Guest Blog

It's been a busy time, with last weekend taken up with Pat's Mum's 90th birthday. I was going to write something about it, but then thought Pat could do it just as well, if not better:



My last week has been taken up helping my Mum celebrate her 90th. She has been high as a kite all week and has thoroughly enjoyed being the centre of attention.

Saturday was the actual birthday and we all, (Harry & I, my sons and partners, my brother and his wife, their sons, partners and daughter, 15 altogether) had a slap up lunch at Headlam Hall.

Headlam Hall

She had a (real) birthday cake, (plastic) tiara and magenta feather boa which she wore with aplomb.


Tiara and a Boa

Luckily the weather was fine and we could move out into the gardens afterwards and take loads of photographs. She was thrilled to have all her family around her, all getting on with each other and looking so happy.

We left her on Sunday surrounded by flowers and plants, and every inch of space covered in cards.

I was back on Tuesday for Wednesday's buffet lunch party at the local pub for some other family members, friends and neighbours. She still didn't flag, but moved around from table to table talking to everyone, then out in the garden for more photographs.

She now has more presents than she knows what to do with, enough plants and flowers to open her own shop and over fifty cards. She also has a whole new lease of life. On Wednesday she announced that she would see everyone again in ten years time, and I suspect she could be right.

-- Pat Mailer

Bands of Colour

Orange House (work in progress)

As Casey Klahn pointed out in his comment on Black Ship and Mosque, Chania, there's a certain attraction in compositions that consist of relatively simple bands of blue sandwiching a band of coloured complexity. At least, I think they're attractive and I'm pleased at least one other person sees it that way.

I find the concept so interesting that I've been looking for further examples of it to work through and for variations on the theme. This is a variation in that the sandwiching has been turned on its side and there are now vertical bands of wall sandwiching the main subject of the painting, the Orange House. Although it may be less obvious, the recently started painting Archway, is also derived from this thinking. Development of the painting may make it more obvious in due course.

In the case of these paintings, of course, the walls are not quite as featureless as the bands of sea in the earlier pictures, but it's not impossible that further paintings on this theme might produce plainer walls. Oh, a painter's life can be so exciting in its possibilities ....

Sunset

I'm always a little restless when I'm finishing off my tax accounts. I don't like doing them and would rather be painting, but generally I end up fiddling with both and feeling ... well, restless.

So it was today that I made some small progress with the accounts and then some smaller progress with a painting that may yet work out, but not until I can give it my full attention.

Coming up from the studio, I slumped into my chair in the living room bay window and looked out at the setting sun. It's at times like this that I sometimes wonder why we try to make paintings. They certainly can't compete with what gets painted in the sky every evening.

Sunlit Wall. No Bagpipes.

Archway (work in progress)

Those bagpipes I hear must be still some way off, because this is definitely somewhere more exotic. I hasten to add that at this point I'm not prepared to enter into a discussion of the value judgement inherent in my suggestion that Scotland is not exotic.

I enjoyed working this over an old painting I'd decided would never make it to completion. The texture and colours of the old painting were really good to paint on. I worked quite fast and used what paint was still on the palettefrom the last session. As a consequence there's some greying of the colour (especially the greens) which will need to be dealt with when I cone back to it, but overall I like the effect of a sunlit wall seen through an archway.

Black Ship leaving Harbour

Black Ship leaving Harbour (oil on canvas, 9 x 12 ins)

This Black Ship has proven to be very useful. However, I think I may have exhausted its possibilities for now and will have to start looking elsewhere. I think I hear bagpipes ....

Black Ship and Mosque, Chania

Black Ship and Mosque, Chania (oil on canvas, 12 x 12 ins)

One of the " one or two other things" I was "getting on with" got finished today. The two Black Ship paintings look good together and it's not immediately obvious that one is 30 x 30 cms and the other is 12 x 12 ins. It is immediately obvious, however, when I try to put them both into 30 x 30 cm frames. Bummer.


