Hobbs blog

The Art of Urban Sketching: a quick flick through

2012-01-25T09:55:00.005Z

Have a quick look at "The Art of Urban Sketching", out any minute now. My work flies through at about 47 seconds, and again later on...

The Art of Urban Sketching

2012-01-04T10:24:00.006Z

I've been blogging occasionally on the Urban Sketchers website for a few years now, and I'm one of 85 artists profiled in a new book about the international non-profit organisation. The Art of Urban Sketching, by its founder Gabriel Campanario, is published in February by Quarry at £17.99.

Urban Sketchers is a great thing. Invited artists around the world post their drawings and paintings with a few words about how they came about. Whether the drawing is on the back of an envelope or in one of those swish Moleskine sketchbooks that some artists seem to like, it can have an international audience - and international critical response - within minutes. This can be kind of odd, and strangely exciting, when you consider what usually happens to many such drawings. Urban Sketchers is fantastically international, holds an annual symposium, which I haven't been able to attend yet, has nearly 16,000 Facebook fans and 7,000 people subscribing to its blog feed. It's worth visiting, if you haven't already.

As its motto says: "See the world one drawing at a time."

N16 Pop-up: open now

2011-12-12T22:26:00.004Z

It was a betting shop, and now it's a pop-up gallery, handily placed just around the corner from where we live in Stoke Newington. It's currently showing the work of 11 local artists, including mine, and open right up until Christmas, and late on Thursdays.

In the spirit of keeping it local, I have some unframed prints of our much-loved local pub The Shakespeare in Allen Road on sale inside.

Pay it a visit if you're around. It's next to Mother Earth health food shop at Albion Parade.

And follow their tweets at @n16popup.

Built in Miami

2011-12-06T10:38:00.008Z

I'm back from another week working at Art Basel Miami Beach. It's the tenth fair and the years have gradually bestowed a cultural and architectural legacy on the city. At one end of the pedestrianised shopping street Lincoln Road is Herzog & de Meuron's carpark at number 1111 (right). I drew it last year, and didn't think it was finished. I drew it again last week, and still wasn't sure if it was. (It is.) Apart from the shops and the distinctive, irregular carpark, there is, apparently, a residential element, a floor for installations and a restaurant. But is there a way in?

Just off the other end of Lincoln Road, towards the beach, is Frank Gehry's New World Center for the New World Symphony Orchestra (below). Again, I haven't been in (Art Basel Miami Beach's video programme was screened on the hall's exterior during the warm evenings during fair) but it's unmistakeably finished.

Over its entrance and on its roof there are rolling forms that recall Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, but otherwise its exterior has clinical straight lines. The paved footpaths across the palm tree-lined park before it are straight too - in time, the public will carve more direct and natural lines across its lawns.

On sale this Christmas...

2011-11-27T15:21:00.005Z

How about a limited edition print for a Christmas present? I have works on sale, framed and unframed, at Skylark Gallery 2 at the Oxo Tower Wharf, right next to the gorgeous River Thames (above), at the Art Agency, Esher, and at Printroom, Hampstead. More details of another venue for my work will be posted here as soon as it is confirmed.

Or you can contact me directly for more information. See more examples of my work here:
www.james-hobbs.co.uk

Still showing at the Art Agency, Esher

2011-11-02T15:13:00.006Z

I still have work showing in the inaugural exhibition at the Art Agency's new gallery in Esher, Surrey, which continues until 10 November.

The Art Agency
93 High Street
Esher
Surrey
KT10 9QA

Right, Regent Street, digital print, £120 unframed

My stolen bike

2011-10-30T16:22:00.007Z

My black Marin Kentfield, stolen, padlocked, from the bike shed in our garden in Stoke Newington today. I'd say it was a much loved bike, but I haven't had it long since the last one was stolen.

This one I have security tagged, photographed, insured and burdened with padlocks. Will I ever see it again?* Let me know if you see it.

Frame number JB11640GJD037

* Let's face it, no.

At the Affordable Art Fair, Battersea Park, 20-23 October

2011-10-16T14:19:00.003+01:00

My work is showing on the Skylark Gallery stand (F4) at the Affordable Art Fair in Battersea Park, London, from Thursday 20-Sunday 23 October, along with the work of nine other gallery artists. I'll be at the stand over the weekend if you're passing by. There are two Affordable Art Fairs in London this month: I'm showing at Battersea, not in Hampstead.

Need more information? Visit www.affordableartfair.com.

And a reminder: the Art Agency's launch show at its new Esher gallery also continues until 10 November. More details here.

St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, London

2011-10-10T14:17:00.002+01:00

The new St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, George Gilbert Scott's mesmerising structure in north London. It's amazing what you can do with bricks.

The Art Agency gallery launches 11 October

2011-10-03T12:28:00.007+01:00

I'm exhibiting a selection of my prints in a group show of work by six artists at the launch of the Art Agency's brand new gallery in Esher, Surrey. It is having a special launch week from 11-15 October, with 10% off the price of all works. The private view is on Thursday 13 October: see details on the right to receive an invitation. The show continues until Thursday 10 November.

The Art Agency,
93 High Street,
Esher,
Surrey, UK
KT10 9QA

Tel 01372 466740
Open Tues-Sun 10am to 4pm

www.theartagency.co.uk

Featured artist at Skylark 2 until 9 October

2011-09-29T14:50:00.005+01:00

I'm the current featured artist at Skylark 2 in the Oxo Tower Wharf on London's South Bank, until 9 October. There's more of my work on display than usually, and I'm at the gallery on Friday 30 September from 6pm to 8pm, and on Sunday 2 October, from 11am to 6pm, if you're around. Need directions? Look here.

I'm showing at the Art Agency and the Affordable Art Fair, Battersea, in the next month. More details soon.

I'm tweetable: @jameshobbsart.

Port d'Addaia, Menorca

2011-09-20T11:31:00.006+01:00

The family holiday to Menorca was thrown into doubt by daughter number two breaking her arm the week before we were due to fly out, but after an hour spent at check-in while the airline made its mind up about whether it would let her fly with her arm in plaster, we were away to the heat. Port d'Addaia, a yachty sort of place on the north coast of the island (a bit too yachty for me, to be honest) was one of the places we visited on our trips around the coast. There are fantastic, remote, unspoilt, sandy beaches around Menorca if you're prepared to walk to them.

Now it's a case of preparing for a featured artist slot at Skylark 2, a group show at the Art Agency's new gallery, and the forthcoming Affordable Art Fair at Battersea, all in the next month or so. More details here soon.

The eye is fine now, by the way. Thanks to people for their kind messages.

Blurry in Moorfields

2011-07-19T22:45:00.005+01:00

With the arrival of some unusual floaters in my right eye on Sunday afternoon, I headed to Moorfields Eye Hospital yesterday morning, which happens to be about ten bus stops down the road from where we live. It was an eye-opening experience in more ways than one: I sat in a succession of waiting rooms (never for too long, and sometimes only for a few minutes) as I worked my way through the system, and was eventually told that my eye is only acting in the way that it may when it's been around for half a century, and that things should settle down over the next month or so. I'm heading back for scan results in about 10 days' time.

With some goop put in my eyes to numb them and to dilate the pupils, I couldn't devote my waiting time to reading the small print of the Guardian I'd naively brought with me, but drawing was surprisingly enjoyable, and the haziness of the results I can put down — in part, anyway — to my blurred vision.

