London · 2025
London Big Ben small was created in London during my visit to Westminster.
This original has found its home. See it on ArtMajeur.
The subject
Big Ben is really the bell; the tower that holds it is the Elizabeth Tower. But everyone calls the whole thing Big Ben — and this small, splashed version is my shorthand for it.
The tower stands at the north end of the Palace of Westminster, Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin’s great Gothic Revival parliament, finished in 1859. The Great Bell inside — the real ’Big Ben’ — has struck the hours over the Thames ever since.
What interests me is less the architecture than the silhouette: that unmistakable clock face and crocketed spire against the sky. So I let the colour burst around it — a spray of red, blue and yellow thrown behind the ink drawing.
It is a sensation of the tower rather than a survey of it: the thing you recognise in half a second, from across a square or across the world.
Big Ben in a handful of marks — the clock, the spire, and a spray of colour for all the noise and life around it.
The ink keeps the drawing honest — the clock face, the pinnacles — while the watercolour is deliberately loose, flung on and left to run.
Small and bright, it is the version of Big Ben you carry in your head rather than the one in the guidebook.
See also · London The London Big Ben · London Big Ben Sensation · Small London