Black Ship at Chania (oil on canvas, 30 x 30 cms)

Frustration and a Fish

Chania Harbour (work in progress)

It's been a week of frustration, mostly. The latest "winter" painting is misbehaving and progress, such as it is, has been of the two steps forward, one step back sort. The painting is in a state I don't care to show at the moment, some painting out having been necessary, but once I've re-established it, I'll let you see where I am with it.

Meanwhile, I've been getting on with one or two other things, including some work at the Club today on this small picture of Chania Harbour. The light in it is peculiar and I wonder where it came from. Somewhere within the picture itself, I guess, because it wasn't in the original scene.

I came away relieved of some of my frustration and carrying a fish - Roly has been in the trout streams again and although he catches them, he doesn't like to eat them.

Hot and Solitary

Chania (work in progress)

Well, it was another gloriously sunny day today, so what better idea than to make my way to the Club and paint amongst my fellow painters? Of course, the studio being so hot, everybody (by which I mean all two of them) had gone home by the time I got there.

Having taken along a fresh small canvas, I figured I might as well get something done, so spent the next couple of hours laying out yet another view of part of the harbour at Chania, while muttering aloud to myself and wiping the sweat from my brow. Who are these people who say painting must be fun?

Hickery Dickery Dare

Fibretip and coloured pencil in A6 accordion fold Moleskine.

Hickery, dickery, dare,
The pig flew up in the air,
But Patrick Brown
Soon brought him down,
Hickery, dickery, dare.

Sometimes a change really is as good as a rest. I recently agreed to help out Michael Nightmare with his Piggy Moly which he'd retrieved from a moribund group of Moly Xers. When it arrived from Lynne Lamb a few days ago, I found the chance to do something that didn't involve painting very attractive, so tonight I set to and finished my contribution.

The nursery rhyme I found in Cole's Funny Picture Book, a treasure from my childhood. and I decided to make my pig a superhero. The evil Patrick Brown, his arch-nemesis, is yet to appear on the scene.

Grey Day

Turnbull Winter (work in progress)

One of the hardest things about this painting is that I need to grey down most of the colours to make the seasonal light look right. This is particularly difficult with red because to do the greying down you really need to add green and as I've indicated before, my eyesight is red/green deficient. The Turnbull Building is proving resistant to the right amount of greying, but it seems to have worked okay for me in the building at the bottom right.

Ah well, who wants to be able to get a painting right in a day anyway?

Winter Again

Turnbull Winter (work in progress)

It's been a funny old week, with some tests for an ongoing eye problem which I won't go into here. I used what was left of the week to catch up with the guys at the Club, but did no work there. However, I made a start today on another possible Winter painting.

This is a view across the Tyne from Gateshead to the Newcastle shore, with the Turnbull Building on the crest of the river bank. It's unusual for me in that it's a low viewpoint. Normally I go for something high above the subject because it enables me to flatten things out and emphasise the abstract pattern. Nevertheless, I rather like this current approach as it allows me to work with horizontal banding again.

It's a reasonably large picture (36 x 36 ins) and those big areas of flat colour take some filling. But they should prove interesting as new layers are applied and the colour becomes, I hope, more complex and subtle.

Grey's Monument

Grey's Monument ( oil on canvas, 20 x 20 ins)

I thought it was time I put the finishing touches to this painting. I last worked on it over three years ago, but I got distracted with other projects and enthusiasm for it waned. Ridiculous, really, but that's how the mood takes me sometimes. Had there been a need to finish it, I'd have done so in a very short time - less than an hour.

Anyway, here it is finished after all, one more to add to the collection in the back of the studio.

Rugs & Icons

Rugs & Icons (oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cms)

Working on the Shops & Stalls series gave me a greater insight into what it was I wanted from this subject so, although Rugs & Icons was the first of its type, I found I wanted to make some alterations to draw it into closer alignment with its children.

As a consequence, I've brightened up the colours of some of the rugs and taken down the colour of the walls round the shop. The blind has been made more substantial. I think now I'd be happier to show this with the later additions to the series.

