Cataloguing with Flick!

I've been planning on cataloguing my work for some time now. I really need a centralised database of all the work I've produced in the last 20 years, with details of sizes, prices, exhibitions they've been in, galleries who've shown them and who bought them.

This looked like one of those tasks that might never get off the ground, but reading about a piece of software in The Cycling Artist, has shown it is achievable after all. Several times on that blog, Tina Mammoser has extolled the virtues of Flick! software for just this purpose, so I downloaded it, tried it out and bought it.

It really is a great bit of kit. It has so many useful functions that I've been playing with for days, while beginning the task of entering details of my work. Admittedly, this is still a mammoth task, but I doubt that any other system could make it easier.

Someone Blows My Trumpet

It's not something we've been used to, my Figure 8 pals and I, but it's always good to get a decent write-up in the press. When we gave a talk in the Gallery in Darlington last week about our Colour Room exhibition , in addition to a good sized interested audience, there was a reporter from the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette.

It's not easy to get hold of the Evening Gazette in Gateshead, but luckily there's an online version. And, although it's a little disappointing to find there are no photographs to illustrate the piece, the write-up is extensive and very positive.

"I am very interested in townscapes and I did a lot of paintings with no people in," explains Harry, "but recently I have found people creeping in."

They certainly do in his elegant and eye-catching views of Venice where the diverse crowds packing the ever present water buses dramatically take centre stage over the city's gorgeous buildings.

There's more here.

Blog Brush (sorry)

Using Google Alerts, I've been searching the Interweb for blogs which contain the word "painting." As a result, I've found an awful lot of people are currently painting their walls and seemingly not enjoying the experience.

But interior decoration wasn't what I was looking for, of course. What I really wanted was to find some new and interesting artist bloggers and one or two of them are now listed in the sidebar.

One that I'm very pleased to have found is that of Vivien Blackburn, - paintings prints and stuff. In her current post, she's suggested a project which, in an idle moment between frantic preparations for exhibitions, I thought I'd have a go at.

"Your task grasshopper, should you wish to take it, is to sketch your paintbrushes," is what she said. So here's a sketch, in watercolour and Pentel brush-pen, of one of my much-abused acrylic gesso priming brushes.

As always with watercolour, I ended up cursing the wateriness of it and, indeed, the Pentel was used to pull it back into shape (although nothing at all could be done for the curiously shaped handle). And I know it's only one brush, but it's a start. My sketchbook has been neglected for too long.

Oil Strike in Lake District

I was just gearing up for our annual painting week in the Lake District, when news reached me of a disaster in our rented holiday house.

Last week a tanker brought the regular delivery of oil for heating. No problem there, you might think. All the tanker driver has to do is pump the consignment of oil into the house's tank. Fine. Except that what he did was pump two tanks-worth of oil into the one tank. The garden is full of oil. The basement is full of oil. The house is effectively out of commission for months to come.

So it's goodbye to Little Langdale for this year, at least.

Some desperate re-booking has found us another property, but in the Hawkshead area. Not as quiet and secluded as Little Langdale, perhaps, but the website makes the house and surroundings look good.

I feel the first stirrings of excitement, coupled with the usual sense of anxiety over what materials to take. I expect it'll be mostly drawing materials, but I gather I may have more room in the car this year, so a range of gear might be accommodated (to cope with the expected range of weather).

Artist's Statement

I've written here before about the difficulties involved in writing the Artist's Statement, but this time - for the show at Darlington - I was determined to make it specifically relevant to the work in the show. This is what I wrote about The Vaporetto Series:

On my second visit to Venice, I was acutely aware of the long history of artists who have painted the city, especially the great Turner, Monet and Sickert. The list of painters is so long that many are of the opinion that any original approach is by now impossible. My view, however, is that whether or not the subject has been painted a thousand times is irrelevant. It has never been painted through my eyes and one of the joys of art is that it enables us to see through another person’s eyes.

So I determined to relinquish any preconceptions and open myself up to the city. I let it present itself to me as I absorbed its atmosphere and waited to see how my own interests might be revealed, rather than those who have painted before me.