This morning I awoke to a wonderful soft focus effect through my right eye, lending a romantic tinge to gritty Stoke Newington, and giving the effect you'd expect if viewing gorgeous, love-struck couples running through wheatfields hand-in-hand to soaring orchestral music. Film noir continues unabated through the left eye.

Heron Tower, Bishopsgate

2011-07-13T09:13:00.006+01:00

While I am sitting drawing in one of the many cafes on Bishopsgate, younger daughter is on a school trip to Heron Tower, the modern tower with the zigzags in the centre of my drawing. She was whisked up with her year 5 class to the 21st floor where they met two architects who had been working on the recently opened 46-storey building. They showed them their drawings, before the children drew their own views of the city through the windows as they lay on their stomachs on the floor.

I saw some of their drawings in the school corridor a couple of days later as I waited to meet her teacher for the end-of-term report. They were great, really excellent (as was her report). Why didn't I get school trips like that? When did I last make a drawing lying on my stomach?

Coals to Newcastle

2011-06-28T14:49:00.003+01:00

I'm back from a few days in Switzerland, where I'd been working at the vast Art Basel fair, and where business seems to suggest that the economic uncertainty of the past few years never happened. The park at Claramatte (above) is just around the corner from the exhibition halls, and filled with families and children that make me miss home in London.

Heading home, I'm going through security at the airport before I realise, too late, that I haven't transferred my penknife from my hand luggage into my suitcase. They pick it up on the scan, as they should, and then they take it from me, also as they should.

But I'd had that knife for years, a gift from Ms S. The irony is, of course, that it is Swiss customs that take from me my dear old Swiss army knife. As if they didn't have enough.

Online at BBC Your Paintings

2011-06-27T23:05:00.006+01:00

The first 63,000 paintings from the nation's public collections have just gone online on the BBC Your Paintings website. My painting, which found its way into the Hampshire County Council Contemporary Art Collection some time after I sold it at my degree show in 1988, is among them. You can see it here.

It's still being called An Island Near the Shore on the Your Paintings website for now, a name given to it, I expect, by the mysterious A Smitt, who was credited with the work for too long. I'm hoping that it will soon return to the title I originally gave it, after due consideration and contemplation: Untitled.

I gather that the painting hung for many years in the main reception area of Hampshire County Council in Trafalgar House, Winchester, until the building closed last year, and is now in Hampshire House, Eastleigh, which is used for Children's Services staff and public meetings. I'd quite like to pop in and pay it a visit sometime. I bet A Smitt never did that.

From sea to sea

2011-05-25T13:37:00.009+01:00

The newly opened Way of the Roses cycle route goes from Morecambe, Lancashire, on the west coast, across the Yorkshire Dales and Yorkshire Wolds to Bridlington on the east coast, 170 miles away. Ron and I had set aside four days to do it, so there was no huge rush, but it's gruelling enough in parts.

Gruelling, but fantastic. On day two, travelling from Settle to Pateley Bridge, we had 27 miles of up up up (and a burst of very fast down down down), and the several occasions we got off and pushed gave us plenty of opportunity to admire the dales in the sun.

The Way of the Roses, which opened in September 2010, follows some off-road sections and lots of backroads. Near the village of Clapham we somehow lost our way, heading off into the sunset when we should have been going eastwards (seeing, in the process, some of the most memorable landscape), and we missed a sign on the way to Driffield having come down a hill too fast (when the momentum is with you the temptation can be to go with your hunch on the right direction), but the signposting is generally great, and there's the usual sense of camaraderie and support from fellow cyclists.

On day four we set off for the coast with a severe weather warning ringing in our ears. But the wind was at our backs. This was a good way to finish the journey at Bridlington seafront, even if it was hard to stand up in the wind. Branches may have been falling from the trees, but when wind and bike are going in the same direction you enter a wonderful world of calmness and speed. Don't do this route east to west.

This blog is also posted on the Way of the Roses website.

Found in Hampshire

2011-04-27T11:30:00.012+01:00

An email arrived out of the blue the other day from somebody at the Public Catalogue Foundation asking if I was the artist called James Hobbs who had painted the work they had attached as a jpeg (above). The disappointment at finding out I wasn't the James Hobbs they were looking for would only have been compounded by finding out there was another artist called James Hobbs, so it was a relief to find out that the painting was mine.

It was an odd sensation to see the painting again, because I hadn't seen it in nearly 23 years, since my degree show when I had sold it. I'd sold a few works at the show (although not as many as Ms S, and only on a small scale compared to what was going on at the Freeze show that was being arranged by Damien Hirst at Surrey Docks at about the same time).

The email went on to tell me that my painting was in the art collection of Hampshire County Council, and the Public Catalogue Foundation charity are in the process of photographing and recording all the paintings in public collections in the UK. It's estimated there are about 200,000 such works in buildings including council offices, hospitals and fire stations, the vast majority away from the public eye. Colour catalogues are being produced but, inevitably and essentially, they are going to be shown online too. My painting, along with all the others, will end up in time in a catalogue and on the BBC's Your Paintings website.

Four years ago I had a similar email from the Berardo Collection in Lisbon asking if four works in its collection were by me. I like the idea that you make these works and then they go off and have a life of their own. It's like bringing up children and then seeing them leave home. (I hope ours don't disappear without trace for 23 years, though.)

The most bizarre things about the past couple of decades the Hampshire painting has spent is that it has acquired a new title — An Island Near the Shore is definitely not the title I've given any painting, although my records from that time are not all they might be and the hunt goes on in the attic for its true title — and that it was apparently attributed for a while to an artist called A Smitt. How did that come about? Who is A Smitt? That's something my hunt in the attic will not sort out.

Showing with the Art Agency soon...

2011-04-01T11:28:00.011+01:00

I'm very happy to say I'm going to showing work for the first time at the Art Agency's forthcoming Spring Show, which takes place at the Landmark Arts Centre, Teddington, Middlesex, over the long bank holiday weekend later this month (29 April-2 May). The Art Agency organises exhibitions in a range of venues in London and the south east. I'm one of five new artists being introduced at the show. For more details, see here.

Landmark Arts Centre, Ferry Road, Teddington, Middlesex TW11 9NN.
Open from Friday 29 April-Monday 2 May, 10am-5pm (4pm Monday).
Directions to the Landmark.

A statue for Mary Wollstonecraft?

2011-03-22T06:17:00.011Z

On International Women's Day the other week a green plaque was unveiled in a square down the road in memory of writer and educator Mary Wollstonecraft on what is thought to be the site of the school she set up in the 18th century. Wollstonecraft packed a lot into her 38 years. Her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is considered one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy and led her, eventually, to be called the mother of feminism. (Is there also a father of feminism? I think probably not.)

By coming to live at Newington Green she came into contact, through Richard Price, minister of the neighbouring Dissenting Church (still functioning next to the tasty Belle Epoque patisserie), with such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Adam Smith. If you weren't radicalised before meeting this lot, you would be soon afterwards, wouldn't you? Her life was short, unconventional, and more inspirational than she could have possibly imagined.

The new plaque, which looks over the southbound bus-stop on the east side of the green, is perhaps just the beginning: a campaign is underway to erect a statue of Wollstonecraft in the square, and this recent letter to the Guardian is proof there's a lot of support for this plan.

I have a few drawings on this blog, A Vindication of the Rights of Mary, which is a good place to find out more about Wollstonecraft.

