Gallagher & Turner Open Exhibition 2021

 Ouseburn Viaducts

(acrylic on linen panel, 30x30 cm)

Late for the Match

(acrylic on board, 25x25 cm)

Two of my paintings have been selected for exhibition at Gallagher & Turner Gallery, in Newcastle. The exhibition runs from 26 November to 22 January.

Late for the Match

Late for the Match

(acrylic on board, 25x25 cm)

Another painting going down the Northern School route. Two Newcastle United fans, complete with black and white scarves and hats, hurry across the Tyne Bridge from Gateshead to Newcastle to see the Toon Army play. There are no more loyal fans than NUFC fans and the owners don't deserve them.

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.

The Man Who Sold the Tyne Bridge

Buildings with Tyne Bridge 
(oil on canvas, 9x12 in)

I know, I know, I'm supposed to be telling you about the most recent Sketch Crawl, but things keep happening. On Friday I discovered that this painting in the current Gateshead Art Society Xmas Exhibition, has sold. 

I'm really pleased, of course. I painted it about six years ago and have been mildly surprised that, despite it being exhibited several times in different galleries, it didn't sell earlier. I always considered it one of my better pieces and it has the Tyne Bridge in it, usually a magnet to local buyers. For whatever reason, it failed to walk off the wall. I guess it was just waiting for the right owner to come along. I hope it looks good in its new home and that its new owners like it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Newcastle, East and West

Newcastle, West of the Tyne Bridge
(Oil on 3 MDF panels, 24 x 144 ins)


Newcastle, East of the Tyne Bridge
(Oil on 2 MDF panels, 24 x 96 ins)

Each time I go to the RVI, I experience a sense of irony as I pass the Ophthalmolgy Department's casualty waiting room, because each time I catch a glimpse of two of my paintings. They're quite big - 2 x 12 feet and 2 x 8 feet - and hang in the corner of the room.

The paintings were commissioned as part of an Arts Lottery Project in 1997/98 and as Germaine Stanger, the Arts Consultant on the Project put it in her booklet:

The paintings in casualty are very popular as you would expect, for the subject matter and style of painting makes them instantly recognised by a partisan Geordie public. But some comments are not about the subject matter but how it is painted and show a well deserved appreciation.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take decent photographs of the works when they were originally first hung, because Health & Safety insisted on acrylic glazing being put over them which made photography impossible. Fears of painting sabotage proving unsubstantiated, the acrylic was taken off the following year and I should have photographed them when I supervised that, but I didn't. Time passed and the urge to get a proper record faded., but my enforced renewed association with the place makes me think i should go in when the waiting room is quiet (whenever that might be!) and take some decent photographs.

Meanwhile, I remembered Germaine's booklet and scanned these images from those printed (very small!) in it. There's also a photo of me (much bigger, in too many ways) in the studio:


"Harry Bell in his studio in Gateshead"

The full text of Germaine's article can now be found in the Reviews section of my website.

Snow - Outlook Clearer

The Side with Snow (work in progress)

More information came to light today about the "winter" show. I now have a clearer idea of what will be needed and how much work I need to get done by November.

I've been mulling over how I wanted to this painting to be; mulling so much that it's taken until today to get it started. It's a view from the Tyne Bridge looking down on the buildings of The Side; a view I've tackled many times before, but never with snow. It always surprises me that the end result is so different from each previous painting of the same subject. At the moment, I'm a little puzzled by the overall look of the painting. Not at all like my usual style, but as the work progresses, I dare say it'll fall more into line.

Buildings with Tyne Bridge

Buildings with Tyne Bridge (Oil on canvas, 9 x 12 ins) £190

I think I'm heading for an entry in the Guinness Book of Records: for the longest-running cold. The cold I developed around Xmas becomes, by turns, a cough, a runny nose, a sneezing fit then a cough .... None of which saw me in much of a mood to get things done at the Club this week. Especially as the revived central heating has brought back members keen to catch up on the gossip.

"Do you know", said Joe, "I've done nothing today but stand around and chat." Then stood around and chatted some more.

Despite all this, I did finish off Buildings with Tyne Bridge which a search of this blog suggests I last worked on in October 2008. This can't be right, because the picture I worked on today was almost complete. Maybe I did more to it at home. Anyway, there was little needed: a few windows here and there, a touch up of railings on the Bridge and there we are, another addition to my increasing collection of Small Works.

The Harry Ramsden's has moved along slowly, with work on the lettering proving a fiddly detail, but next week could see it almost - if not actually - complete.



Above Harry Ramsden's (work in progress)

Old Drawings #52

Rooftops (Charcoal and compressed charcoal on cartridge paper)

This drawing is clouded in uncertainty. I don't really remember when I did it, but this seems an appropriate point in the Old Drawings scheme of things to post it. I can't locate the dimensions of it either, although I suspect it was done on a sheet of A1 cartridge paper.