My main painting concerns over the years have been to do with the built environment and Venice amply provided subjects of architectural appeal, but what stirred my imagination was first of all the wonderful absence of cars and then the people, especially those travelling on vaporetti, the efficient and reliable water-buses of Venice.

I have previously painted pictures of staff in ticket offices at fun-fairs and there is something about the containment of people in boxes which interests me. It was something of that nature – metal boxes of people - that at first attracted me to the idea of passengers on the vaporetti. But as I examined the possibilities of the subject in my studio, I found a great deal more to explore.

First of all it allowed me to play with some interesting compositions. The picture plane could be flattened out and broken up into a series of horizontal bands of
buildings, water, roof, people, boat and more water. I also found it interesting to contrast the organic forms of the passengers with the more rectilinear forms of architecture and engineering. The people themselves began to fascinate me, as they accommodated themselves aboard the water-bus, sitting on rails, holding onto the ceiling to keep from falling over, kissing in the dark. And if it isn’t too fanciful, the way they were spread across the picture brought echoes of Italian frescoes to mind.

The Vaporetto Series

These are my paintings now showing in the Figure 8 exhibition at the Myles Meehan Gallery in Darlington.


Night Travel (Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 ins.)


Photographers (Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 ins.)


Sitting on the Rail (oil on canvas, 24 x 30 ins.)


Santa Maria della Salute (OIl on canvas, 24 x 24 ins.)


Caught in the Spotlight (Oil on canvas, 20 x 20 ins.)


Dorsoduro (Oil on canvas, 30 x 30 ins.)


On the Giudecca Canal (Oil on canvas, 24 x 24 ins.)


Passing a Palazzo (Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 ins.)

Yellow Page Despair

I really must get my name taken out of Yellow Pages. In the seven years I've been listed there, the only enquiries I've received - with one exception - have been on the lines of, "Do you paint pet portraits?" I got another today. There's obviously a crying need for pet portrait painters in the North East, but I'm not ready to serve that need.

The one exception? Someone wanted to know if I painted weddings. I assume they meant from photographs, but the image of my setting up an easel in front of the church, while the bride and groom's families pose in their best hats, is an intriguing one.

Colour Room

I finished all the work for Darlington at the weekend, but decided that one of them wasn't up to scratch. Nevertheless, when we took all the paintings to the gallery on Monday morning, I found I had just the right number for the space allocated to me.

We might have spent some time arguing between ourselves over the hanging, but Julie the Curator offered to let us go for coffee while she sorted out a suggested arrangement. When we got back, she'd come up with a hanging which gives each of us a wall to ourselves, and mixes in the other pictures in blocks which work well together. I'm delighted with the look of the show and am full of admiration for Julie's abilities. She's a very confident and competent Curator.

The Private View is on Thursday evening, and as always, I'm full of excitement and trepidation, in equal parts.

The show, entitled Colour Room, opens to the public at the Myles Meehan Gallery on Friday and runs for a month.

Garden Twitter

I'm pleased to say the recent snow hasn't had any obvious affect on the presence of birds in my garden. I've kept them fed and watered and, observing their terrific response to a block of suet embedded with mealworms, I've put up two more.

In the last couple of weeks I've noticed:

• A good dozen sparrows.
• Three or four goldfinches.
• Several pairs of starlings.
• A pair of black caps (who eat only the suet)
• A bigger gang of jackdaws than I'd really like.
• A flock (at times) of wood pigeons.
• An old wood pigeon who spends most of his time dozing on the fence.
• Several collared doves (two of whom I think are nesting in the big conifer).
• A song thrush.
• Lots of blue tits.
• A scuttle of coal tits.
• A constant skirmish of blackbirds.
• An annoyance of magpies.

Since Prague

Please excuse the silence. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Prague. I thought it a most magical city with wonderful architecture and delightful people. But I also picked up a streaming cold on my last day there and since then have been hard at work a) fighting it off, and b) desperately trying to finish my Vaporetto series.

