Welcome to my Blog
Two communities at the Edge: Seal Sands and Dungeness
I am a painter of place, and through a series of largely mixed media compositions, I attempted to express something of what it means to me, to know a place ‘at the edge’. The resulting paintings can be seen in Gallery 2 I observed two communities: Seal Sands (Greatham...
Staithes (part 2): the strand.
On North Yorkshire’s Jurassic coast, where Roxby Beck meets the North Sea, there is just enough space to squeeze in a landing place. The Old Norse word ‘stoth’, means a wharf, but in the North East of England, under Danelaw, the word in common usage was ‘staithe’, and...
Staithes (part 1): the village.
I stepped down from the ‘United’ bus at a junction on the main Redcar to Whitby road, and found myself on the edge of a small estate of unprepossessing council houses. Feeling underwhelmed at the climax of my journey, my 12 year-old legs dawdled 300 yards further, and...
May 2014. “How long did it take you to do that?”
Looking at paintings, people often seem to want an answer to the question, "How long did it take you to do that?" It’s difficult to offer a reply. I can work out the hours I spend in the studio at an easel, applying media to a surface, but that would only give part of...
March 2014. Blackhall Rocks.
Just 4 miles to the north of Hartlepool lies the former colliery village of Blackhall and Blackhall Rocks, at the southern extent of the Northumberland and Durham coalfield, and what a place it is! In my initial blog I said that the sort of places I painted were not...
January 2014 Greatham Creek/Seaton snook
Greatham Creek is a tributary of the river Tees, not really flowing into the river, but forming part of the delta, and joining the estuary at Seal Sands beyond Seaton Snook on the south side of Hartlepool. I used to cycle there in the late 60s and early 70s when there...
December 2013 Run for home.
It was in 1978 that I went to the Lindisfarne Christmas concert at the Newcastle City Hall. I went to watch my mate Eric, dance with the Killingworth Sword Dancers, a warm-up act to the main band; but it was Alan Hull, the lead singer with Lindisfarne, who made...
Welcome to my blog
Over my lifetime, I have grown to love shores and hills and empty landscapes – I have spent a lot of that time in them - days of close observation, trying to understand them, traipsing their rough terrain. I also spend long hours scratching about in a studio. In...