, adding to them until they took on new abstract forms.

‘Useless maps’ of Folkestone (featured above), Dover, Whitstable and Sandgate are currently on display at the Cristus Summer Exhibition, but if you would like a map of anywhere, John is ready to take commissions, at a fixed price of £150, framed. Please contact Deborah@cristus-gallery.com to place an order, or visit the exhibition.

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Farid Auoni’s Impressions of Folkestone

There is something special about the light that falls on this fair corner of England. Artist friends are inspired by the huge skies above the channel, which seem to intensify the shapes and colours of the foreshore; but so often the land and seascape art we see is purely representational and, to be honest, a little dull.

That’s why Farid Auoni’s paintings appeal to us, because they bring a new vitality to the familiar local scenes that have been rendered a million times before. So Farid’s Old High Street bustles with life and colour, and his Leas and Kingsnorth Gardens bloom and spangle as they do from time to time. When asked, Farid says that this is just how they look to him. And one thinks of Renoir’s way of seeing Algiers through impression and imagination fused, and Farid returning the complement to Folkestone.

Farid’s paintings will be exhibited at Cristus throughout the summer, with new works planned for a special exhibition to coincide with the Sandgate Festival in August.

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The Old High Street

The depth of darkness is Dickensian on The Old High Street. Piss-yellow light seeps into Folkestone’s black night. I walk up the hill towards the source of the fast-food stench. The fugg rolls past, down to the sickly harbour. Old businesses are dead and dying, young ones are alive and trying to kick. Deserted laundromats and chic galleries, cheap arcades neon lit like a vision of hell, old curiosity shops, cafe bars and coffee houses, bric-a-brac and urbane cafes. The quick and the dead.

It’s like watching a dying animal give birth. Never mind the works of art in Folkestone, Folkestone is the work of art. See it now before it dies.

The Old High Street is brown ale in your cappucino, it is mud in your eye and beautiful paintings, it’s a boutique hotel readying itself for a first visitor, sometime, any time, and a Christian bookshop teleported from Old Dublin, birth control models intact and graphic.

A drunk walks behind, muttering darkly. I wonder will he attack me. He remarks on the weather, I let him slip by, he mentions the cold again. This time I answer, because he isn’t a threat, or a photo opportunity, but just a genial young man in the cold, with a few too many drinks inside.

I walk back to the car through the super-real light. Tribal teens bored and posturing, a bag lady, a corporate coffee shop. I am not sure if this is the still-born future or the dawn of something real. I’ll keep on taking my photographs, and see what happens.

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