Due to some kind of mental aberration, I discovered I had only a week and a half to get nine paintings finished for the upcoming Figure 8 show in Darlington. Luckily I work well under pressure, but it has meant painting through the day and well into the night. At the moment there's only one of them finished, but the others are getting there. I am quietly confident (and secretly panicking) that they will all be finished by the coming weekend.

Here's one of the new ones, still showing part of the crimson underpainting (an experiment):

Vaporetto 5:Photographers (work in progress)

Prague

I'm off to Prague for a week. Patsy123 bought me this short break for my birthday and we fly out of Newcastle later today. While there, we'll be linking up with Buddy K and Susie Sue and generally having fun.

Please try to have some fun yourselves.

Back on the Grand Canal

Vaporetto 3 (work in progress)

I returned to this other vaporetto picture yesterday determined to move it along. I've knocked in rather roughly a new background which I think will work well. At the moment it needs pushing further back and the columns, balconies and windows need development, but it looks OK today and I'm not disappointed with yesterday's work.

I'd have preferred to work on it again today, but there's still a tackiness to the paint, so I'll have to be patient and turn my attentions elsewhere.

Raimonds Staprans

I’ve been interested in the work of Raimonds Staprans for some time now. He’s a fascinating man: a Latvian-American, he’s celebrated in Latvia as a playwright, in the USA as a painter.

Starting with Diebenkorn, I’ve gradually been exploring a small selection of Bay Area painters. After Diebenkorn came Wayne Thiebaud, then Elmer Bischoff. I was able to pick up books on all three without too much effort, but publications on Staprans eluded me. Until now. Last week I took delivery from Amazon of Raimonds Staprans: Art of Tranquility and Turbulence by Paul Karlstrom.

Karlstrom is clearly something of an expert on Staprans. In the Smithsonian Archive of American Art is an interview Staprans gave to Karlstrom in 1997. It’s a fascinating insight into Staprans’s thoughts about art, the development of his career and how he feels it was held up by staying with one gallery. In particular, his comments about the work of Diebenkorn and Thiebaud are illuminating, even if, at times I think he may be wrong in his conclusions.

I read this interview a couple of years ago, but reading the interview without the benefit of some printed images as illustrations occasionally made for opaque understanding. So it was rewarding in a number of ways to find that a book had finally been published about Staprans and his work.

The pictures in it form something of a retrospective, not surprisingly because it was conceived in connection with a retrospective exhibition of Staprans’s work at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in January 2006 (which then transferred to the Latvian National Museum in Riga).

The paintings begin in the early 196os in a very West Coast abstract way, with hints of de Stael in the blocks of thick colour, but these are gradually replaced by abstract landscapes composed of large areas of broad smooth colour.

In the early 70s, Staprans turned to the female figure for subject matter and there are a number of quite disturbing female nudes, their heads almost non-existent, their genitalia aggressively displayed and the pictures suffused overall with blood red. Staprans has some firmly held views on sexuality which he talks about in the Smithsonian interview and which are the main theme of one of his most famous Latvian plays, The Freezing (excerpted in the book).

Of greatest interest to me are the later landscapes, and some of the still lifes of cans of paint, tables and fruit. The landscapes are quite striking. On first viewing they appear to be severe landscapes with all human life and any incidental detail removed. There’s an eerie silence to them and they’re all bathed in the fierce glare of Californian sunlight.. Staprans says:

As one deplanes in San Francisco, one is blinded by the unbelievable intensity of the sun. And the light is so white and so aggressively energizing, that one automatically gropes for his sunglasses. And so it goes for eight months each year – nothing but blue skies and that blinding light. It is impossible to ignore it.

Yet Staprans maintains that all of them – still lifes and landscapes - are constructs, not taken directly from the real world or real locations at all. He’s working in the field of what he calls abstract realism. He builds his pictures “from the ground up,” making compositional sketches and working with a strict geometry, he attempts to create order out of what he sees as the chaos of the natural world.

More about Chadbourn

My SiteMeter continues to show people coming here to read what I said about Alfred Chadbourn. For those who want to read a little more, I recommend an article by the late Charles Sovek, in which he expands on Chadbourn's use of three values. Sovek himself was an accomplished painter whose style closely resembles that of Chadbourn and his site, now maintained by his family, still holds many of his pictures and, more especially, his other interesting articles from The Artist's Magazine.

