North of England Art Club Exhibition 2023

 

Edinburgh Florist (WIP)

Edinburgh Florist (WIP)

(Oil on canvas, 30 x 30 cm)

Nice to finally get back to the studio at North of England Art Club after a break of over two years and get some oil painting done. Of course, after a lay-off of over two years, it was a struggle to get the caps off the tubes of paint and I’d forgotten how messy my hands get with oil paint. Still, I enjoyed getting to grips with the old medium again, an experience made even better by amiable chat with members I haven't seen for a long time.

Still Life in a Cupboard

 Still Life in a Cupboard

(Acrylic and collage on board, 8x8 in)

A competition set for members by the North of England Art Club, helped me get out of a week of Empty Brain Syndrome. They asked for paintings on the theme of The Things in My Cupboard and I spent a happy hour or so assembling various objects inside an imaginary Photoshop cupboard.

When it came to start painting, I found myself doubting that the rough assemblage would work as a painting, but as is often the case, things can be made to work once you get going. In the end I rather enjoyed working on it, especially once I'd found a suitable collage piece for the orange jug to replace the pattern on the original.

It’s available for sale at £85, by the way, including P&P in the UK. Contact me through my website (see Sidebar) if you're interested.

The Seafood Shack

The Seafood Shack
(Acrylic on board, 20 x 20 cm)

The North of England Art Club has announced another of their exhibitions of 20 x 20 cm paintings at the Bondgate Gallery in Alnwick. The theme is "People, Figures and Faces", the paintings must all be 20 x 20 cm and offered for sale at a fixed price of £50 I showed two pictures last year and sold one of them, so I've decided to submit two more this year (although there's no limit on the number I could enter).

This is the first. I found working in acrylic on board a little different to working on canvas and the size made the detailed subject a bit tricky, but overall it's worked out OK, I think.

Annual Show

Clouds over Holy Island
(Oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in)

Sunset, Holy Island
(OIl on canvas, 12 x 16 in)

I dropped these two paintings off today at the gallery on Westgate Road. They'll be going up later today when the North of England Art Club's annual show is hung.

Private View is this coming Friday, 18.45 to 20.00:

St John Lee

St John Lee Churchyard
(0.5 Micron marker in A5 sketchbook)

Occasionally, the North of England Art Club organises a day out for members to do some drawing, painting, whatever. This used to happen a lot a few years ago but the main instigators have fallen by the wayside. Pity, because they used to be good fun. Still, here was one on Monday and off I went in a friend's car.

I've seen the road sign to "St John Lee" hundreds of times: it's on the roundabout on the main road just north of Hexham, but I knew nothing more than that.

It turned out to be a really nice little church tucked away in the depths of the country with a long hut nearby that they hire out for groups such as ours. By the time I got there, Ian was setting up his table outside to begin cooking sausages, so I wandered around the church and graveyard taking a few photographs until the sausage sandwiches were ready.

Two sausage sandwiches later, I was off into the graveyard to draw these headstones. The one in the foreground was an interesting lesson in the general impossibility of immortality. After the quite easily read inscription of ERECTED IN MEMORY OF, the stone had almost completely eroded away and the details of the person were pretty much indecipherable.

Just as I finished the drawing, the call came for cups of tea, lemon drizzle and Victoria sponge cakes. Sometimes food can be a great distraction to the struggling artist, so no more drawing was done. 

But here's a photograph of a stone with Neolithic cup and ring marks I found just inside the door of the church.

Lindisfarne

Lindisfarne Boatshed
(Oil on board, 8 x 8 in)

Coves Haven, Lindisfarne
(Oil on board, 8 x 8 in)

On Monday I went back to my old studio, unpacked the oil paints and finished off these two paintings over two days. There was always going to be the problem of drying, but a judicious mix of W&N Underpainting White and Liquin helped them dry by Thursday, when I handed them in at the North of England Art Club in Newcastle.

After handing them in, I made a final attempt to find my lost pencil case. The only place I hadn't checked was the Discovery Museum where we held our February Sketch Crawl, so I asked the nice man behind the desk if it had been handed in.

He was very helpful, even reading out some of the items that had been handed in.

"A ham sandwich and a bag of cash?"

"No", I said.

"A wallet with £100 in it?"

"Yes, that's the one!" but he was having none of it, and didn't find any mention of my pencil case either.

Water and Oil

I recently agreed to take part in an exhibition by the North of England Art Club at the Bondgate Gallery in Alnwick, the theme of which will be the rather vague "Northumbrian Scenes". There are two restrictions: the paintings must all be 20x20 cm and must all have a fixed selling price of £50.

Having agreed to get them ready by 12 May, I was dismayed to find that the date for handing in has changed to 28 April to allow for their framing. So the last few days have seen me hunting for images to fit the brief and suitably sized boards on which to paint them.

The studio still isn't really set up for oil painting, so I'd have preferred to work in acrylics, especially as I've just invested in a new set of Atelier Interactive Acrylics and would like to see how they perform. But the boards I found already have old oil paintings on them and acrylic over oil paint isn't a very good idea.

Another problem: most of my oil paints are still in the studio at my old house, so I found myself painting with a set of 8 Van Gogh water-mixable oils. Inevitably the colours aren't really those I would have chosen but they provided me with enough colour to cover over the old paintings.

This is where I got today with my two images which are, incidentally, scenes from Holy Island.

Shipley Art Gallery

Shipley Art Gallery (Oil on canvas, 9 x 12 ins)

At the beginning of the 1970s I joined Gateshead Art Society and for a while went along to their Tuesday night meetings in Gateshead's Shipley Art Gallery. It was there that I met Dave Richardson who persuaded me to take an 'A' Level course in Art at night classes and so launched me into a career in the world of art. In the process, I left Gateshead Art Society and although I've thought about rejoining in the intervening years, the Tuesday night meetings were never convenient. 

Now, however, the Society has changed its meetings to Friday afternoons and as I'm unsure about continuing membership of the North of England Art Club, I'm going along to my first meeting tomorrow. The facilities at the Gallery are limited and there's nowhere to store wet oil paintings so I'll be forced to return to water-based media, something I have very little experience with but which I've lately been thinking would be useful in my search for a new direction.

If I produce anything worth looking at, I'll be posting it here, but don't hold your breath. I will report back, however.

[Later] I didn't go. There are weighty factors working against me in this regard, but be assured, I will get there eventually.