St Pancras to Paris

2011-02-22T12:08:00.006Z

There's a milestone anniversary for Ms S and I, and in a surprise and uncharacteristically romantic gesture (a surprise for me as much as for her) I arrange a short, child-free weekend away for us both, which we all somehow manage to keep as a secret from her. Once she'd made the rendezvous at St Pancras it wasn't too difficult for her to guess where we may be heading (Corby or Northampton, two other destinations from the station, for all their probable charms, were unlikely contenders), and three hours later we are in a hotel in Paris.

There isn't time to draw this on the way, or on the way back. I head back later in the week for a few hours to draw. Railway stations don't often have quiet corners, but on the upper level there are acres of space, quiet cafes and the statue of John Betjeman, the poet laureate and founding member of the Victorian Society, gazing up into the arched roof that he helped save from the demolition mob. The St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, the old Midland Grand Hotel designed by George Gilbert Scott, opens next month.

The Shard: London's newest tallest building

2011-01-31T15:50:00.008Z

London, Britain even, has a new tallest building. The Shard is still on the way up - this is how it looked last week - but it has already gone higher than One Canada Square at Canary Wharf. This may sound ridiculously obvious, but it really is incredibly high: to stand beneath it and look towards its disappearing summit is to look into a place where nothing, apart from the occasional feral pigeon or police helicopter, has any right to be.

Its designer, Renzo Piano of Pompidou Centre fame, has said that its top "would come to almost nothing", by which he means, I think, a point, above which will be exactly nothing. After 72 storeys, including a viewing gallery and open-air observation deck, there will be another 15 "radiator floors".

It is difficult to pass judgment on a building that isn't even finished yet, but the Shard does look a little remote from the rest of London's high-rise architecture, and I get the feeling that its glassiness and straight lines will mean it ages quickly. As I draw it from London Bridge, people continually stop, stare and photograph it. And from an unrepresentative sample of a couple of conversations with them, praise was not immediately forthcoming.

Getting ready for 2012

2011-01-21T10:02:00.005Z

"Getting ready for 2012," says the sign on the hoarding around the centre of Leicester Square. There's no mention of the Olympics, which start in London in July next year, but there's the obvious implication that that's why the work is in progress. It feels as if the city is in a state of limbo in the run-up to its opening: scaffolding abounds well away from the Olympic park in east London. Quite what needs to be done to the small park of benches, and statues of the likes of Shakespeare, Chaplin and Newton to make the square suitable for spectators of synchronised swimming, beach volleyball and archery isn't obvious. But if as much attention is lavished on it as a painter is lovingly giving to putting the final touches to the black screens erected around the square, it will be worth the wait.

Pencils: the high-fibre option

2010-12-31T10:52:00.010Z

Over the years I have collected a wide and rather curious range of artists' materials that are stored in an old cupboard in the corner of the office/studio. Sorting through it recently in the hunt for an A5-sized sketchbook – shades of an alcoholic ransacking the house desperate to find a forgotten and unfinished bottle of whisky — I realise how much I had restricted myself in the materials I used.

A pile of redundant stuff mounts up: aquarelle pencils, rabbitskin glue, hard pastels, soft pastels, oil pastels, oil paints so rich with pigment that a couple of tubes would serve perfectly well as dumbbells, student-quality acrylics that look as if they came free in a packet of cornflakes, watercolour masking fluid so old the lid has fused tightly and permanently shut, box upon box of charcoal from every known manufacturer in the western world... And there, lurking at the back, a blast from the past, a reminder of happy, innocent days from years ago, a bunch of stubby pencils bound together by a now corroded elastic band.

There was a time when I went hardly anywhere without a 2B pencil or two in my jacket pocket, along with its inevitable companions the Swiss army knife and the little black sketchbook. Its place in my pocket has been taken over by the marker pen, which has its advantages, but none of the beauty and naturalness of a pencil. For a start, you can't look at a marker pen and see how close it is to running out. With a pencil, what you see is what you get: a one-inch stub leaves you in no doubt that you need to get a new one. And pencils are cheaper, too.

The pencil is still, however, a thing of beauty to me: to bring one to a fine point with a sharp knife, to feel that sharpest point ping and break as it first hits the page, leaving a little splash of graphite dust across the paper; to have at one's fingertips that infinite range of weights of lines and tones that software packages can only dream of. A pencil is small and light, and available in every high street. It looks and feels organic, the high-fibre option. I would even venture to say that, if pushed, a well-sharpened H pencil could be used to perform an emergency tracheotomy. And they work just about anywhere. NASA still uses them on the International Space Station.

In an age obsessed with upgrading, the pencil is a towering monument to getting something right almost first time. We are now on no more than Pencil 3.0, and considering that it first appeared about 450 years ago, that is something to boast about.

So why are pencils relegated to the darkened corners of the studio cupboard? It's a question I'm still asking myself. At the moment, at least, I'm looking for a line that is thicker, and blacker, less likely to smudge and less pencil-like. But there's one in my jacket pocket again now, and a precious relationship has been rekindled.

Back from Miami

2010-12-06T14:52:00.009Z

The week's work in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach coincides neatly with the cold snap in the UK: London is snowless on departure and the thaw is complete by our return. Miami is consistent in the opposite extreme. Cloudless on arrival and departure, and most of the rest of the time as well. There's a chasm in temperature between Florida and the rest of the US - it's obvious why it's a place to flee to in the winter.

Art Basel Miami Beach brings together about 250 top end international galleries with hundreds of top end international collectors, curators, movers and shakers, and then there are another dozen or more satellite shows around the city. My work with The Art Newspaper goes on late into the night, so there's time during the day to explore and draw. Apart from the beach with its meandering palm tree-lined board walk, and the tasty art deco architecture - best in the evening when the neon kicks in - there are plenty of shows about town. Isaac Julien's sumptuous Ten Thousand Waves at the Bass Museum is showing on nine large screens in a dimly lit room that is interspersed, you realise once your eyes become accustomed to the light, with people sitting on the floor with the hush of a religious service.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, are the sculptures of Jonathan Meese and black and white photographs by Bruce Weber of Miami's Haitian community that explore the way refugees from the Caribbean country are handled by the US immigration system. That these photographs come from the lens of the photographer best known for his shots advertising Calvin Klein underwear somehow makes them even more powerful.

But the cafe-less museum is a $35 ride from Miami Beach, and when we ask where we can buy a coffee, and they offer to order us a taxi to take us to a Dunkin' Donuts, you can't help thinking they are missing a trick.

Swiss Schiffstation

2010-10-26T21:59:00.004+01:00

We had a family summer holiday this year in a youth hostel on the banks of Lake Lucerne, Switzerland. One day we took a ferry to the village of Beckenried on the opposite side, the lights of which we would watch twinkling across the silent evening air each night.

Next to Beckenried's ferry station is, in the great integrated transport system that is Switzerland, a cable car that whooshed us up 1600m to the resort of Klewenalp. We then spent the rest of the day working our way down through clanking cows and staggeringly beautiful scenery.

You rarely get to spend much time between transport connections in Switzerland, so I had to be quick to get this drawing done as we waited for the ferry that took us back to Gersau.

Affordable Art Fair, London, 21-24 October

2010-10-18T11:24:00.005+01:00

I am showing at the Affordable Art Fair in Battersea Park, London, with Skylark Galleries this week, from Thursday 21 to Sunday 24 October. It's the perfect chance to stroll into the sunset with a well-wrapped work of art under your arm like the happy couple in their publicity material.

