Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It...

Thanks to a worrying amount of the white stuff coming down I've had to cancel the aptly-named Saturday Art Day. Someone I know kindly abbreviated this to S.A.D- and the Monday Art.... well, you get the picture.
This week- I can go to The Ball! I've probably sold two pictures at the Seegallery in Rossendale and one at Colin Jellicoe in Manchester.
All three were small collaged drawings of Manchester views- the Cornerhouse, Central Library, and Sunlight House.
Encouraged by the carrot of success and driven by the whip of a rapidly diminishing log-pile, I finished another one yesterday- of Deansgate.
The building's in collaged parcel paper, the drawing's in pen and ink and- spot this- I've included myself rummaging in my bag for my sketchbook. Or was it my camera?

Pictures: Deansgate Girls, Sunlight House Distant.

“Baby It’s Cold Outside!”

It certainly is, and they say there’s more to come, so any artwork en plein air has to wait ‘til the warmer weather.
Even when sketching in the car there’s about a fifteen minute threshold before my hands get cold. Turner lashed himself to a mast to see the effects of a storm at sea, but I see no advantage to wearing a hogshair shirt and beating myself with a bunch of paintbrushes in order to produce.

The last few weeks have seen The Ladies Who Sketch group gathering in each other’s warm kitchens…. I’ve been drawing friends’ kitchens for a couple of years now. At heart it's a place of work and I like the tools, the gadgets and the clutter. And the tea. And the cake.

"Another Year Over and...."

Well, there goes another one, and, looking back, 2008 was artistically quite successful.
Apart from the usual activities, I sold six or seven paintings, landed a big commission, and spent a month tutoring Painting Holidays in France
And I found three new galleries to show my work.
The friendly and un-po-faced Seegallery in Crawshawbooth- Rossendale, Lancashire- took several paintings off my hands. These included scenes of Manchester, and a view of the 'iconic' Salford Lads Club, as featured on a Smith's album cover.
Seegallery has a bit of a rock-n-roll edge to it- we originally called in to see their Ray Lowry (cartoonist, Private Eye, NME) exhibition. Sadly, Ray had died only a few days previous to our visit, and we felt touched to be invited to leaf through huge binders full of his unframed work- hundreds of images.. our silence broken by the occasional snort of laughter and "Here, look at this one!" Prices were incredibly reasonable and we treated ourselves to a cartoon about Elvis and The Jordanaires.
PAD Gallery in Preston has also asked for work and I'm pleased with my picture of a discount carpet warehouse. This building's in a part of town which has been allowed to run down, a deliberate ploy so that the public will be relieved when it's knocked down and 'improved'! Preston has a fine record for this kind of insensitive Urban Renewal- ' the only town with a ring-road running through its centre' ( historian AJP Taylor).
The county of Devon has a more immediate beauty and visiting the 'in-laws' can now be combined with a bit of business at The Hind Street Gallery in Ottery St. Mary. Ottery's main claim is that Coleridge lived here, and I've done his portrait in my alter-ego as window painter .
For this gallery I doggedly tackled a painting of nearby Exeter Cathedral. It's a complex structure- how many saints in niches did they actually need? I drew at least 63, each one of 'em different, some with skirts, and cross-legged!
These small successes of last year are, of course, meagre pickings from the vast table that has Damien Hirst as King Henry VIII at its head, and myself as a mouse in the wainscotting- but I'm cheered, heartened and motivated and I will venture forward to see if anyone's dropping any crumbs my way!

Ho-Ho-Ho!

At this time, the mind turns happily to all things festive.
Pity the poor window-painter- not myself this year, but my accomplice, Al. It's one of our busiest times and the red paint's slapped on like nobody's business.
None of our customers wants their shop window decorating too early for Christmas, nor too late, so it's a frenzied period of activity resulting in a sort of madness- a blur of holly, a whirl of snowmen, a sweetness of Nativities, forests of fir trees- and the dreaded favourite, Pere Noel, who, for this stressful period, is often referred to in irreverant and colourful terminology involving size and mother's marital status.
We work from photos and old cards. It's difficult to find a plumptious, white-bearded old fella in a red suit to pose while we paint, and the best-drawn images of Santa are the ones from the old Coca-Cola adverts. The offending bottle in his hand ( no wonder he's fat!) is replaced by a star or a dolly. Or, on last week's pharmacie window, a blood-pressure gauge.
I see that this year, Al's photcopied a picture of Brian Blessed as a possible model.... he'll have to bleach that beard, and add a few extra locks.
Other window painters crawl out of the woodwork around now and we see their handiwork. Some are ok-ish, but bad taste does abound in the city of Rennes. A semi-naked woman dressed as Father Christmas on a bike, smoking a tab somehow lacks the festive ring of Decking the Halls, Awaying in Mangers , and bringing pine logs hither.
And to Slade's perennial questions ' Does he ride a red-nosed reindeer, does he turn up on his sleigh?'- well, 'Yes, if that's what you'd like on your windows, M'sieur, Madame!'

