Jeremy Dickinson

collection, documentation, and history

I think we are all curious to know how many toy cars you own.

I don't know exactly, somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 probably. They are kept in plan chests in the studio, The ones I like to collect always look like they've been well played with and have their own history, usually unknown to me.

Could you tell me about the skyride series?

Like the building blocks, I use the string as a device to hold vehicles in space, usually caravans posing as cable cars. This is over scale green string originally found on a toy crane in my collection.

A lot of the vehicles in Autostack series remind me of faces. The wheels look like eyes and have characteristics in each; it’s like a family portrait.

In the smaller paintings, the groups are usually just simple selections that make sense together. There are groups of French built cars, cars with two tone colour schemes, a group of reds, and a group of high performance sports models.

Many collectors are looking for their favorite car in your painting.

I am not much of a real car fan or car nut. I wouldn't really be interested in going to a motor show, although I would be happy exploring a junkyard full of rusting wrecks. The work is more about collecting, documenting the collection, and also about the toys and their history.

I also heard you collect toy cactuses.

Yes, I have a collection of toy cactuses, mostly accessories to go with Wild West playsets. I also collect superballs, and souvenirs, bought on holidays. They sometimes appear in the paintings as 'street furniture' to go with the vehicles. I have been using superballs to make new map paintings. In 'Football League Wall Map (Division 3, Halifax, season 07-08)', the balls represent towns in the north surrounding my old hometown of Halifax, represented by a bigger ball. It's a map of the journeys (represented by the same kind of string as before) made by fans to the nearby towns to see away games. In theory, this is a structure which, like the wall maps, could be constructed.

When did your artistic practice and your car collecting meet in your career? Since I’ve known your works, you’ve always had cars in your paintings.

I was paintings maps around 15 -20 years ago, They were very detailed copies of UK 'Ordnance Survey' maps of area I knew well, mainly from childhood. It was a bit like therapeutic art. I also drew maps as a child, such as the housing estate where we lived, or the journeys from home to school or into town, usually drawing from memory.

A turning point?

Up to 1993, I had been painting these very tight maps. Then, I found these 6 x 4 inch colour photographs at a fleamarket. They were very familiar images of buses in my old hometown of Halifax. They dealt with the same issues of memory which the map paintings were doing, So I started doing these tiny realist portraits of the buses from the photos, removing unfamiliar landscape backgrounds. I realised there was something there dealing with memory, vehicles, colours, local identities. This work lead me to look again at my own small toy vehicles as well, which I'd always kept in boxes in the studio, but never really paid much attention to.