The Skylark stand number is G4, and I'm going to be attending for much of the time, so chase me up if you can come, or give me a call. I showed at the fair for the first time last year, and it was an excellent way for artists to meet buyers, and buyers to meet artists.

There's a nifty free shuttle bus that goes to the fair from the north-east corner of Sloane Square every 15 mins that I've always found to work well. Find out more details about the fair here.

A bridge too far

2010-09-17T14:03:00.008+01:00

"Visit [his blog] to see if James won," suggests the final line in an article in today's Stoke Newington Gazette about the Blackfriars Bridge competition. Well thanks for checking, if you are, and no I didn't, this time. It looks as if it will become an annual competition, or for as many years as it takes to finish building the new station, so it can wait until another day.

But the exhibition continues until Sunday 19 September at the Bankside Gallery — where the shortlisted work (see previous blogs) is for sale. There was a private view earlier this week and I realise now that I've just spent the morning walking around Stoke Newington with a sticky label on my lapel saying: "James Hobbs, exhibiting artist".

Above, St Mary's old church, Stoke Newington

London Lives exhibition opens 9 September

2010-09-03T08:59:00.004+01:00

The 100 shortlisted artists for the London Lives competition - including this work by me, on sale in an edition of 30 - goes on display at the Bankside Gallery, London, on Thursday 9 September, and runs until 19 September. The winning work will be enlarged and shown on the hoardings across Blackfriars Bridge while the new station is being built. The station will be the most convenient stop for Tate Modern when it opens in a couple of years.

Meanwhile, the Oxo Gallery show went really well - my thanks to the people who have been in touch with me about it, and to those who bought my work. My work is, of course, still on display as usual in Skylark 2 at Oxo Tower Wharf (there's a link on the right). And I'll be showing again with Skylark at the Affordable Art Fair, Battersea Park, from 21-24 October. More details here soon.

London Lives: the shortlist

2010-08-06T23:25:00.004+01:00

Today comes the news that I've been shortlisted (but at 100 names it's still quite a long shortlist - it's a medium list perhaps, or just list), which means that I'll be included in the show at the Bankside Gallery, London, from 9-19 September. More details later.

My work is still on show at oxo@gallery, at the Oxo Tower Wharf, South Bank, until 15 August. Details here.

London Lives: the longlist

2010-07-30T13:58:00.007+01:00

I've just heard that I've been longlisted (and with 200 names it is a long list) for the London Lives competition, in which the winner's work will be reproduced in an outsize form for 12 months on Blackfriars Bridge, which is currently swathed in scaffolding while a new Thames-spanning railway station is built alongside it. The winning work will be seen by millions of people, including me, as I cycle over the bridge on my way to work. I will, therefore, have plenty of opportunity to contemplate and appreciate the winning work, whoever it is by.

More about London Lives here, with some images by other longlisted works.

In the city

2010-07-22T20:27:00.003+01:00

While Urban Sketchers around the globe are packing their bags and preparing to leave for the group's first international symposium, in Portland, Oregon, and the schools empty, there's a sense that we should be somewhere else now, too. In a short while, and after a few deadlines, we will be. But there are advantages to being in the city in the summer. Some streets are quieter, queues shorter, tempers calmer, even in the heat. The pace changes.

Gallery@oxo, South Bank, London, 29 July-15 August 2010

2010-07-19T12:18:00.007+01:00

I'm showing in Skylark's summer group show at oxo@gallery on London's South Bank, which runs from Thursday 29 July to Sunday 15 August. The gallery, on the waterside between Blackfriars Bridge and the National Theatre, is open from 11am-6pm, seven days a week.

For more details, see here.

Domestic extremism

2010-07-01T17:33:00.003+01:00

I have a quiet hour waiting to pick up daughter 2 from a friend's house, so have time to buy a coffee in a Turkish cafe on the High Street. Because I am here, and it is there, I draw what is across the road, which happens to be Stoke Newington police station. Years ago, when we lived in a tiny, rattling flat over a launderette just up the road, the police had a bad reputation here, and there were no cheerful Turkish cafes with tables on the pavement. Things change.

Picking up the Guardian , I find myself reading about an 85-year-old artist, John Catt, who accompanies his daughter to demonstrations against the arms trade, and who has somehow found himself classified by the police as a "domestic extremist". Their files have recently been released under the Data Protection Act.

"My dad likes to sketch and I will hold a banner and shout a few things," says his daughter. "But I'm careful about what I say."

British Museum, London

2010-06-10T11:02:00.002+01:00

To coincide with World Cup in South Africa, the British Museum has brought plants and trees from the Cape region to the forecourt of the British Museum — but no South African weather to match.

Post-Brown London

2010-05-18T11:26:00.006+01:00

My usual ride home from work takes me along the Albert Embankment as far as the London Eye. East of Westminster Bridge, it's London's equivalent of a seafront. The old County Hall has been turned into a theme park, and there are ice creams, doughnuts, swathes of silver-painted street performers pretending to be statues, Michael Jackson look-alikes, Charlie Chaplin impersonators, assorted buskers and meandering international tourists on the walkway towards the Royal Festival Hall.

Except last week it was all happening on the north side of the river. The bagpiper on Westminster Bridge had the place to himself while everyone headed off, like me, to see Gordon Brown move out of Downing Street and David Cameron move in. I joined the crush by the Downing Street gates (left), having missed the Browns and their boys walking out by about ten minutes. Mounted police, chanting troops-out demonstrators, TV camera crews every ten yards, the relentless whirr of a helicopter overhead and an incredible, exciting atmosphere. I'm quite missing it.

Hawker's Hut, Morwenstow

2010-04-24T00:01:00.000+01:00

Hawker’s Hut is set into the 400-foot cliffs of remote north Cornwall, originally built out of driftwood by the Victorian priest Rev Robert Stephen Hawker as a place to write poetry, smoke opium and watch for passing ships coming to grief on this notoriously dangerous stretch of Atlantic coast. It is now owned by the National Trust, and at no more than six feet square, its smallest property.

Morwenstow, the closest village across the fields, was where my farming grandparents grew up and retired - I have many dairy-farming relations there even now - and where we would visit regularly as children. It’s remote and wild, and one of my favourite places.

The ashes of my late brother, David, were scattered nearby. He died ten years ago today, at the age of 41.

Planeless skies

2010-04-17T13:26:00.002+01:00

Planes on their way to land at Heathrow airport loop high over our house on their way towards west London — well, normally they do. The volcanic ash cloud drifting across Europe from Iceland has now meant that the restrictions on UK airspace will continue for a few days at least. This is bad news for many who are trapped in the UK (being an island has its drawbacks) as well as those trying to return home from Easter holidays.

So the skies are empty, silent and cloudless here today. I'm working with the window open, and you wouldn't believe how wonderfully silent London can be.

The Shard, London Bridge

2010-03-04T11:20:00.002Z

I was near London Bridge this week when I caught sight of a concrete stump emerging from between the railway station and Guy's Hospital, usefully labelled "Shard". Concrete stump it may be now, but when it is completed in 2012 (the year of the London Olympics) it will be the UK's tallest building, and one of the city's most recognisable landmarks. And there won't be any concrete on show when it is finished: its architect Renzo Piano has compared the 310-metre building to a shard of glass. Have a look at this.

The Iraq inquiry

2010-01-30T11:55:00.007Z

I was passing Westminster the day before Tony Blair appeared at the Iraq war inquiry, and instead of crowds of demonstrators, there were just a handful of people putting up gantries for the TV crews on the lawn in front of the convention centre in Westminster where it's all taking place. It's a hideous, modern building, slap next to Westminster Abbey - what was there before to make way for it?

