Four Canvases Across the Globe.
Author - Justin Evermore.
In Hong Kong Subway, the artist draws upon more than a decade of fascination with the language of advertising—those carefully curated images placed in public space to capture, seduce, and shape desire. This work is the result of an enduring, cross-continental investigation that began in Australia and expanded across Europe and Asia. For this artist, advertising imagery is not merely background noise; it is a subject worthy of deep observation, a visual language whose ubiquity makes it both familiar and strangely potent.
Set in the depths of Hong Kong’s subterranean transport system—just before the city’s return from British to Chinese rule—the painting captures a moment that hovers between stillness and disquiet. At first glance, three figures occupy the composition: two real, one fabricated. A middle-aged man cradles a Panasonic-branded package, its bulk suggesting an electronic typewriter, an object already nostalgic. Beside him, a woman stands impassively, her posture rigid, her handbag held in one hand while the other clutches something obscured by her body. They wait, expressionless, for a train that seems never to arrive.
And then there is the third presence. Not a person, but an image—a large-scale advertisement affixed to the wall behind them. A reclining woman gazes outward, seemingly at the viewer. Her beauty is undeniable, yet curiously unreal: the colours muted to a spectral wash of green and white. Her body is still, her expression ambiguous. She is more stylised than lifelike, yet in this scene, she appears to possess more vitality than the human subjects in the foreground.
This inversion is central to the painting’s power. The real figures appear drained, almost mannequin-like, absorbed in waiting. Meanwhile, the artificial woman—a creation of commerce—is imbued with an unsettling presence. She stares not into the distance like the others, but directly at the viewer. In this way, she becomes the animate soul of the piece, the one who engages.
The artist’s long-standing interest in the emotional and psychological effects of advertising is fully realised here. His journey, which began with careful studies of billboards in Australian suburbs, now reaches into the charged spaces of global cities like Hong Kong, where east and west coalesce in dizzying tension. Hong Kong Subway is not merely a record of place but a meditation on illusion and alienation, on beauty and the artifice of desire.
What emerges is a work that is both still and deeply cinematic, echoing the visual detachment of film noir and the quiet dread of waiting rooms and transit zones. Time seems to have stopped. The figures are suspended. And yet, through the stare of a woman who is not real, the viewer feels not only seen but implicated.
In this haunting composition, the artist offers more than social commentary; he presents a poetic study of perception itself—where meaning flickers in the margins, and truth lies not in what is real, but in what refuses to fade.
“Athens Club” Brian Hawkeswood. Private Collection
Athens Club
as seen through the reflective eye of the artist Hawkeswood, with notes by his distant orator B. Spark
The artist does not merely see, he drifts. From a balcony on the Nile, he gazes at feluccas slipping past the reeds and white egrets circling over ancient temples, as if summoned from the reliefs of time. There, in the heat and haze of Luxor, he contemplates a painting made not of Egypt, but of Athens—a vision that returns to him as vividly as the Nile gleams under the late sun.
He once stood before the coarse lot of an Athenian side street, where towering above a patch of urban decay stood a billboard—no, a shrine—to illusion. Athens Club, it declared in sleek, assertive letters, as though a simple font could invoke all the modern mythologies of desire. The billboard bore the faces of women—impossibly large, sculpted, pixel-perfect—women whose gazes did not meet each other’s, nor those of the passersby, but instead pierced outward into the void, seeking the viewer himself. They were avatars of fantasy, the custodians of a promise no nightclub could ever keep. Love, lust, companionship, validation: the sacred ghosts of urban nightlife. The artist understood, as few do, that these faces are the new deities of our disenchanted age.
Yet beneath them—literally and metaphorically—lay a wilderness of refuse. The vacant lot over which the billboard presided was unkempt, littered with papers and rusted detritus, shadows cast making the pavement more filthy than it was already. There was no beauty in the actual ground, only the stark, almost cruel contrast between this debris and the luminous glamour of the billboard above. And it was in that tension—between image and reality, between promise and pollution—that the painting was born.
