This week I put the finishing touches to an exhibition of my work at Roots and Fruits, a vegetarian and vegan café in Leeds. I’ve been a regular customer at Roots and Fruits for several years and have always found it a friendly place to eat, alone or with friends, with a great atmosphere and delicious food. The café is located in the rather beautiful Grand Arcade, close to the popular Grand Theatre. It has been a venue for several exhibitions by local artists working in a variety of styles and so it seemed the perfect location to display a selection of my work.
The theme for the show was the angles and lines of manmade structures both old and new – from the imposing outline of an electricity pylon to the timbers of an old roof, from a view through an ornate railing to the patterned roof of a shopping centre. My aim was to show how these structures can be as alluring as art and as complex as nature. I was as much influenced by abstract painting as I was by other photographers.
It was a whole new experience working out not just the content of a show, but how the pieces should relate to each other to create a unified whole. Someone once said to me that I sometimes had a way of looking at things that they might never though of before. My hope with this exhibition is to look at the manmade in a way that people might not have previously considered and to see how there might be more to it than initially meets the eye.
I was very happy to be able to exhibit a collection of my work, especially in a venue that I particularly like and which does such a good job of enabling local artists to bring their work to a wider audience.
Damian Mark Whittle
Strange and Lost Visions 
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