Sketch Crawl - Bowes Railway Museum

Bowes Railway Museum

(0.8 marker over two pages of A5 sketchbook)

Allan picked me up at 12.30 yesterday and we drove in unaccountable sunshine (can this be Summer at last?) to the car park of Bowes Railway Museum, just at the edge of Gateshead. I'd been wondering if we might be a small party of sketchers this time, as response from our regulars had been lukewarm or absent when the venue was proposed. ("Oh, railways!" said the ladies.) But my fears were groundless - in the end we numbered eleven, with many a new face.

Pessimism is always rewarded, of course, and we found that the Museum site closed an hour earlier than we'd thought and even worse, the cafe closed an hour sooner than that. Recognising that there'd be no time for a coffee break or a bit of the usual show & tell at the end, we decided to just get on with it, after an initial tour of the buildings.

Straight away I could see there was a huge amount of things to draw,  especially inside the workshops, so after a short walk I picked on the first view that caught my eye that also benefitted from being out of the light wind. I toyed with using my A4 sketchbook but decided that I'm really no longer comfortable with standing holding that size and weight for any considerable time, so took out the A5. And that proved to work well for me, especially utilising a two page spread to take in a couple of coal wagons and one of the long sheds. OK, the railway lines are wobbly, but that's an effect of standing holding the book and doesn't honestly bother me to any extent.

I realised there was only about an hour left of the session, so after checking out the inside of one of the sheds where Bob was drawing a forge of some sort, I decided to stay out in the sunshine and see if it was worth drawing wagon No.939 (see the drawing above) again, but from further inside the yard.

What clinched it for me was finding that Mark was now painting the same wagon and presented me with an opportunity to capture a relatively stationary figure. 

Bowes Railway Museum

- Mark paints his wagon.

(0.8 marker in A5 sketchbook)

Mark deserves an apology for the sagginess of his arse and the shortness of his legs in this sketch, but as I say, we were running out of time. I'm happy to confirm that in fact he's a reasonably well-proportioned human being; corrections might have been made if only he hadn't finished his sketch and moved away.

With no time for a proper winding up of proceedings, we had a bit of a natter and Allan took this group photo. After that, well ... we dispersed.

Urban Sketchers Tyne and Wear

26th May 2018

(Photo: Allan White)

Next time: Provisional date 23rd June. Venue to be decided.

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.

Sketch Crawl # 7: The Discovery Museum

Mr Walker's Suitcase
Discovery Museum
(Black markers in A4 sketchbook)

Holeyn Hall Turbine
Discovery Museum
(Black and grey markers, A4 sketchbook)

The Discovery Museum in Newcastle has changed quite a bit since I was there last. In addition to a huge new atrium accommodating the famous Turbinia, the world's first steam turbine-powered steamship, there is what seems to be a maze of rooms full of all sorts of engineering and historical stuff. 

Perhaps I should have been more adventurous in my choice of subjects on this, our seventh Sketch Crawl, because others seemed to find things that had somehow missed my attention, and while I thought Turbinia couldn't be drawn, Mike and Richard proved me wrong.

Still, I was happy with my suitcase, carried by a Mr Walker on his voyage on RMS Franconia. I don't know if there's anything special about Mr Walker or indeed his choice of steamship, but the suitcase served to illuminate the possibilities of world travel brought about by the introduction of steamships, in this case by the Cunard Line.

As for the turbine, I wish now that I'd not gone along with the black painted pipes,because although they were what drew me to the subject in the first place, I had to make a decision about the panel bearing the name of the manufacturer, C A Parsons. It was also black but couldn't remain so and still be legible; I think now the drawing would have worked better without the solid black. Oh well, you learn by your mistakes (sometimes).

Finally, as I'm pleased to say is often the case with museums and Sketch Crawls, I can recommend both the Americano and the fruit scone in the cafe, although Allan would rather they didn't serve Lattes in what he regards as glass vases.

Next time: a venue in Newcastle to be decided (Don't you just love a mystery?)

Lisbon Ceramics

There's a wonderful Tile Museum in Lisbon - the Museu Nacional do Azulejo. In addition to a splendid range of Portuguese ceramic tiles through history (and the modern ones are really something), there's a changing exhibition of ceramics in the broader sense. 

When we were there the show was called Art Submerged 2014 and the artist, Sylvain Bongard had made a collection of fish of various species, molluscs, crustaceans and marine plants:

 as well as old boots, keys and other stuff you might find on the sea bed:

I was particularly taken with a set of heads which seemed to be the underwater equivalent of the Green Man :

Erased Canvas

Sixty years ago, the American artist Robert Rauschenberg obtained a drawing from another US artist, Willem de Kooning and proceeded to erase it. The result, titled "Erased de Kooning Drawing, Robert Rauschenberg, 1953" is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Leaving aside the merits or otherwise of this piece of work, I was reminded of it when today I embarked on a similar project.

