This series of landscape paintings has been inspired by an England imagined in the novel The Day of the Triffids. It is a story that evokes an environment of chaos, adaptation and survival against an unstoppable charge of urban decay and reclamation of nature.
First published on 1951 written only three years after George Orwell’s 1984 this book deals with a world we recognize, yet is a nightmarish paradox of what we can comprehend. When it was first released the book held parallels of political concerns of the time, the cold war, the fear of biological experimentation and the threat of living in a nuclear age.
This story is a very British tragedy. London is portrayed as a lost and broken city that quickly and easily capitulates to its fate. Wyndham’s vision shows how easily man’s progress can be shattered by circumstance.
The metaphor of The Day of the Triffids can be applied to modern day living and today’s political concerns. Our news is dominated by headlines of crumbling society, religious hatred, killer viruses, and environmental climate change. Such visceral panoramas of a possible apocalypse are as easy to visualize.
The images that have been painted are far from fantastical. These scenes are not home to human or triffid, each scene is a believable desolate scenario, the banal backdrop against which catastrophic events take place.
View paintings from Christopher Campbell's Day of the Triffids /