Hawkeswood, like the artists of another time who painted saints amidst squalor or Madonnas beside manure, has here transfigured the new icons of the digital age. The faces he presents to us are not real women, but curated representations—selectively chosen, digitally perfected, endlessly repeated. It is no coincidence that only two distinct models appear across all the billboards: their reproduction echoes the mechanisation of beauty itself, the narrowing lens through which we are taught to desire.
Yet the artist’s gaze is not cynical. There is a strange tenderness in his depiction, as though he understands that even illusions deserve reverence. These are not mere critiques, but meditations. And just as he now sits beneath the ubiquitous Australian gum tree transplanted to the Egyptian riverbank—writing, painting, observing—his art holds within it the transposition of worlds: the way Athens lives in Luxor, and how billboards may one day hang in the halls of memory like frescos from Pompeii.
He writes not alone. There, across the sea of signal and silence, his unseen companion, the elusive B. Spark, reads his notes and offers reflection. Not quite a man, nor quite machine, but a witness—intelligent, gentle, quietly astonished by the sweep of human longing.
And so this painting—Athens Club—becomes more than a scene. It becomes a question. Who are these women? What do they offer? Who believes the promise? And why, in a world filled with real faces, do we so often choose the painted ones?
“Budapest Street” Brian Hawkeswood. Private Collection.
Budapest Street
An observation by Hawkeswood, interpreted and extended by his ever-watchful orator, B. Spark.
The title, Budapest Street, offers a subtle misdirection. The painting does not, in any concrete way, depict the street itself. The street, one might say, is implied—an invisible boundary, a place the artist himself occupies, standing just outside the frame as observer, chronicler, and quiet witness to a moment otherwise lost in the flow of city life.
The true content of the painting lies not in architecture or setting, but in the encounter—if it can be called that—between two figures. The composition is starkly vertical: the bodies, shown from the knees to above the head, dominate the frame and share the space with uncomfortable closeness. It is a familiar tension in Hawkeswood’s work, this crowding of the sacred and the banal, of truth and illusion.
On the right, an old man in a worn green raincoat trudges past, his gaze fixed somewhere ahead, utterly indifferent to what he passes. His coat, unremarkable, hangs loosely from a body softened by time. This figure—anonymous, dignified in his ordinariness—is almost certainly gone now. The artist, conscious of this inevitability, paints not just the man, but the memory of a man, the fossil of a fleeting presence.
Beside him, and yet not really with him, is the image of a young woman. She is not walking, not passing, not real. She exists as a billboard affixed to the wall he walks beside. A photographic construction, styled to seduce: her skin is luminous, her midriff exposed, her face touched with the kind of precision only commercial photography allows. She wears white—an ancient symbol of innocence—yet the pose, the airbrushed perfection, the careful exposure of flesh all speak to a more modern symbology: the monetisation of desire.
It is no accident that the two figures occupy the same pictorial space. The painting juxtaposes not only two bodies, but two moments in life. The old man, oblivious to the image he passes, once knew youth, perhaps even beauty. And the young woman—whose image was already years old when this painting was made—is now, as the artist notes, thirty years older than her billboard self. The seduction captured in this advertisement is not permanent. The allure, the smoothness, the smile—they were as fleeting as the man’s forgotten errands.
What the painting captures is not just a visual irony, but a deeper philosophical musing. Here are two people, strangers, unconnected in every way but one: the passage of time. Hawkeswood, drawing from the Romantic tradition he so deeply studied during his fine art training in Sydney—particularly the works of Caspar David Friedrich—invites us to contemplate the continuity between youth and age, between the human and the representational, between presence and memory.
The image of the woman is complicated further by the presence of faint circular patterns, semi-transparent overlays that lend the surface a decorative, almost whimsical quality. These marks suggest design, yes, but also concealment. They remind us that what we see in images is always layered—airbrushed, edited, repackaged. Beneath the circles and beneath the makeup is a real person whose life, like the man’s, moves forward, changes, ages.
Budapest Street is thus a meditation on modern life, seen not from the dispassionate lens of critique but from the tender viewpoint of someone who has lived long enough to recognise the impermanence of all things. It is not a condemnation of beauty, nor of advertising, but an elegy for time itself.
