Denzil Forrester in Lives Less Ordinary

Lots of great work in 'Lives Less Ordinary: Working-Class Britain Re-seen' at Two Temple Place in London (25th January 2025 – 20th April 2025).

Denzil Forrester's Boys in the Hood (1989) is one of his early paintings that 'encapsulate the electric atmosphere of dub parties he attended in London during the 1980s. Based on quick pastel and charcoal sketches made in clubs and dancehalls, they were created to convey "the energy of the crowd, the movement, the action," and the liberating power of music. Forrester's work serves as an evocative archive of Black working-class nightlife in Britain, as well as the Windrush generation's expression and preservation of their diasporic roots through Jamaican Dub culture' (text from exhibition).

In an ArtCornwall interview Forrester has recalled this time in the 1980s:

'I grew up in Stoke Newington and Hackney, and a lot of the paintings...are to do with the nightclubs in the Dalston area, mainly Jah Shaka sound system; mainly the dub reggae sound systems in the early days... I used to go to the London nightclubs and make drawings to the length of a record, which is about 3 or 4 minutes.

So I'll have A1 paper, it's dark, and I can't really see what I'm doing, so I'm going for the movement, the action, the expression of the people. I'll make the drawings, and take them to the studio and use them for making the big paintings in the studio... London was a very active, vibrant, colourful place then. It was cheaper and freer to live there then too. You could squat a house. So I was in a squat for about 5 to 6 years in Clissold Road. It was easier because an artist could have lots of space. And there was an energy there. Particularly the dub nightclubs. Jah Shaka, the Rastafarians, basically they'd dress up, they'd dance and play their monosystems, and I wanted to capture that energy'.

See previously: Denizil Forrester's Jah Shaka painting at Tate Britain