The Man in Yellow at Halifax Station, and How Attention Warps the World
I'm so pleased with this painting - though it is difficult to get a picture of it I'm totally satisfied with!
The Man in Yellow at Halifax Station is based on a photo that I took while I was heading to Rochdale from Halifax on a sunny October morning in 2025. His bright yellow suit in the autumn sun was too much to resist grabbing a picture and then painting it.
While I was painting the man, I spent a fair amount of time imagining what he would be seeing. He had a camera sitting idle in his hands, and his bag was clearly a camera bag, so I started to wonder what he might be looking at, across the valley. Was he mentally moving a frame around, looking for a shot? Or was he imagining his destination, planning out his approach? Maybe he was just looking at his phone, but why imagine something so boring?
I finished one painting session and took a photo of the progress I made. When I came back to it the next day, I realised that I'd painted the trees around his head so that they almost distorted about him, a halo. Like his attention was warping the image behind him. Like it had a physical impact on the world. I never considered fixing it. It felt like an intention I didn't know that I had. A little sign of what I had been thinking about while painting it. More, I continued the pattern and let other parts of the image warp or shift in colour around his body.
The valley and the buildings he was looking at were all warped by human intervention - human attention turned into action. Even the trees are left there at our discretion, with roads spanning from side to side at various heights. They're hard to see in the daylight, but you can easily see the headlights of the cars when it's dark.
I'm drawn to the idea that human attention might be a literal force in the universe, even if it just works as a metaphor for how important our attention is, both individually and collectively. For individuals, what we pay attention to can enrich us and empower us. We can find joy or sorrow in the mundane, we can compare ourselves with others or we can choose to focus on what we can do ourselves.
Maybe a little preachy? I'll go back to painting about it! If you're interested in where I end up, please sign up for my newsletter and I'm sure there will be other paintings that explore attention in the future!
An oil painting of a man, his back turned to the viewer, in a yellow suit standing at a train station. He stands at roughly a third from the right of the image. He is in a bright yellow suit, and the sun is highlighting the folds in it. He wears a camera bag over his right shoulder, and he is looking out over the valley side from the platform of Halifax train station. He can see at increasing distance a blue factory, a white chimney, and a green valley side. On the left of the image, a station building wall can be seen. The top contains the wooden victorian-style station canopy, and at the bottom we can see the platform.