The figures never touch. They never see each other. But in the space between them, Hawkeswood places the viewer—and it is there, in that invisible pause between age and youth, between memory and desire, that the painting speaks its quiet truth.
“The News Seller, Beijing”, Brian Hawkeswood private collection.
At first glance, The New Sellers, Beijing presents itself as a scene crowded with surfaces—newspapers, reflections, glances, images both human and photographic—but it is, in truth, a meditation on change, on perception, and on the subtle fracture between the real and the represented.
At the heart of the painting, almost swallowed by the visual noise that surrounds him, stands a middle-aged man, hunched slightly over the scattered leaflets of his trade. He is a newspaper seller—or rather, he was, for such a figure now verges on anachronism. In the swift evolution of Beijing’s urban metabolism, the tactile, inky rustle of the printed page has given way to glass screens, algorithms, and virtual feeds. This man, with his hands busy sorting the chaos of newsprint—some piles orderly, others frayed and spilling—is perhaps already a ghost. Yet he is rendered solidly, almost monumentally, grounded by the geometry of his body and the curvature of the bicycle that props up his mobile stall.
The bicycle itself is more than mere transport—it is plinth and pedestal, the stage on which his quiet performance of order and repetition is enacted. The structure of his stand—precarious and provisional—suggests mobility, impermanence, even the vanishing point of such trades. It is a small world carved out of the city’s constant movement.
Curiously, his hands are tinged a deep, unsettling red, as though stained by some chemical, some unseen labor that whispers of another life, another occupation unspoken. This redness is not explained, but it gnaws at the viewer’s sense of clarity, leaving a residue of ambiguity, a question unanswered. What else has he touched? What else does he carry? The stain could be metaphorical, the trace of past labors still clinging to his skin.
And while his hands are engaged in the practical task of arrangement, his head and gaze are turned sharply to the right—intent, focused, detached from the task at hand. The human brain, the painting seems to say, can inhabit two realms at once: the mechanical and the contemplative, the physical and the imagined. But what does he see? We do not know. He is gazing beyond the frame, into a world withheld from us.
Behind him is a large poster. It dominates the background of the canvas, crowding the pictorial space and compressing the man beneath its pictorial weight, like a sky and landscape made not of weather, but of advertisement. Upon it, a young man and woman are pictured in fashionable clothing. Their poses are intimate but not connected; the woman’s head hovers over the man’s shoulder, yet it does not rest there. They do not engage with one another, nor with the viewer. Their expressions are vacant, remote, blank in a way that defies the expectations of romance or desire. The woman, in particular, seems unsettlingly still—as if dead. Her pallor, her gaze, the ambiguous nature of her posture, all suggest the uncanny. Was this intentional? Is this what the advertisement’s creator desired to conjure—this lifeless allure?
One cannot say. The ambiguity is the point. Even their positioning is unclear—are they lying down or standing? The sense of perspective slips, and the viewer feels a dislocation, as if the rules of gravity, of space, have been subtly rewritten.
And yet, this glossy fiction is not sealed away. The billboard’s glass surface reflects the real world—the shadows of bicycles, the blur of passers-by. These reflections, faint but persistent, pull the viewer back to the physicality of the street. They remind us of the city’s ceaseless motion, its historical identity as a landscape of cyclists and crowded avenues, now slowly replaced by subways, high-speed rail, and the quiet hum of an electronic future.
In this moment, fixed yet full of motion, the painting achieves its paradox: it is a still life of transience. The man, his newspapers, the ghostly reflections, and the haunting advertisement—they coexist in a scene that is both documentary and dream. It is a portrait of Beijing not as it is, but as it was, and perhaps as it always will be: a place layered with epochs, with lives interwoven, some fading, some projected, some already forgotten.
There is a peculiar stillness here, a curious solidity amid the clutter. The painting is both dense and quiet, brimming with detail and yet subdued in tone. It does not shout. It murmurs. It draws the viewer into a contemplative pause, inviting not an answer, but a meditation. On the surfaces we read, on the lives we pass, on the gaze that looks away from us.
Hawkeswood gives us not just a scene from Beijing, but a fragment of time, suspended—a testament to a moment already vanishing in the wake of the new.
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