Some buildings don’t just stand; they pulse. Battersea Power Station is one of them. It has always been a place of energy – once, in the raw, industrial sense, lighting up half of London, filling the air with heat and power. Now, it hums with a different kind of charge, something more intangible but just as alive. For me, the building has never stopped generating energy. It pours out life, throwing fireworks across the Thames, crackling with the past and the present in equal measure.

I feel it when I walk through the place, through the restored halls and reimagined spaces. My father worked here when it was being dismantled – saw it stripped down to its bones, its power extinguished. But I see him everywhere in its new form, in the brickwork, in the steel, in the sheer presence of the place. It was never just a power station. It was a force. And it still is.

Painting it was not about stillness. It was about movement, about energy barely contained. The brushwork had to follow that – bold strokes, deep textures, colours that vibrate against one another. The building itself, standing defiant against the London sky, its chimneys like monolithic sentinels, holds a charge that refuses to fade. The river carries its reflection, stretching it, distorting it, making it flicker like an electric current in the water.

By day, it is a monument to reinvention, its new glass and steel catching the light. By night, it becomes something else, a glowing ember on the banks of the Thames, radiating memory and possibility. I wanted that duality in the painting – the solidity of history and the spark of the now.

For me, Battersea Power Station is more than architecture. It is energy, past and present fusing into something unstoppable. It doesn’t just stand there; it surges. And every time I paint it, I feel it all over again – that same power, that same charge. The building may have changed, but its fire never went out.