Fighting Cocks

Fighting Cocks

(acrylic on board, 25 x 25 cm)

A New Year dawns, one in which I fear for the safety and prosperity of my country, so  I wish you, my Regular Reader, the best you wish you yourself. Here's tae us!

Dispiriting though life may occasionally seem, there is always Art to see us through. This is a painting I finished late last year. It reflects my fairly recent interest in what I find is called the Northern School, a style of painting unashamedly derived from that of  L. S. Lowry. I'd rather dismissed it in the past as the "Flat Cap & Whippet School" and I do despair sometimes at the proliferation of paintings of miners going to the pit painted by people who clearly are far too young to remember such things. Ersatz Norman Cornish. 

However, I've always had a liking for the grubbier parts of town and the interesting vernacular architecture of pubs in the area I grew up in. It's not nostalgia: I don't want to go back to the Good Old Days, which really weren't that Good. In the 1980s I took some photographs of old pubs, many of them now either demolished or put to different use, and The Fighting Cocks is one such. It used to be a boozer in Newcastle, but has subsequently been converted to (I think) a design practice, with a glass extension added to the end wall.

I really like the grand frontage and thought I could make a successful picture out of it, as I did with The Portland and, to a lesser extent, Burton House. In the past, I would never have included figures, but as I grow older, my memory starts to fill these scenes with archetypes and it seems only right to put them in my pictures.

Cynical Nostalgia

General Dealer WIP
(acrylic on board, 10 x 10 in)

Paintings of nostalgia sell well in the North East; raggy kids playing football in the back lane, men in caps and mufflers going to the match, smoky chimneys, that sort of thing. There are several artists round here who have made a very good living out of pandering to the public desire for things they think they remember fondly. 

Me, I've always avoided painting pictures like that. I paint what I want to paint and mostly that doesn't include the Tyne Bridge or Memories of Old Gateshead or even Flat Caps and Whippets. I've often threatened to produce a series of Flat Cap & Whippet Pictures just to see how they'd do, but the will wasn't really there. Learning recently that one of the most successful painters of nostalgia is seriously depressed because he doesn't want to paint Men Going to the Match or Smoky Chimneys by the Docks ever again but can't stop because he needs to make the sales, definitely strengthened my resolve.

Until today. Gateshead Art Society has a programme (that I have a hand in deciding) to give members a prod in creative thinking should they need it. Quite often, unless it's a talk or a video, I go my own way and just get on with whatever I'm currently painting. This week, however, I noticed that the suggested activity was "PAINTING FOR POSTER COMPETITION". This is to remind members that someone's painting will eventually be chosen to appear on the poster for the club's Annual Exhibition at Xmas, so making a start on something suitable might be a good idea.

Now I've never been on the poster, so it suddenly came to me that I might as well have a go. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. But what to paint? Recently I've been storing photographs of old bits of Gateshead, mostly now demolished. This is the sort of subject matter the great Norman Cornish specialised in, though in his case it was his home town of Spennymoor. While I hate the painters of nostalgia who aren't even old enough to remember anything of the things they paint, Cornish lived that life and I respected his right to paint what he knew. Well, I thought, I was born and brought up in the Gateshead that no longer survives and I have clear memories of it, so maybe I have the right to paint a little of what I remember too.

And so today I started this Work in Progress, using an old monochrome photograph of a shop on Tower Street. Colour added from memory, and yes, that blurred shape was the figure of a woman carrying a shopping bag. She turned out to be in slightly the wrong position, so had to be scrubbed out. She'll go back in once I've made more of the building and the snow (added to the scene because it's Xmas).

During the coffee break, someone asked me about the painting and all I could think of was to say it was "cynical nostalgia". It seems I haven't forgiven myself yet.