I'm cycling past the centre again on my way home from work the following day. The film crews are lit up ready for the news at six o'clock and there's an end-of-the-day weariness about the place. Discarded "Bliar" placards litter the pavement. I stop and watch for a bit, not that there's much going on, but there is the suggestion that soon there might be. I ask a policeman, who tells me Blair has already left, and he gives the impression everyone else should too. People linger, seemingly reluctant to go home.

It's a few weeks later now, and Blair's appearance was typically assured enough for it to have faded into history, even if the Iraq war hasn't.

From the window

2010-01-19T14:48:00.004Z

The view from the window. It's often where it all starts and finishes, especially in a winter like this. It may not be what you'd usually stop and draw but you do, because it's there and because you can stand and stare to your heart's content in a way it's not so easy to if you're just standing on the pavement. Views from our homes and places of work become eroded to our eyes so that after a while it's not so easy to see what's really there. The apparently mundane nature of the scene can take it over that threshold of what makes something worth drawing.

On the road, travelling in foreign countries, everything is fresh and the sketchbook hardly ever goes away. At home, the flats across the road gradually become almost invisible. It has little to do with the quality of the scene. A friend waxed lyrical for hours about the scene from her new rural Devon house after they'd left London a few years ago. The hills, the trees, the sky. I couldn't disagree, but I know, having grown up in lovely, essentially rural, surroundings, that in time that would fade so that she would be no more aware of the view out of her window as I am out of mine. Drawing what's outside the window revives the view, brings it back into focus. These are two drawings made through windows.

South Beach, Miami

2009-12-08T11:49:00.005Z

Snow may be falling in Texas, but Miami still basks in the high 20s celsius. I’m back in the city with The Art Newspaper working on a daily edition at Art Basel Miami Beach, the premier US fair that hosts more than 250 international galleries. The art market lives on, despite everything. The figures, like the temperatures, are high, but not as outlandish as previous years: “five hundred thousand is the new million,” said one gallerist. A Warhol priced at $2.25m sells, but most are relatively cheaper, although outlandish enough.

The beach is one focus of the fair: there are works on the sand, in the sea even. The buying mentality continues at the non-commercial Bass Museum, where a couple viewing a show by Chicago artist Dzine view one large work while broadcasting a conversation about the possibility of commissioning a work by the artist for their “top landing”. The beachside walk weaves its way through palm trees past towering hotels towards Ocean Drive, the strand of art deco hotels and shops, and Gianni Versace’s former residence, the scene of his murder in 1997. The Art Deco District Welcome Center is locked and less than welcoming.

The cafes, of course, spill on to the pavements, making them perfect for people-watching and drawing. The palms are as exotic and alluring to draw as they were for me on my visit last year. There are palms in Torquay, though. There the similarities end.

Piccadilly, south side

2009-11-26T06:13:00.006Z

A cycle to the Royal Academy, where the sculptor Anish Kapoor is showing pigment works, reflective sculptures and some new works (until 11 December). The galleries are stuffed with visitors, waiting for a cannon to fire great lumps of wax splattering into a corner of one of the galleries every 20 minutes, leaving gobs of coloured gunk on the walls and door posts to leave an effect that is a little reminiscent of the hideous, creative mess of Francis Bacon's studio.

In a series of other connected rooms, a great lump of coloured wax squeezes sluglike and almost inperceptibly slowly through the connecting doorways to leave another cleaning bill for the RA. There's something theatrical about this work, but you spend a lot of time looking and waiting, as if you are watching a glacier. A little more erosion would help, perhaps a wall falling over and collapsed ceilings.

From a cafe across the road, it occurs to me that the sculptor Henry Moore may have enjoyed Kapoor's work. Moore suffered at the hands of the RA in the 1940s when the harrumphing "modern art nonsense" president Sir Alfred Munnings ruled the roost. A cannon firing at the RA's walls would surely have appealed to Moore — Munnings, on the other hand, must be rotating in his grave at Large Hadron Collider speed. Moore's dislike for the Academy, early in his career if not later, was such that if walking along Piccadilly he would cross to its south side outside the window where I sit, to avoid even being on the same side of the road as the RA. I'm sure I've read this somewhere, anyway, even if I can't unearth it now. But it sounds right.

Happy Birthday, Urban Sketchers

2009-10-31T17:15:00.009Z

It's happy birthday time for Urban Sketchers, the group blog of 100 invited artists - including me - from more 56 countries who post their sketchbook drawings on the site that lets you "see the world one drawing at a time". During that time its 3,500 posts have, incredibly, attracted more than a million visits. Running alongside the blog is the Urban Sketchers Flickr site, which hosts more than 20,000 drawings by 2,000 artists.

For some it's been a catalyst to draw, for others the chance to get feedback from artists around the world, and feel part of a wider community. I started blogging for Urban Sketchers in January, and what I enjoy most about it, beyond seeing some fantastic drawings by other bloggers, is that my work gets seen by artists in far-flung places whereas most of it would probably have lingered unseen in a sketchbook on a shelf at home. Draw in the morning, get feedback from Bhutan in the afternoon. There's the feeling that the internet is the ideal vehicle for our kind of work.

Its founder, Seattle Times artist Gabi Campanario, already has plans to turn USk into a non-profit organisation to promote drawing and offer grants and fellowships. There are plans for a book and international face-to-face meetings. The statistics for the group grow every day. It's gone a long way already, but its journey may just be beginning.

Guess what? You can find out more on Twitter and Facebook.

Top, Green Lanes, London.

The 10th Affordable Art Fair, London

2009-10-19T06:39:00.010+01:00

My work is showing at the 10th Affordable Art Fair with Skylark Galleries (stand G4) from Thursday 22 to Sunday 25 October. The fair, which shows contemporary work by about 120 UK and European galleries, takes place in Battersea Park, London SW11, and focuses on work costing between £50 and £3,000.

Find out more about the fair. I'm there most days — let me know if you're coming and I'll meet you there.

www.james-hobbs.co.uk

In this month's Artists & Illustrators

2009-09-17T10:41:00.009+01:00

I'm featured in this month's Artists & Illustrators magazine — out now and available from all good newsagents — in an article about drawing in the city.

Mad for Dorset

2009-09-01T12:37:00.009+01:00

Bournemouth sits on Dorset’s coast with what seems like an unjustified reputation for being a city only to retire to. By the end of our week’s holiday there we’ve started planning the same – although retirement is still decades away. I can see it now: a flat with a sea view and a balcony close to the seven miles of sandy beach, and a gentle stroll along the promenade each morning past the thousands of beach huts. Too soon! Too soon!

The glimpse of the sea from our hotel room also reveals construction cranes working close to the new artificial surf reef – Europe’s first – being built near to Boscombe pier. It’s nearing completion, and has already helped to generate eight-foot waves earlier in the year. There’s no reason why surfing shouldn’t be a retirement pastime, but it will probably have the effect of lowering the average age of Bournemouth’s inhabitants still further.

Along the coast to the west, Brownsea Island sits at the mouth of Poole harbour, the world’s second largest natural harbour after Sydney. It belongs to the National Trust now and is all peacocks and cream teas, as well being undeniably beautiful and relaxing.

