'Atlantic', Coldharbour Lane

In this monochrome drawing, customers are depicted drinking, talking, playing pool and listening to music in the Atlantic pub on the corner of Brixton's Atlantic Road and Coldharbour Lane. Some residents regarded the Atlantic as a 'racist pub': a former customer recalled that 'the white man who owned the pub would break your glass after you had finished using it.' When the Brixton uprising broke out in 1981, the Atlantic was one of the first buildings to be attacked.

Mike Hawthorne based this work on an earlier drawing that he completed in 1980. A self-taught artist, Hawthorne has been drawing and painting since childhood. The first nine years of his life were spent in Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

Hawthorne described his early influences as MAD magazines, illustrations of the American Civil War and television newsreels of Biafra and Vietnam. His paintings also draw on European medieval traditions of depicting heaven and hell. Since 1975 Hawthorne has worked in London, creating rock, reggae and jazz visuals and underground 'comix'.