Old Town Hall

Old Town Hall (oil on canvas, 12 x 14 ins) SOLD

This is how it looked when I handed it in yesterday. I'd come to the conclusion that there were too many colours fighting one another, so I dispensed with the purple sky and opted instead for one made from ultramarine with a little cadmium orange in it (both colours used in the rest of the painting).

I also managed to get a little work done on one of the Vaporetto pictures. These will represent my main occupation in the next few weeks, if I'm to have sufficient work ready for the show opening in April.



Caught in the Spotlight (work in progress)

Pressure at the Club

Back to the Club again. This time, I was working on the Old Town Hall painting I started last week.. There are real problems with this one, not least the paucity of information I can get from the photograph taken from across the motorway. Nevertheless, progress was made:

   

Old Town Hall (second day) 

 But the pressure is on to get this finished. When I go to collect my Figure 8 work from Gateshead Library Gallery on Monday, I have to hand in the Heritage Buildings paintings. There were going to be three, but two will have to do; no time to complete another.

Still Life Painting

I was woken early this morning by a man at the door who said, "Mr Martin?" I shook my head and mumbled , "No."

"Gaynford Close?" he asked. I shook my head, and mumbled another, "No."

He looked puzzled and stared at the piece of paper in his hand for a while. "Do you know where it is?"

I shook my head .... well, you get the picture.

After he'd gone, I figured it would just be lazy to go back to bed, so I decided I'd go to the Art Club. Last week was the start of the new Wednesday Still Life Group and, although I'd put my name down as an interested party, I couldn't go. Today I would show my support.

As it turned out, I was the Wednesday Still Life Group this week. No one else turned up, so the studio was all mine. I made some coffee, turned on the radio which would generally get a shout of "Put that bloody thing off!" and thought about what I might want to paint in the still life vein.

It's about ten years since I last sat down in front of an object and tried to paint it in one go. I found an old shell, a tea towel and a small table, and off I went. The paint soon got pretty worked up and I had to resort to the palette knife and dollops of Spectragel, but in the end I felt that one and a half hours had been well spent. I think I'll do it again.



Shell (oil on board, 5 x 5 ins)

More Heritage

Old Town Hall (1st stage)

I started another of the "Heritage Buildings" pictures at the Club today. I feel like I'm really flying by the seat of my pants with this one. The colours with which I've laid it in are much more exaggerated than I might normally use, mainly because the subject is so difficult. The Old Town Hall is a nice enough old Victorian building, but it's difficult to get a good look at it it, or indeed take a decent photograph. To get the reference photograph I'm using, I had to stand on a grass verge at the other side of a motorway.

As a consequence, to try to make it an interesting composition, I cranked up the colour in the sky and the Sage in the background. As the picture progresses, it's possible the colour will be played down again and simply become more complex, but I have no real idea if this will happen.

But then, that's half the fun of painting: the not knowing. Richard Diebenkorn said:

I can never accomplish what I want, only what I would have wanted had I thought of it beforehand.

Shipley Art Gallery

Shipley Art Gallery (Oil on canvas, 11 x 14 ins)

I pushed myself to get this done at the Club today. It's one of a set I've been asked to do for inclusion in an exhibition in March. Not really a subject I'd have chosen, but the theme is "Heritage Buildings of Gateshead," so my choices were limited. For something completed in about three hours, it's turned out OK, I think.

I needed to get it done today so that they might consider a photograph in the publicity being prepared this week. There's a flag pole missing, but the paint was too wet to try adding it. I'd rather be able to add it later anyway, because I'm not sure I want it in. I've already eliminated a lamp post.

I wonder why red comes out so strong when photographed? It's not that red in the painting itself - I used mars red toned down with a bit of alizarin crimson - but even Photoshop doesn't seem able to do anything about it.

A Vaporetto Painted

Vaporetto (Oil on canvas, 30 x 30 ins.)

