Andrew Holmes' drawings, all executed with coloured pencils, are more real than photographs. Recently, he has celebrated the romance of oil and petrol vehicles.

Andrew Holmes is Britain's leading SuperRealist artist. He is also an architect (and one of the original Richard Rogers four-person practice), a long time unit master at the Architectural Association and latterly at the University of Westminster. For three decades he has been working on, among other things (including 50 Penguin book jackets), a 100-picture series called Gas Tank City. It records the storage tanks, trucks and trailers of the highways of the West Coast desert and that artificial urban oasis, Los Angeles, which Holmes has visited annually since he was a student at the AA. These, says Holmes, have replaced such traditional buildings as the barn and have, in some ways, become architecture. If that sounds like an echo of Reyner Banham and Archigram and Cedric Price and their interest in architectural transience and mobility, that is because it is. But it is also to put too architectural a gloss on his work which is sheerly beautiful. Holmes says anyway that the early Rogers connection is more relevant. 'The truck epitomises more what those early ideas were originally about': simple steel construction, ready-mades, ad hoc-ness, design-as-accruing.

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There is an obsessive quality about deciding to do exactly 100 paintings. Holmes says not really: you should look at it like ten music albums each with ten tracks. And there is something clearly obsessive and certainly astonishing about the way he executes the paintings, most of them containing reflections and shiny chrome, in Derwent coloured pencils with only the skies air-brushed in at the beginning. Holmes says disarmingly he is more comfortable working with pencil than slow-drying paint--and he works from 35mm slides which he checks out using a jeweller's loupe because it enables him to see into the shadows better than with a print. All this could be just elaborate photographic realism. But this is SuperRealism. Holmes' has an instinct for strangeness in apparent banality, an instinct for stunning beauty in what his gallery calls 'the compulsive reading of transit steel architecture pumping through the urban desert'. Holmes' site is at www.realisticpictures.co.uk.