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.
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