Of the larger canvases I brought home from University in 2001, one was four by four feet, stretched and primed and pristine white. Too big to store easily in the studio downstairs, it's been tucked behind another similarly-sized completed painting in my bedroom. But there's no room for such a picture, devoid of imagery or no, in my next studio, so today I began the process of taking the blank one apart.

First of all the canvas had to be pulled away from the stretcher, the staples popping out and falling to the floor. Using my Gran's dressmaker's shears, I cut the canvas into strips and put them in the bin. Next I took out the screws. This showed that the bloke I bought it from ( he'd made several and didn't need two of them) had cunningly made use of several short lengths of wood, fastening them together with four-hole metal joining strips. So, more holes and more screws.

Once the screws were out, the stretcher still held together because of the thin strips of MDF round the edge which provide the canvas with lift away from the wooden stretcher. They had to be eased off with the screwdriver. Once everything was apart and on the floor, it looked a little like a flat-pack item from IKEA, laid out to check against the sheet of assembly diagrams. But I was going backwards, and the wood was broken up into shorter lengths and binned.

OK, I don't think this was an artwork, though I'm sure a video of the afternoon's work would entrance just as many people as those I see being ignored so often in galleries. And as a philosophical exercise, it kept me on track to shake off the ridiculous idea that possessions make me who I am.

Museum Sketchbook #2: Main Hall

Hancock Museum, Main Hall 31.10.97
(Charcoal on two pages of A4 sketchbook)

Looking down from one of the galleries, I could work away without being noticed by the punters downstairs. The only problem was that the lighting was so poor up there that it was difficult to see what I was doing.

Two Emus

Two Emus (Oil on board, 24 x 24 ins)

Thinking about the time I spent in the Hancock Museum reminded me that I did a few paintings based on the sketches and photographs I brought back from there. This rather inadequate photograph is of a painting I did on a piece of blockboard rescued from the skip outside the School of Architecture. Framed up in a nice dark wood frame it still looks pretty good to me.

Mind Map

Mind Map (Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 in)

One of the things about having problems with my sight and distrusting my ability to see what I want to see in the world outside, is that I think it encourages me to turn inward, to look at the world of the imagination, of memory and fantasy. So you'd be forgiven for thinking that this painting is a fanciful invention, but that isn't quite the case.

In my first year at university we were given free access to the Hancock Museum which was then part of the university. That was before the Labour Government's enlightened Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Chris Smith, enabled many museums to give free admission and well before it was absorbed into Tyne & Wear's Great North Museum.

The Hancock in those days was still pretty much the way I remembered it as a child - full of dimly lit wooden galleries with rows and rows of cases full of beetles and butterflies and big glass cases with stuffed birds and ethnographic items from far off exotic places. I loved it and did a lot of drawing there as well as taking several rolls of film (I had to source very fast film to get what I wanted).

It was undergoing a makeover, however, with roaring life size dinosaurs being put in and new interactive displays to attract children who think they need modern devices to get their imaginations working.

Looking down from one of the galleries I saw two people pondering a new display which linked various collections in the museum. That's what this painting shows, the original rather poor photograph filtered through time and memory and the interested couple replaced by a man who owes his existence more to the workings of paint than to actuality.

Purple and Green

Purple and Green (Oil on canvas, 8 x 8 ins.)

It's becoming eerie at the Club. People are taking their equipment home and the place is being stripped of much of its clutter. All in preparation for our move, of course.

On Monday we had our Annual Dinner and it was rather sobering to reflect on the fact that this would be the last we'd hold while in the Bolbec Hall premises. We ate in the Library of Neville Hall, home of the The North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers. The building is a grand Neo-Gothic affair next door to the Neo-Classical Lit & Phil, which in turn is next door to Bolbec Hall.

The Library in Neville Hall, with its galleries, photographs and memorabilia is a moving reminder of the days before we started to turn this country into a retail park selling stuff made abroad. In a socialist country, the Library would be a notable monument to the working man but now it's struggling to make itself known and to find funding. I can't imagine there ever being a Library devoted to workers in the call centres of the UK.

Today I finished this little picture of some chocolates. They used to be made by a British owned company, but now they belong to Nestlé (*spit*). Next week I'll go back to the Club and take away my paints. And then, I guess, look forward to life in the Club's new home; but it won't be the same.

Nest Forms

Nest Forms (etching, 12.5 x 21 cms)

Another week without painting. In a spirit of a glass half full, let's call it a period of retrenchment and reconsideration, rather than a block.

Some time ago I made myself a promise to have framed a small collection of prints I made at University. The actual framing has taken much longer than anticipated, but yesterday I collected them from Gallagher & Turner, the framers who've framed almost all of my work since I began to get serious about it.