The island looks out on to Sandbanks, a sandy spit of some of the country’s most expensive properties that looks sure to disappear one stormy night when rising sea levels have taken grip. John Lennon bought his Aunt Mimi a bungalow here in the 1960s, now demolished and replaced by a glassy residence with a swimming pool on the ground floor. I can’t quite imagine Aunt Mimi going for that. David Beckham, the story goes, sold his house there almost as soon as he’d bought it because photographers took up residence on the public beach at the bottom of his garden. Poor old Dave.

http://www.james-hobbs.co.uk/

A global view

2009-07-28T17:30:00.008+01:00

I head down to the Globe, the reconstructed Shakespearian theatre on the banks of the Thames next to Tate Modern, to pick up some relatives who have come to stay with us. While the play finishes and the sun sets there's time to stand on the Millennium Bridge and feel the wind in my face to the sound of gulls. It's a dark, warm, rainy evening and as the light fades almost visibly, the lights from the office blocks opposite grow correspondingly stronger. The buildings gradually become almost featureless blocks of concrete, stone and glass.

In preparation for the mass exodus of the audience from the theatre, the doors are opened and a great belch of music, drumming and applause is expelled into the river air, attracting a cluster of tourists with video cameras who film the closing moments of the play through the doors.

Propelled by the tide, party cruisers head downstream to the sounds of more music and laughter.

The Thames is a slice of something really gorgeous running through this city.

New at the Hays Gallery

2009-07-01T14:33:00.005+01:00

As from today, I have work showing at the Hays Gallery, in Hays Galleria between London Bridge and Tower Bridge on the South Bank. A stroll along the Thames to cool down in the current spell of meltdown. Who could ask for more?

From Waterloo Bridge

2009-06-29T11:27:00.004+01:00

The South Bank is like the seafront of London, especially around the London Eye, where the air is rich with the sounds of international languages and the smells of fresh doughnuts and burgers. Shut my eyes and I could be back on Hastings pier - until Big Ben chimes.

At a distance, from Waterloo Bridge, the view is more contemplative. The Thames arcs past the Houses of Parliament, a great slice of nature meandering through the stone and concrete, its tides rising and falling sharply over the day. A sliver of sandy beach on the southern side survives from the time of the Festival of Britain in the 1950s. We passed it the other day and there was a full-on beach party going on there. The river is busy, particularly at this time of year, with tourist trips, but barges as well. Nothing like the massive tankers I saw on the Rhine the other week, though, which seemed to stretch from one bridge to the next.

What is striking about the view is just how modern most of the buildings are. The Shell Centre tower, Royal Festival Hall, the Festival Pier, the Golden Jubilee pedestrian bridges, the London Eye, Millbank tower, Portcullis House, next to Big Ben: much of it has arrived within the last 20 years. Most of the parliament building is only 19th-century, so not so old. But it's unmistakably London.

Swiss perspective

2009-06-16T09:32:00.008+01:00

Art Basel closed this weekend. It's the largest art fair in the world - nearly 300 galleries, 2,500 artists, 61,000 collectors, dealers, artists, curators and general browsers - and a market where there are still buyers. All the big art world figures are there, fresh from the opening of the Venice Biennale the week before, along with celebrity figures such as Roman Abramovich, Brad Pitt and Naomi Campbell. Sales are surprisingly buoyant, but is it a sign of the end of the recession, or the bounce of a dead cat?

I was staying in the medieval part of town; it's all narrow roads, steep hills, market places and tram lines. As well as working, I had time to visit some of the relatively new museums in the city. The Fondation Beyeler in the north, designed by Renzo Piano, is busy with visitors from the fair, which is a short tram ride away through suburbs and green, cow-filled fields. There's a huge Giacometti show, and an exhibition showing modern works with incredible sculptures from Oceania and Africa, which stole the show for me.

To the south, similarly handy on the tram, is Schaulager, which blew me away as a building, and which is worth a visit in itself, regardless of the great exhibition "Holbein to Tillmans". The building, by Herzog & de Meuron, looks like it shouldn't work at all - it's as if you have to walk through a deserted mud hut to get into the forecourt - but it does. What's the point of a gallery that threatens to overpower the works it is displaying? From inside it seems as if it continues upwards for ever, and the glimpses of the underwhelming industrial zone the building is set in pour in through the windows in a beautiful way. Spaces widen and narrow. Yet it isn't overpowering, and I see works by Holbein, in particular, and David Claerbout's Section of a Happy Moment as if for the first time.

Returning from the Beyeler, the tram passes the German railway station (Germany, France and Switzerland all share boundaries in the city). It was the scene of a moment of family history, where Naomi's paternal grandmother finally managed to escape Nazi Germany in November 1938, being smuggled from the Germany part of the station to the Swiss, to be ultimately reunited with her family exiled in London, where they flourished. Basel is an ideal place to consider the importance of the European Union, the unity of the countries that converge on it, and the outrage of Britain returning two extreme right British National Party members to the European Parliament in the recent elections.

By the pool

2009-05-10T11:01:00.011+01:00

I've never found it so easy to sit by a pool for too long - some of the people staying at the same holiday village as us in northern Cyprus seemed able to nurture their tans from straight after breakfast until dinner, gradually shifting their sun beds over the day so they were in line with the sun, like human sun dials.

If I'm packing for travel, the essentials are a passport, ticket, money, insurance, sketchbook and pens, a novel or two and a penknife. I could manage without a camera now, except it's good to have photographs of everyone having a good time, and being able to record the children growing up. The drawings can never do that. I'd sooner be without a novel than a sketchbook. The clock is ticking every day in terms of drawing. We may be out to relax, but coming home without drawings is too awful to contemplate.

So we sit by the pool for a bit, and the sun's not too hot, and the pool is quite cold, except we all go in, the kids particularly keenly. And then I have to draw, whatever is in front of me. I'm not sure it really matters at all what I do draw. If I had to spend time in solitary confinement I think I'd still manage to keep going. And then I read a bit, until it's time to draw a bit more, with a slightly uneasy feeling that the sun is drying out the pens, even though they are in the shade under the sunbed. But it's best to use them before they do dry out. Pencils are so much better in this respect.

By this time, we're about 90 minutes into the day. The world beyond beckons. How do people keep going by the pool all day? Some are evidently happy to lie low all day, on their own, with a thick novel and time on their hands. Perhaps it is because there is no extradition treaty between northern Cyprus and Britain, and the weeks spread before them. But don't quote me on that.

Slowing down

2009-05-01T05:55:00.004+01:00

As part of Slow Down London, a festival that aims to help us all take things more calmly and perhaps appreciate life better for it, the Skylark Galleries on the South Bank are spilling out on to the Thames riverside walk to extol the relaxing benefits of the work of its artists. People will be around from 2-6pm this bank holiday weekend, from Saturday 2 May to Monday 4 May, in the gardens next to the Oxo Tower. See you there.

The tide goes out

2009-04-24T23:22:00.015+01:00

Northern Cyprus is fantastically beautiful in many ways. The mountains that run south of Kyrenia, or Girne, are spectacular, with castles and ruined abbeys, olive trees and palms. But a mile or so towards the coast a tide of development has risen, and then fallen dramatically in the past few years. These unfinished buildings, that all show no signs of being currently worked on, are on a 15-mile stretch of one road. There are many more, hundreds more.

Being there

2009-03-26T14:12:00.004Z

Google’s Street View was launched in the UK last month, with 360 degree views of 25 cities now available as part of its mapping service. This is handy for such things as checking what the hotel you are heading for looks like or whether your mate really lives in the mansion they are boasting about. And because most of the images were taken last summer, they offer a vision of that time before the recession, when we still had Woolworths and MFI on our high streets.

