When I first came to Los Angeles from London in 1977 I had just read Reyner Banham's book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, first published in 1971, which analyzes Los Angeles's urban form through four distinct environments: Surfurbia (the coast), the Foothills, the Plains of Id (the flatlands), and Autopia (the freeway system). However witnessing the landscape of the city in person was more spectacular than I had imagined: the scale and close proximity of the mountains, the sensation of traveling through the landscape on the freeways, the quality of the light and the colors.I set about trying to record some of those things. I made drawings sitting on the pier in Santa Monica of the people on the beach with the city and the mountains as a backdrop. I sat on Melrose Avenue and Rodeo Drive and drew fashionable storefronts. I made paintings of the freeways snaking through the landscape, juxtaposing the foothills covered in vegetation with the skyscrapers of Downtown. In 2025 I showed several of those works, made between 1977 and 1983, with Megan Mulrooney and it got me thinking of how much the city has changed, and not changed in the forty plus years since I originally drew and painted it. So I decided to make a new series of paintings that follow on from my earlier observations of the city. The 110 Freeway Through Downtown is part of this series. The skyline of Downtown L.A. has significantly changed but the mountains and foothills and even the freeway is essentially the same as when I arrived here almost 50 years ago.