This etching has always been a favourite of mine. It shows the influence of Graham Sutherland, I think, which is unsurprising given that I was about to write my dissertation on his Pembrokeshire landscapes. It was based on some drawings I did in what was then the Hancock Museum but which has now become part of the Great North Museum:.

Here's a relevant page from my sketchbook;


Bird objects (Rotring Art Pen in A4 sketchbook)

Oh, GOMA!

Balcony, GOMA

When it opened as a gallery of modern art, it came in for a lot of criticism from the "art establishment" who considered that it was too "populist." They were right - it has indeed become very popular, with over 400,000 visitors a year, and none the worse for that! This is a modern art gallery which everyone can enjoy, even those who would not normally consider themselves "arty". And the art which has been acquired for this gallery has been produced by living artists. There is much of Glasgow here, of course, with Beryl Cook's "By the Clyde" (pictured here) and "Karaoke" and the minute detail of a Glasgow tenement in Avril Paton's "Windows in the West."

Peter Howson, whose work has been purchased by major corporate and private collectors in the UK and USA, is well represented with his sometimes brutal figures and the gallery seems to enjoy presenting three dimensional perspectives which make people stop and blink, such as "The Shadow of War" by Patrick Hughes. And there are not too many art galleries with sculptures of "The King" (Elvis Presley, complete with halo) and the Queen (in carpet slippers and dressing gown). Yes, definitely, populist! - Places to Visit in Scotland

Yeah, that was what I thought, too. I went to GOMA in 1996 and thought the collection on display was really interesting, so I was looking forward to going again while we were in Glasgow. Pat isn't familiar with the work of the "New Glasgow Boys" (Peter Howson, Steven Campbell, Adrian Wiszniewski, Ken Currie) and all the guidebooks and leaflets assured us that their work is well-represented there.

Well, it isn't. There's one very large painting by Adrian Wiszniewski carefully hung on one of the landings of the stairwell, such that it's actually impossible to get further than two feet away from it. Other than that, nowt.

Perhaps I might have been forewarned if I'd seen this on the GOMA website before I went:

Photography, video and installation from Glasgow Museums' contemporary art collection - open now.

It's that word "contemporary", isn't it? Had I read that signal, I might have been prepared for the sight of two floors of visually non-descript prints and photographs, with their explanatory labels - labels with short stories which bore little or no relevance to the pictures next to them. Or perhaps it's fairer to say that the pictures were the irrelevance; as Pat said to me, some of the stories might be interesting to read in a magazine, but did they deserve to be put on the wall with a pointless "illustration"?

The best part of the museum is the neo-classical building itself and we enjoyed talking to a helpful attendant who offered a potted history of it, complete with tales of the tobacco and slave trade which paid for its construction. But in that respect, it reminded me of nothing so much as the Baltic in Gateshead, where people come to look at the building and are generally indifferent to the contents. The few other people in GOMA were, like us, drifting through the floors of exhibits like lost souls hoping that something might leap out and grab their attention. No such look.

The ground floor, the biggest exhibition space they have, had all its windows blacked out so that it could be given over to a video installation by Fiona Tan: "two screens, this work is an atmospheric portrait of a group of schoolchildren that challenges assumptions about identity, race and ethnicity." Ho hum. The whole floor, for one video presentation, presented as if it were a religious experience. Give me strength. No one was watching it, by the way.

On the way out we asked one of the attendants on the desk what had happened to the permanent exhibition, particularly the New Glasgow Boys' work. She looked uncomfortable, and waffled a bit about how they liked to rotate their collection and of course there was the question of conservation and the problem of sunlight and .... Yeah, right, oil paintings suffer so much from sunlight.

As it turns out, some of the work referred to in the piece at the beginning of this post (the Avril Paton painting and the sculpture of Elvis) have obviously been transferred permanently to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, because sure enough, there they were.

You put your left leg in ...

Moa Legbone, Hancock Museum (charcoal, coloured Conte, A4 sketchbook)

At about this time every year, I begin to look forward to the end of festivities. After almost two weeks of rich food and drink, constant partying alternated with couch potatoing in front of the telly, I feel the need to get back to the routine of work in the studio and the occasional meal of beans on toast.

I miss making art. It starts to burn me up inside, but I did at least find the time over the holidays to scan in all my sketchbooks. I was pleasantly surprised to find that - scattered as they are throughout umpteen half-empty books - the images amount to much more than I'd thought. Don't worry, I'm not about to launch a new series of Old Sketches - the continuing Old Drawings series has a while to run yet. But my continuing interest in reviving the sketchbook habit has had something of a boost from this exercise.

Just after Xmas Day, Pat and I went on a fascinating walk through an old part of Newcastle which got me wishing I'd taken a sketchbook along, and I'm still thinking about the place over a week later. Maybe when the weather gets a bit more inspiring ...