It’s also been handy way, I have found, of reminding myself when I get home of the details and surroundings of some of the places I have drawn. As I draw in ink on site and then work with colour back in the studio this can be a handy way of recalling how buildings look, and how the colours may work. It’s probably better to use images from a digital camera, which will at least be free from companies now collapsed into liquidation, but the online option is a handy alternative.

This system presents problems, of course, for the visual artist. For a start, Street View only offers the view from a road, so you are unlikely to quite get the panorama that may have grabbed you from a park, for instance, or pedestrian routes. It’s a car-centric view that it offers, and bike-centric to an extent, which is only a part of any town or city. I will find it much more useful when Google finally gets around to introducing Cafe View, showing panoramic views from cafe windows around the globe.

The other overriding problem is that there is nothing quite like the experience of being somewhere. Why add information to my drawings that didn’t grab me when I was there? Drawings don’t have to be comprehensive to work — in fact the opposite is true. Patience, energy, threatening rain clouds, the amount of ink a page can take, children who needing picking up from school: all have an effect on when I consider a drawing “finished”. Getting everything in has nothing to do with it.

My point is, Street View may be quite handy sometimes. That’s all.

Regent Street, London

2009-03-22T08:02:00.001Z

James Hobbs: Skylark 2, 3-22 March 2009

2009-03-01T13:35:00.006Z

I'm the featured artist at Skylark 2 at the Oxo Tower on the South Bank, London, from 3 to 22 March, showing prints and drawings, some of them so new I still haven't finished them. I will be at the gallery on
Thursday 5 March from 6-8pm
Friday 13 March from 11-6pm and
Sunday 22 March from 11-6pm
so drop in and say hello if you're passing by.
The gallery is open daily from 11-6pm, closed Mondays.

Skylark 2 Gallery
1st Floor OXO Tower, Riverside
020 7401 9666
www.skylarkgalleries.com
Nearest Tube: Waterloo/Blackfriars
A few minutes from the National Theatre
Entry free

Image: James Hobbs, Paddington Station, £320/£120 framed, £90 unframed.

Building in the City

2009-02-17T14:06:00.004Z

On the bike, and down to the City. At the Royal Bank of Scotland’s headquarters, close by Hawksmoor’s Christ Church in Spitalfields, you can sense the squirming inside as they try to justify giving themselves the usual bonuses for – for what exactly? For doing so badly that it is now effectively nationally owned. Its former chiefs, and those of the equally unsuccessful HBOS, have just been quizzed by the Commons Treasury Committee. I don't get the idea they have lost too much sleep about things.

The new buildings still go up, too. The Pinnacle (barely above the ground but promising 63 floors), Heron Tower (36 floors), St Botolph’s (a piddling dozen or so floors)... all add up to more than enough office space for the city. Another site close to Spitalfields (and near the cheerfully named Frying Pan Alley), currently up to 25 floors and rising, is for student accommodation. This is more like it, surely? Who is rushing to get office space in the City at the moment?

Time

2009-02-07T05:52:00.004Z

St Pancras railway station, gateway to Europe, and bits of England.

Looking out

2009-01-23T10:17:00.005Z

It’s cold – it’s really cold, and the idea of standing around outdoors drawing isn’t doing anything for me. So it’s warm in comparison with Alaska, but you get the idea. And daylight is short. Winter can have the same effect on drawings as it does on lawns: it gets so darn cold and dark it’s hard for anything to grow with vigour.

Unlike lawns, I’m able to head indoors. Cafes often have those long, high tables running alongside the windows that are probably designed to squeeze more sitting customers in, but which are, more importantly, ideal to draw from. The seats are usually so hard and uncomfortable it’s impossible to relax too much or doze off, so you have to draw. There’s enough room to spread out with your sketchbook and skinny espresso macchiato fiordilatte on the rocks with a green salad and not feel overlooked.

The choice of what you get to draw is limited by these cafes’ locations, but there are so many of them around London that this isn’t such a major problem. Cafes usually come first: I haven’t seen so many closing in the teeth of the recession. Several years ago the Victoria and Albert Museum marketed itself as “an ace cafe with quite a nice museum attached”. Look at any National Trust property and the cafe is a prerequisite, regardless of the hundreds of years of history, intrigue and turmoil that the building may have been witness to. Cake is king.

Things have been improving with pubs too. The dingy old boozers with frosted glass and bands of drunken, smoking dockers creating enough fug to make even the view across the table difficult to make out have largely given way, at the expense of a lot of character, it must be said, for smoke-free wining and dining opportunities with clear glass to the world outside. The idea being that people, especially women, are more likely to enter a pub if they can see into it before reaching the door. Good news for the artist looking for shelter from the cold, bad news if he/she has any predilection for drink at which point drawing will go out of the window.

At this point it becomes a case of either how fast you work or how well your drawing stands up to high levels of alcohol or overpriced caffeine. Working indoors comes at a price.

At large

2009-01-03T17:33:00.016Z

An age ago, when Zimbabwe still had a thriving tourist industry, and food, and a working currency, an economy, hospitals, schools, productive farms, a working population, and much more, we went there on holiday for a few weeks, and mostly did the kinds of things relatively rich western tourists do there: visit Victoria Falls, the Matopos and Hwange National Park. We spent hours out in the bush with a guide watching this parade of incredible wildlife go about its often bloodthirsty business.

Drawing wildlife has never really done it for me. Most of the animals one usually comes across in nature stay far away enough to make them turn into little more than ink blobs on the pages of my sketchbook. But in Zimbabwe we came so close to ridiculously huge animals - elephants, giraffes, buffalo, hippos, rhinos - often moving helpfully slowly, that they could register even on my A5 sketchbook.

I was reminded of this experience recently on a visit to Arundel Wetland Centre. There were no hippos showing their heads above the water, vultures circling over a kill, or giraffes heading down to the watering hole, but there was a great range of wildfowl, including sheldecks, shovelers, siskin, teal and snipe, not that I'd know what they'd look like without the swathes of information on hand in the visitor centre.

These birds couldn't possibly be recognised by the drawings I made of them through the windows of the cafe as we all sheltered from the cold. Most took somewhere between two or perhaps even three seconds to complete. There is a thin slice of time for the dark shape of the wildfowl on the bright, reflecting water to leave some mark on the retina before it is turned into lines on the paper. Look back and it's impossible to find the relevant duck among the throng milling about on the water. Markings, size, colour, bills, plumage and crests, all what differentiates one kind of bird from another, are turned into a few lines in a few seconds.

It's rarely successful, drawing like this. I can't imagine an ornithologist would be able to recognise any of these. Birds are rarely bird shape at first glance, to put it badly: they swim away from you so the shape of the head is lost, or hunt for food under the surface of the water, so that a simple silhouette becomes a kind of visual nonsense. There's time for something essential to be put down, but nothing more, not for me anyway. After making works about the inertia and solidity of architecture, there's something very enjoyable about this.

Art Basel Miami Beach

2008-12-09T13:51:00.009Z

I’d never been to Miami Beach before, so I had no idea whether the people around town were any different to those that spend the remaining 51 weeks a year there. But when Art Basel Miami Beach descends upon this stretch of sandy shoreline so far south in the US that people are lazing on the beach well into December, there’s the sense that something special is going on, and that artists, dealers and collectors are out in number.

