Tom Carment Womerah Lane

This is the view from next to our back gate, on an autumn evening. The painting shows the back of a row of terraces. In the late 1970s these were boarding houses, mainly occupied by single men. I used to visit an old man there, called Geoffrey Fox, who lived in one room with a gas ring on the floor. His small living space was stacked with suitcases of table linen, which he sold from door to door, and hundreds of books. He had a reproduction of a Vincent van Gogh painting, from Arles, pinned to the wall.

The lit-up window in the painting is a memory of him.

- Tom Carment, 2014