You cannot escape your first impression that this is a very blue painting. Everywhere seems full of blue. Look closely and you will see there are other colours sadly placed within the buildings, dark green and purple shadows. You are looking at the Lloyds building and the cheese grater looming tower above you on Fenchurch Street, both distinctive but in very different ways.
The cheese grater is geometric, angular and taller, the distinctive shape which gave it its nickname emphasizes the height and increases the looming effect when viewed from such close quarters. In contrast the Lloyds building is full of fluid curves, it seems that the individual components are fixed together like LEGO or stacks of glasses or plates in a bar stroke restaurant. Whereas the cheese grater is a solid mass, a whole, of magnificent undivided reflective surfaces and their reflections emphasize the materials used to create them as well as their distinctive shapes. The Cheese grater with its acres of polished glass in crisp geometry reflects its surroundings in the mirror-like reflection.
The Lloyds building in brushed steel curves which cast highlights in which you may see the surroundings, but you’re in no doubt just how curved and distinguished it is.
That Cerulean blue marbled sky is most exotic over a very English urban scene. Do Skies in England get that blue? Well yes obviously.
