A remarkable work of art which depicts a six mile radius of Dundee – including all its major landmarks – has been unveiled at a city museum.
Self-taught artist Carl Lavia, known as Sketch, spent three months creating the aerial ink drawing of the City of Discovery from memory, burning through 150 pens in the process.
The work – which maps Dundee from Broughty Ferry to the Tay Road Bridge, The Law and the West End – was unveiled on Thursday morning at The McManus and is the largest piece he has ever produced.
And Mr Lavia said he “fell in love” with the city whilst working on the project, which is the fourth artwork in an ambitious bid to create sketches of all 69 UK cities.
He has been obsessed with drawing maps, buildings and even fictional cities since his youth.
After recovering from the rare Guillane-Barré syndrome, a serious autoimmune disorder, he embarked on the epic artistic venture.
So far Mr Lavia has completed sketches of Edinburgh, Birmingham and Manchester in conjunction with project partner, photographer Lorna Le Bredonchel
Before embarking on the Dundee sketch, he had never even been to the city.
Revealing his finished work Mr Lavia said: “It took me three months to sketch the entire city of Dundee. When I actually first sketched the city I had never been to Dundee before.
“It is the largest cityscape of all the four cities I’ve done so far. I think my style is changing in terms of I wanted to have more of the city included. I wanted to have much more representation of different parts of the city.
“But I fell in love with Dundee, I really did, and I wanted to include as much as possible. Because of the panorama of the city, I was coming in via the Tay Road Bridge, I could see the entire city.
“I thought I couldn’t just do a part of it, I wanted to include all of it. So I just tried to cover as much as possible.”