Time to stop tinkering with this one and sign off on it. I think it works pretty well. No, because it's Don't Cry Over Spilled Milk Day, I should be more positive and say - I'm pleased with it. There.

Crash Survivor

Here's a conundrum. You find that after a computer crash, all the program drivers for your devices - graphics cards, sound cards, modem, CD-ROM - are corrupted or missing. All the drivers are available on the disks you've carefully stored away, or can be downloaded from the Internet. But you can't run the disks because the CD-ROM won't work because the driver is corrupted or missing. And you can't download the drivers because the modem won't work because the driver for the modem is corrupted or missing so you can't connect to the Internet ...

What do you do in a situation like that? Well, what you do if you're me - which you're not, but for the purposes of this exercise, you can pretend - is you sit and fume for a while, you try everything you can think of, to no avail, and then you send for a Computer Man and pay him money to put it right.

It's always interesting to look through the list on the Sitemeter to see what referrals to Boogie Street there have been. Given the recent lay-off due to computer problems, there was a nice long list to browse through, so trends were more noticeable than might otherwise be the case.

For a blog more or less devoted to painting, it's quite a chastening experience to find that a sizeable proportion of my visitors came wandering down Boogie Street in search of, first of all, the meaning of the words "Boogie Street," then the standing stones on Machrie Moor, Chip Chadbourn, a drawing of a banana palm (at least it's my drawing) but more importantly than anything else, whatever happened to Jimmy Nail.

At the Art Club on Thursday, I found myself between pictures, so I pulled out one of my neglected earlier pictures. It's a double set of balconies in Crete which was fighting me a while ago. I think I may be making headway with it now.

Balconies (Work in progress)

Pushing on

Vaporetto 2 (third day)

I decided I need to push on with one of these vaporetto pictures and get it to a conclusion. I have no real idea of what any of them will look like when complete, so having one finished could be very useful.

I started today's work by glazing over the water with a greenish-blue mixture of phthalo turquoise and raw sienna, then scraping it lightly off again with a palette knife. It's a little dark now, but I think it's working better as compositional band between the vaporetto roof and the canal-side buildings. When it's dry, I'll think about dragging over some blue again to re-establish the waves.

The figures are coming to life a little more, although I have no intention of making them very realistic. What I'm after is an understanding of the space they occupy, and gradually working over them, changing their position slightly, altering the colour build-up, gives me that.

George Colston

Although I enjoyed meeting up with the guys at the Art Club yesterday, there was a subdued quality to the conversation.

One of our members, George Colston died recently, following a by-pass operation. I didn't know George well, but I liked his work a great deal and he always seemed a cheery and helpful sort of bloke. I was looking forward to getting to know him better.

In one of life's cruel ironies, there's a three or four page article on George and his work in the February issue of The Artists & Illustrators Magazine. He may never have lived to see it (although I'd hope that the publishers would have sent him at least a proof). Certainly, he hasn't lived to benefit from whatever extra success such exposure might have brought him.

The First Vaporetto Again

I went to the Art Club today - the first visit since before Xmas - and renewed acquaintance with the first of the Vaporetto series. I'd forgotten how much I'd moved it on since I posted an image of it here.

For various reasons, I didn't have the time I needed to get back into it, so just sat with some of the guys and caught up with the crack. But every now and again, I'd sneak a look at the picture and surprise myself with how it seems to have taken a slightly different route from the others, probably because it's been done in a different studio environment. It's much more restrained in terms of colour, having a somewhat misty look to it. It may well change as I get back into it, but I like it the way it is at the moment and there are things about it I'll try to keep.


Vaporetto No.1 (2nd stage)

All aboard

Spotlight (2nd day)


Vaporetto 2 (2nd day)



Vaporetto 3 (2nd day)

[The photographs are not good: they were taken in the studio at the end of the day, without any flash, so the colours are a bit dark in places, too light in others.]

It may look like nothing much has actually changed in these three pictures, but today I've been gradually adjusting and readjusting the figures. Some were too large, some too small, and they all benefit from being worked over, being made more substantial.