Return to Kastela

Kastela Restaurant (work in progress)

I'm very fond of the work of Lionel Bulmer and that of his wife, Margaret Green and some of Bulmer's pointillist techniques seem to have come unbidden to my mind when I started again on this painting of a restaurant-on-stilts in Kastela, Croatia.

It's odd the way a painting can demand something different from you, but giving in to the demand often turns out to be so rewarding. I'm looking forward to seeing where this picture may yet take me.

Rooms & Mannequins

Rooms & Mannequins (oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cms)

Another in the Shops & Stalls series brought to completion. I think they look good lined up together and now I have only to finish the slight reworking of Rugs & Icons, the painting that started me on this theme.

Open the Gate Again

The Gate (work in progress)

This painting has been languishing in the studio for some time now. I last worked on it in 2008 and it just didn't seem to be going right. But today I pulled it out of the rack and had another go at it. I've simplified the composition and taken the colour down somewhat, which I think suits Newcastle better, but there's still some way to go before I'll be satisfied with it.

Another Black Ship

Black Ship and Mosque (work in progress)

I thought I'd get the day off to a good start today by laying out this new small picture of the black ship in Chania harbour, the disused mosque in the background.

Sometimes I'm really surprised when the first layers of colour turn out to be as vivid as these, because it's not something I generally do deliberately. Colour is something I think about when the composition is established, but maybe my constant colour thoughts are coming to the fore more than they once did.

Two Toothbrushes

Two Toothbrushes (2B mechanical pencil, A5 sketchbook)

Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head ....

and then I drew this. Something about it caught my eye and I just had to get it down on paper. This doesn't happen often, unfortunately, but I've been looking at the blogs of Michael Nobbs and Jay Mercado recently, and something of their enthusiasm for drawing must have rubbed off on me. Whatever the reason, it felt worth going with the flow.

And then into town. Into the drizzly-grey-raininess of Newcastle. Please someone tell me that this isn't going to be another of those awful summers! Don't let me find by the end of the year that summer was that nice week I had in the Dales in April.

It was all worth it anyway. I was there to lend my expert opinion on the purchase of an outfit for Pat's son's wedding in September (by which time, we hope, the summer really will be here). The expedition was a success and Pat will look fantastic in her emerald green. Now I have the far more arduous task of finding just the right tie....

Six Years

Waste Pipe (2B automatic pencil, 6 x 4 sketchbook)

Another Boogie Street anniversary slipped by without my noticing. On the 15th April, the six anniversary of my first post came and went.

A little googling shows that the traditional gift for a sixth anniversary is something made of iron, so I thought I'd trawl through my sketchbooks for something suitable. Quite a lot of things made of steel, but the only subject definitely of iron is this cast iron waste pipe. Drawn in a break from office life, it evidently took me away from my duties for 20 minutes, yet another example of public spending waste.

The subject should not in any respect be taken as a comment on the blog, however. I still find it fun to post things here and it often serves as a stimulus to get some painting done to show you. But not today it seems.

Breakfast & T-Shirts

Breakfast & T-Shirts (oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cms)

This one has just been waiting for me to finish off the top and tickle one or two areas round the clothing. It's all done now and I'm an increasingly happy man.

Paintings & Prints

Paintings & Prints (oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cms)

Pushing the painting style dilemma to the back of my mind, I had a good day today, pressing on with this painting in the Shops & Stalls series and finishing it. I feel this series is going well and my initial enthusiasm for it has had a resurgence.

Not to be defeated with the Winter painting, however, I've done a little more to the Night Station 2 picture. I know it looks as if I've depicted the mouth of hell but have patience. It'll come right in the end.


Night Station 2 (work in progress)

Distracted Again

Night Station 2 (work in progress)

I've been forced to take my eye off the ball, despite an earnest wish to get on with the outstanding paintings of Shops & Stalls, Kastela restaurants and like so. A few days ago I learned I have the chance of showing some work in a gallery I hold in very high esteem; I've shown there before and have been anxious to show there again for some time.