It's a drawing of the rooftops to be seen if you look over the Western side of the Tyne Bridge. Eventually, I made a painting from it, but people so rarely look over the side of the Tyne Bridge that no one knew where it was and kept asking if it might be somewhere in the Mediterranean! The painting is in a private collection, so I don't have access to a good photograph of it, I'm afraid.

Old Drawings #51

After Rain [Charcoal, compressed charcoal on A2 (?) cartridge paper]
Private Collection

Done in 1998 or 1999, this drawing is a view of the Tyne Bridge from a curious little concrete balcony that juts out over The Side. In 1999, it led to this painting, which I sold through a gallery in Leeds. I could have sold it several times over (the Geordie diaspora?), but later I was a little dismayed to come across it online, for sale "still unwrapped". Whereabouts are now uncertain.


After Rain (Oil on canvas) Private Collection

Exploring Mallorca: Bollards again

Concrete Bollards 2 (Pencil, pastel, and Pentel Brushpen, A5 sketchbook)

Before setting off for the Art Club this morning, I felt the need to revisit the photograph of broken bollards. This was the result.


I actually got to the Club quite early today (a result of forgetting to re-set my alarm after having to make an early start yesterday to get to the dentist) and as a result was able to spend almost five hours working on the new view from the Tyne Bridge. It may not look like five hours work, but this is a small canvas with a great deal of complex detail and for most of the time I was using a brush no more than 5mm wide. I must be mad.




Buildings with Tyne Bridge (work in progress)

This is where I left it today. Apart form some minor corrections, the right hand side is pretty much complete. I've been delaying work on the Bridge itself, because it's such a bugger to get right. All those spars and dramatically receding perspective. I don't want to find myself fiddling with detail, so next week I'll have to approach it quite broadly.

Back in the Saddle

Buildings with Tyne Bridge (work in progress)

You'll have gathered from my previous post that the weather was not all it might have been in Mallorca. Four days of rain, in fact. It certainly reduced the time available to do any sketching, so the one sketch already posted is all there is.

I did, however, take a lot of photographs and what I find these days is that on holiday, my eye is constantly looking for something new, some new project to get me excited. The Vaporetto Series came about that way, and this time I think I've identified two unrelated subjects to bring something fresh to my work. I've started to play around with some of the photographs, but I'd rather wait until there's a definite direction showing before I post them here.

Meanwhile, back to the Art Club today. I'd decided to work on a new small painting based on a photograph taken on the same day, and from almost the same position on the Tyne Bridge as this one.

Last night I squared the canvas up and drew out the main structure. I don't always square up the photograph and transfer it, but I wanted to be able to get on with the painting and ensure that all the elements were in the right place. It's a complicated subject and the chances of getting things wrong were high, leading to a lot of scraping out, re-painting and so on. I don't object to doing that, and indeed, it often leads to a much more interesting and complex paint surface, but this is a small canvas and that kind of work can get fiddly.

Anyway, having drawn out the main composition in pencil, I sealed it under a coat of lemon yellow acrylic. Not a colour I would normally use - I'd usually go for burnt sienna or raw umber, or maybe a dark blue or magenta - but that was first to hand and I went with it. Once I got painting at the Club, the underpainting turned out to be a poor choice. It jarred with everything I laid down and by the time I'd reached the end of the first day's painting, I'd begun flicking small brushstrokes over the points of yellow still showing.

Still, I'm pleased with the way it's goimg. Apart from the fact that I've given myself the task of painting the Tyne Bridge again, I'm looking forward to resuming work on this one next week.

Back on the Bridge

High Level Bridge (work in progress)

Back at the Club today, I decided not to take up the painting of The Gate again. Having tried to get an angle on the building twice now, and finding the result not to my taste, I think I'll write it off for now. Maybe I'm just not a painter of modern buildings

Instead, I spent a happy couple of hours getting this little picture under way. It's a view from the Newcastle end of the Tyne Bridge, looking towards the High Level Bridge with Gateshead beyond, and one of the buildings that cluster underneath the Bridge in the foreground.

I've done a lot of paintings from the Tyne Bridge in my time, but it must be a good ten years since I last did one. Recently I went onto the Bridge to take some reference photographs for a commission for Mrs Sums and while waiting for her to walk over from the Gateshead end, I took one or two other photographs. This painting is based on one of them. It's interesting, to me at least, to see how much my palette has changed over the years. This one, for instance, is one of the earlier series from 1993, A View from the Bridge:

View from the Bridge - The Black Chimney (Oil on board, private collection)