In the late 1970’s and early ’80’s I lived in Brixton and used to go to the Ritzy cinema quite a lot. This was before it was refurbished and relaunched as a multi-screen venue, the original building is an old music hall, one of several in and around Brixton. Anyway, the Ritzy was an independent cinema and didn’t really have ads before the film, you just went to watch the picture. The configuration of the space and the entrance doors, which had two glass porthole like panels in them, - the front door to the cinema itself were mostly glass - meant that at night, particularly in winter, lights from the traffic coming down the hill of Acre Lane opposite threw moving patterns across the screen (which was not curtained). Waiting for the film to start I’d just watch these shapes shifting across the screen. Of course it’s all very Platonic to think about them, but it’s the memory of those shifting and unfocussed patterns that spurred the drawings and the prints.

Richard Deacon