I have to say that this is the tiring stage. Even to me it looks like a lot of work to no great effect, except that I know there's been a change, and for the better. The most noticeable change is in Vaporetto 3, I guess, because the figures are becoming more alive. But I must find a suitable background for it soon, so that it can be integrated into the paint as the picture progresses.

Cheesy

After the Private View on Thursday night, we wandered over the road to The Springfield Hotel, not wanting to abandon the evening's fun too early. Patsy123 was a little hungry, so she asked what they had to nibble on.

"Mini-Cheddars" were amongst the usual list of crisps and things.

"I'll have some of those," she said.

"Yes madam. What flavour?" said the barmaid, looking at the packets behind her.

"Err ... cheese?" said Patsy123, a little taken aback.

"Of course, I'll go and get some."

Q & A

Over the past few years I've been approached by GCSE A level students asking to use me as the subject for their Art Project. There must have been about 6 or 7 of them so far. At first they asked for a face-to-face interview and I gave in to that. But when my request for a copy of what they eventually wrote was always promised but never supplied, I switched to offering to answer questions put to me by email. At least that way I have a record of what I said, which can be useful to me in considering my work

I answered the most recent questionnaire in December and I thought it might be of interest if I posted an edited version of it here:

1. What was your earliest realisation that you wanted to become an artist?

Although I’ve always spent a lot of time drawing, it wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I began to think of it seriously. Even then I don’t think I realised it might be possible for me to be a professional artist. It wasn’t until I became involved with people in the publishing industry throughout the 1970s and 1980s that I began to consider and look for ways of becoming an illustrator. This led to a greater involvement with painting and by about 1985 I knew that I needed to paint full time. It took a long time to come to this conclusion, but sometimes it does seem that what you really want to do dawns on you only slowly.

2. Which artists do you admire and why?

In no particular order:

David Bomberg – beautiful drawings and paintings of London and Spain.
Walter Sickert – solidly structured paintings of great tonal strength.
Graham Sutherland - I wrote my Dissertation on his Pembrokeshire landscapes.
Paul Nash –landscapes with a very English Surrealist slant.
Carel Weight – his pictures are very English, with quirky happenings.
John Piper – his mixed media evocations of the British landscape are so Romantic.
Bill Jacklin – another excellent contemporary painter of the urban scene.
Balthus – a painter of strange, unsettling pictures.
Edward Hopper – the quintessential 20thC painter of townscapes.
Richard Diebenkorn – his still lifes and suburban landscapes are masterpieces.
Wolf Kahn – for his daring use of colours which quite simply shouldn’t work together, but do.
Wayne Thiebaud – for his West Coast townscapes, landscapes and paintings of pies, ice cream cones and gumball machines. A great realist painter.

3. What were the most significant influences on your style?

A love of the contrast of light and dark and a somewhat melancholic disposition which sometimes produces pictures imbued with a lonely or even eerie atmosphere.

4. What are the most significant influences on your choice of subject matter?

I was born in Gateshead, where I still live, and growing up there I was surrounded by Tyneside’s urban sprawl. When it came to finding suitable subject matter for paintings, it was inevitable, I suppose, that urban subjects should be what I turned to.

5. What inspires you?

It’s always something seen. Something catches my eye and I know that it has the potential to make a painting. Usually, what I notice first is an arrangement of shapes produced by strong sunlight and the resultant shadows on a group of buildings.

6. How has your work developed and changed throughout your career? What influences caused this?

The first influence on my work was Andrew Gifford. He was studying for his BA at Newcastle when I was attending OCA tutorials there. I used to see Gifford’s work in the studios and I began to find a language in his views of the Tyne that I could use in my own paintings. At the same time, the OCA tutor encouraged me to adopt a broad approach to my picture-making on the principle that “it’s better to suggest than to describe.” Following these two sources, I developed a series of rather sombre paintings of the Tyne gorge.

Eventually my reading brought me to more colourful painters, like the Americans Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. Diebenkorn’s mid-career figurative work was colourful and loosely painted as befits his beginnings as a Bay Area Abstract Expressionist and Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of the vertiginous streets of San Francisco showed what could be done with the city as subject.