Early Learning

It's a Wednesday and high time to have another 'Kidzart'. I've been reading the excellent 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain' , so instead of doing what are essentially craft-based projects with the young 'uns we decide to give them a workshop that will, hopefully, get the creative half of their grey matter working.
We start off by copying drawings which are upside-down... we chose cats and dogs. The fact that the drawing is reversed abstracts the familiar subject matter into shapes, angles and lines. It also discourages using the usual symbols- by this I mean the tendency to think ' this is what an eye's like- round!' , or 'this is how I draw a tail!' . We're careful, also, not to name any of these bits.
The first drawings go well, but they tire after a while-poor mites! and start reverting to what they think or know is there. Or what they believe should be visibly there, eg a dog has four legs so I give it four even if I can't see them all.
We have a break and then they stand at easels like 'real artists' and do a painting of yours truly lying on a couch. We're amazed at how well they work- for forty minutes- remember these are youngsters aged four to eight only- and produce some great pictures. They all have an instinctive sense of design and even if the figure's badly placed in the beginning it's balanced out afterwards, somehow.
Well done Lawrence, Mathieu, Thibaud and Manon! And thanks to their Mums. And for the cake!

Phew!

After a pause from this blog I can now reveal to you, dear readers, that for the last few weeks I’ve been working non-stop on a series of paintings of Salford for an interior design company- an excellent commission, and- frighteningly, my first of this magnitude.

They’re to be reproduced , much bigger, for an outlet of (so my pizza-literate friends tell me!) the most up-market of pizza restaurant chains.

And with a short deadline, small wonder that I’ve been akin to a headless chicken!

For starters, photos had to be taken of the area, both of the spanking-new, trendy Salford quays with its bridge and Lowry Museum , and the old Salford… factories, mills, streets of red brick.

Out of hundreds of photos I found the best sixty, eventually whittling it down to a dozen or so, choosing a good variety of subject matter. Colour, too had to be considered – I didn’t want to use the same palette on each.

I worked in a mixture of media which gave me the grand sweeps of colour and the delicate architectural detail I wanted to convey.

I was pleased with the results- I’d have liked a little longer to do the ‘ pizzapics’, but I stuck with what I knew would work well and I feel I’ve captured some of the atmosphere of a city under metamorphosis.

It’s been important to me also that I record the changing scene before the charwoman that is regeneration arrives, takes up her Mr. Muscle, and cleans away the grime- and some of the character- of centuries.

Pictured are small details of the work, more to follow!

Everybody's Mate, Rolf.

Sometime late in 2006...
An Art job comes through from the excellent Axis Art website. It's the BBC who want North West artists to join Rolf Harris in Manchester for the day. I'm over in France and feel I can't be fussed- then I decide it'll be interesting . I email examples of my Manchester paintings and I'm taken on.
Rolfie's doing a programme on L.S. Lowry, culminating in Piccadilly Gardens, with himself and the chosen artists painting the scene that Lowry depicted in 1954.
The Beeb give us details of Lowry's palette of colours in case we choose to use the same. That's Prussian Blue, Vermilion, Yellow Ochre, White and Black.
I've never used this combination before and have avoided the all-pervasive Prussian, but when I try them out on test-pieces I'm pleasantly surprised. I leave out the black- 'not colour but the absence of light'.
The results are instant Lowry! I'll use them on the day if they're suitable.

January 2007
All the artists meet the BBC folk in the cafe on Piccadilly Gardens and we're given some idea of how the day will go. We're to be filmed working in a big marquee in front of the building. As we file out , an affable Rolf , swaddled in ten feet of colourful scarf, holds open the door for us.
Out in the open-sided marquee- after Rolf's foot-stomping rendition of 'Sunarise'- no-one can see as much of the scene as Lowry could. A mushrooming of modern buildings pushes us further into the square, so I decide to paint just the slice I can see without scanning.
We have around three or four hours . The BBC and the artists are jolly and friendly, despite the cold, and Rolf's doggedly working on an intensively coloured panorama from photos taken in dramatic evening light.
The artists are working in various mediums- charcoal, oils, acrylics, and - don't ask me how- mosaic and batik!
I meet some nice students from the Fine Art Courses at Manchester Uni. Although we're cordoned off, the public are close by and I loose count of the number of times I hear "Have you guessed what it is yet?" shouted out. But our Rolf's a patient man and poses for endless photos with complete strangers as the day goes by.
I think it's really naff and embarrassing to have your photo taken with Rolf Harris and I wouldn't ever do that, but later on I think 'well, everyone else is and I might regret it later'- so I do!
All the artists are filmed and interviewed towards the end of the day. It's nerve-wracking and we have to carry on painting as we speak (two different sides of my brain, if you don't mind, Mr. Producer!).
I say my bit, feeling daunted by the previous artist's encyclopedic knowledge of Lowry and I know that my paltry observations won't be chosen.
When the programme goes out in March, they have picked my bit and tho' I look pinched and my voice is cracked and ancient with the cold, I say what I really wanted to point out. I tell how it's easy to paint a beautiful picture of, say, a vase of flowers, but that Lowry depicted the ugly, the everyday and the overlooked, and he transmitted their strange beauty to the observer.
A word about Rolf..... I know he isn't popular with some... well, he's enthusiastic and approachable, and who said Art should be depicted in a po-faced way, to be enjoyed only by intellectuals?! His is one of the few TV programmes showing the craft and technique behind paintings.
There's nothing wrong with being populist, and as a schoolkid I was greatly encouraged by his Big Brush Paintings.. .encouraged down that chosen path to a life of penury- thanks, Rolf, haha!!

"When I was young I did not see the beauty of the Manchester streets. I used to go out into the country painting landscapes and the like. Then one day I saw it... I saw the beauty of the streets and the crowds" L.S. Lowry 1972.

Pictured: Lowry's Piccadilly Gardens, Rolf at work with myself being filmed, my own Piccadilly Gardens, Rolf and me!