But there's a problem. The show will be at the end of the year and, although it won't be themed, it was made clear to me that "Winter" paintings are what will be required. The problem? I don't do Winter paintings, or at least haven't done for some considerable time. You'll know that I regularly work from photographs, but I don't even take many photographs in the Winter. I hate the Winter. It's cold and miserable and for some years now I've concentrated on making paintings celebrating colour and light; they make me happy.

So what do I do? It's a not inconsiderable dilemma, but one I'm determined to work through. In an effort to get into a "Winter" frame of mind, I've just begun this painting, a companion piece to the Night Station I painted last year. We'll see how it works out. There are definitely things about it that I like and I may yet be able to fuse this kind of subject matter to my other current work.

Boat in New Harbour, Chania

Boat in New Harbour, Chania (oil on canvas, 30 x 30 cms)

I've been busy socialising since I got back from Glasgow and fretting that my pictures were being neglected., but today I was able to finish this boat painting. I'm pleased to be able to add it to what seemed a limited supply of small paintings.

As well as working on the boat picture, I made further progress on one of the Shops & Stalls series. A satisfactory day.


Picture Shop (work in progress)

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.

Shop Work

Clothes Shop (work in progress)

Getting ready to go to Glasgow tomorrow, but I still found time to work on the new shop painting today. That brings it up to the same degree of completion as the the one I began on Saturday. Coming back from Glasgow, I'll have quite a choice of paintings to finish, always something I like.

Two More Shops

Picture Shop (work in progress)

It's always a good sign when I start to get excited about a new series and that's what's happened with what is now becoming a series of paintings of Shops & Stalls. Yesterday I made good progress in getting this painting of a picture shop in Crete under way despite the unsympathetic orange underpainting. I'd forgotten that painting over an orange ground makes all the yellows look green and had to work hard to correct it. [Note to self: don't do this again].

With a little time to spare, and the bit between my teeth, I laid out another clothes shop.


Clothes Shop (work in progress)

Further work on these and the other outstanding works in progress will probably have to wait a week, as Pat is taking me to Glasgow on Tuesday for a few days - a belated birthday present.

Two Chairs Appear

New Harbour (work in progress)

Finishing a painting, as I did yesterday, always makes me want to get on with another, but today I had a meeting for coffee and a chat at Kaffecinos in town. Still, while the spirit was with me, I had time to make some small progress on this painting of a boat in the New Harbour at Chania.

Somebody seems to have put out two chairs and is that ouzo and kalamari I can smell?

Black Ship at Chania

Black Ship at Chania (Oil on canvas, 30 x 30 cms)

As the election process rumbled on towards its inevitable conclusion (although distinctly more promising than I thought possible), I got on with this small painting. By the end of the day the country had a new government and I had a new painting. No prizes for guessing which I liked more.

Dales Diary - Wednesday 28 April (pm)

Scar Top (Rotring BB Art Pen, watercolour, in 21 x 25 cm sketchbook)

Every day on my way down to breakfast, I'd look out of the rear window and up to the empty farmhouse on top of the hill. I knew I wanted to draw it and on Wednesday afternoon I sat out on the terrace at the back of the house and made this drawing.

As soon as I sat down on my stool I realised the view was better from inside the house because of the slightly lower viewpoint, but I'd made up my mind to do the drawing from the terrace. As a result, rather than do a portrait-shaped drawing, I opted for this landscape one. The black trees against the sky turned out to be something of a nightmare, but a wash over the soluble ink of the Art Pen proved to be the solution.

This turned out to be the last drawing I did at The Rookery. Thursday's walk along the far side of the beck, where I'd hoped to find some new material, ended when I met two of the others coming back, having been chased away by a sheepdog.

Dales Diary - Wednesday 28 April (am)

Ravine (4B pencil in A4 sketchbook)

We'd been promised heavy rained for Wednesday, but by the time the day rolled round the bad weather had moved away, so Roly and I went for a short drive to check out the far end of the valley and on into Wharfedale. Just beyond Buckden, we topped a rise and on the way down the other side, came across this ravine with a not very energetic waterfall in it.

It was a delight to sit in the sunshine and struggle with the problem of capturing streams and trickles of water falling in the recesses of the ravine.