At University I was encouraged to use soft brushes and to eliminate the more obvious effects of a personal handwriting, which produced work in more of a tightly-delineated realist vein. It took me several years after graduation to realise that wasn’t what I wanted and I’m only now divesting myself of much of that approach.

In the last couple of years I’ve been looking at the work of Wolf Kahn, another American painter whose own fascination is with the interaction of pure colour applied to the landscape. Together with increased travelling in the Mediterranean area, this has led me into investigations of much more colour-dominated work.

Running throughout all of this time, of course, has been an interest in the work of Edward Hopper. Hopper remains for me the quintessential urban painter.

7. What ambitions do you have for the future?

Only to go on painting and, as often as possible, getting the pictures on walls where people can see them. I don’t believe the creative process is finished until the pictures have been exhibited.

8. How do you see your work developing in the future?

Difficult to say. My most recent work has seen an increased interest in the use of colour, but I think I’m stepping back a little from that now. As a naturally tonal painter, I find I’m uncomfortable with the inevitable loss of tonal form that the real colourist has to embrace. But my interest in the formal structure of the painting continues. My most recent work displays greater emphasis on the picture plane, with flattened perspective, banding and more gestural mark making. Inevitably, however, the making of pictures suggests ways of development, so that, however much you may intellectualise about the direction you want to take, the work will lead you in unforeseen directions.

9. Which work/s do you consider to be your most successful and/or significant to date?

The most recent one is always the most interesting, but it’s difficult to look at any of them and regard them as successful. Some are more successful than others, but almost all are flawed. At any one time, however, I could single out a different painting and find new inspiration in it. Art comes from art.

Private View

I thought the show at Gateshead Library Gallery looked really good last night. In fact, I believe this is the best looking show we've put on, in terms of gallery space. The lighting is excellent, the walls are clean, white and even with no unfilled holes and the staff couldn't have been more helpful.

Despite our having opened on the same night as the annual Norman Cornish show over the river, there was a respectable turn out. It was made more interesting for me by the arrival of my cousin whom I haven't seen or spoken to for 35 years. We live half a mile apart.

Comments from people I spoke to were uniformly positive and in particular there seemed to be a lot of approval for my painting of the Central Station. The title of my Capriccio painting seemed to inspire a great deal of thought and puzzlement and I was asked several times through the night to explain "Digging up the King." But I didn't.

Not everyone was thrilled, of course. Before the show officially opened, one or two punters wandered in from the library section next door and left their thoughts in the comments book. Mostly they seemed to be on the lines of, "pretty good but vastly over-priced." So don't buy one. Stick with your Vettriano print from Boots. I'll check in later in the week to see if the comments have become more warming.

When the Boat Comes In.

A running sore in my finances was finally healed today. I did some work in November 2006 and have been waiting for payment ever since. Apparently, there was a Misunderstanding. Whatever the reason, a four figure gap in my income has now been closed and I feel like a million dollars. Wait, that's seven figures ...

First Show of the Year

We've been setting up the first of the 2008 Figure 8 shows this week.

For this new show opening on Thursday night, Gateshead Library offered us transport, which we initially turned down. However, as the deadline for the show drew nearer, I started to realise it offered me the opportunity to show a painting I originally did for my Degree Show in 2001. The tutors didn't like, so I withdrew it, but I always liked it. Because it's 5ft square, it wouldn't fit into anyone's car, so it's never been shown before and has sat in my bedroom ever since. At most, about half a dozen people have seen it.

It was a wonderful sight yesterday - a huge pantechnicon arrived at my door and we carefully carried my one big picture into the echoing vastness of the van. The four others are only 20 ins square and hid in a corner.

I'm pleased with the way it looks in the gallery. It has a wall all to itself and during the day is nicely lit by a big adjacent picture window.

This is the painting. It's not a good photograph, a little faded due to the low light and no flash, but it gives some idea of how it looks.


Capriccio (Digging up the King) (Oil on canvas; 60 x 60 ins)

A capriccio in this sense, is a painting representing a fantasy or a mixture of real and imaginary features. In this case it's made up of buildings in and around Newcastle, reconfigured to give a new city.