The art fair is the largest of its kind in the US, with about 300 international galleries showing works by 2,000 artists in the outsize convention centre, attracting a further 20-odd satellite shows around the city. There’s art on the beach, in hotels, up palm trees and anywhere else you can imagine. And even in the current economic climate, there are those who are ready and willing to buy it. Lots of them.

I’m there working with The Art Newspaper, which publishes a daily edition at the fair. This means working late, until the early hours, giving me some time to be around the city in daylight hours. The area’s art deco architecture takes me by surprise. In the UK you may come across a classic art deco building here and there, but the South Beach area seems to have whole streets of them, hotel after hotel, with palm trees lining the pavements. And whereas so many such buildings in the UK give the impression of having been “improved”, ie, had their art deco features, such as window frames, ruined in the name of maintenance and renovation, in Miami they have stood up to the passage of time so much better.

Unperturbed by the vast quantities of outsize, ambitious, multi-disciplined, opulent, attention-grabbing and wincingly expensive art on show around me, I spend what moments I can drawing in my simple little A5 sketchbook with a simple black marker pen. I have no plans to make a film of my drawings, make a series of ceramics about them, have a panel discussion with Julian Schnabel, Yoko Ono and Ai Weiwei about them or enter into discussions with the Guggenheim or Cartier about how they can present them. I just go about making small, squeaking, often uncertain marks with my Edding 4000 to represent the wonderfully foreign environment I have found myself in.

It’s sunny and hot, and therefore easy to find cafes with outdoor tables to sit at. But what I make seems to have very little in common with what is on show at Art Basel Miami Beach – this is hardly surprising; they are making thousands of dollars from this and I am not. In the fair, there is plenty to see and plenty to be moved by. The tour guide standing before two recent photographs by Cindy Sherman spoke fluently about the “brutally honest” figures with plucked eyebrows, sagging necks and ageing skin, despite their obvious wealth, before it dawned on him that he was describing most of the women following his tour just as much the subjects of the photographs. “And yet they remain endearing,” he rallied, less than convincingly, to the shuffling of feet.

Small and black and white drew me in – Brice Marden’s works in ink on paper, and Olga Chernysheva’s photographs of old rural Russia at “Russian Dreams” at the Bass Museum of Art. I’m not sure it pays to be understated in a city where so many are clamouring for attention, but it certainly worked for me.

Joining Skylark

2008-11-02T16:41:00.006Z

Skylark is an artist-run gallery on London's South Bank, with two spaces, one at Gabriel's Wharf and the other on the first floor of the distinctive Oxo Tower, between Tate Modern and the National Theatre. I've just been lucky enough to join the 29 artists, which means that I now have a space to show my work in Skylark 2 in the Oxo Tower.

I'm still a bit green - I spent my first day manning the gallery on Saturday, and have only met one or two of the other artists involved - but it already gives me that feeling I only get when my work is hanging on a gallery wall. I don't expect things to fly off the wall in these weird economic times, but there is always that promise in the air, a promise that can never be present when the work is in a box in the studio or on our own living room wall.

The advantages of showing in such a gallery are obvious: it's a professional space, marketed well, with all the benefits of a group, rather than solo, enterprise. And the South Bank is central and busy, with plenty of people walking along the bank of the Thames wandering in to the gallery on impulse, as well as those who have made a special trip. And the work on show is gloriously varied, and all the stronger for that. Best of all, the river runs just outside its window, busy with traffic, ebbing and flowing, the city's life blood.

Remembering Dave

2008-10-11T23:04:00.012+01:00

Remembering my late and much-missed brother David Hobbs, who would have been 50 this week.

************

Think of a building with lots of paintings and sculptures in it. No, not a gallery, or a museum. Hospitals. They are a great place for showing art. And because they are stuffed with people day and night they are busier than most galleries. All those lovely long corridors of otherwise empty wall space, and people with a bit of time on their hands ready for the kind of boost in morale that medication alone can not always deliver.

For one reason and another, I have found myself in hospitals too frequently in recent years. I'm lucky in that, rather than being the inmate, I've been visiting sick friends and family, or else, more positively, in a maternity ward with Naomi and a fresh daughter. The art on display seems to have become better, and is often by well known artists. It doesn't just affect patients; it also has a great effect on visitors and staff.

Research certainly shows that anxiety and depression in patients are reduced when they are more exposed to visual art. More than that, certain post-operative patients actually left hospital an average of one day earlier when they were exposed to visual art and live music. Although we're some way off being prescribed paintings on the National Health Service, that's just the kind of result that must have hospital accountants rubbing their hands with glee. Because of this positive feedback, most hospitals make the most of art's beneficial effects. The charity Paintings in Hospitals loans works to about 250 healthcare establishments across the UK, and depends upon artists donating or loaning works of art to supplement the work it purchases. Your local hospital will almost certainly have a scheme of some kind.

The chances of making a sale at a hospital are perhaps slimmer than Keira Knightley in Lent, but there are other advantages to having your work there. One is that it is likely to be seen by more people than it would in a gallery, and many of those people would never dream of setting foot in a gallery, particularly a commercial one. And because of what they might have been experiencing, the people who see it are open to being moved in a way the artist could never have expected.

A painting hangs in my parents' home that illustrates the healing power of art in hospital. Our family had become regular visitors to an Exeter hospital where my elder brother David fought what turned out to be a losing battle with cancer. These weren't always unhappy visits. There was usually something to have a laugh about, however grim things were. And, over the years, just as we got to know the magnificent nursing staff that cared for him during his stays there, so we got to know the paintings that were on the walls that led to his ward.

The journey to the hospital to see him on the day he had lost his fight for life was, as you may well imagine, not an easy one. The landscape of our lives had changed for ever. But walking through the hospital my father — not, he would agree, an artistic man, and not given to voicing opinions on art — pointed to a framed work as we turned into the ward, and said: "I have always liked that painting." It was a painting of the River Tavy slipping through the bleak, wintry wilderness of Dartmoor, and for whatever reason, it had spoken to him.

A couple of weeks after the funeral came my father's birthday. What can you give as a present to a man who has just seen his eldest son buried? We bought him the painting he had admired, and it now hangs over our parents' fireplace. It offers a kind of healing. Not the healing we would have preferred, but healing nonetheless.

In perspective

2008-09-18T09:23:00.005+01:00

I’m sitting on the top deck of an 88 bus having had to rush back to one of the offices where I freelance in order to pick up a memory stick I had accidentally left on the desk there. It’s a handy device when you find yourself working on a variety of computers in a working week, but it's also handy to misplace and the idea of losing it is not one to contemplate; most of the information on it is backed up in other places, but there would always be that lingering feeling that I’d lost something irreplaceable if it did go awol.

The files that I was most concerned about not losing were a handful of images I’d been working on that I was due to be emailing on to someone. I had the original drawn versions safely at home, but I’d been grappling with IT problems and I’d invested a lot of time in getting the images to the state they were. Was I feeling a bit foolish about losing something so important to me? As I’m musing on this, the bus passes the Home Office in Marsham Street, a department with a history of losing vital data that put things into perspective.

Hopping off the bus in Regent Street, I nipped over to Sotheby’s to see Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, the show of work by Damien Hirst set for auction, sidestepping the usual route of selling through galleries and heading straight for the buyer instead. This is another chance to get things into perspective. The sale rooms are buzzing, from the foyer where we all get our bags checked, to the many rooms overflowing with spin paintings, preserved assorted livestock, bling in cabinets, and collaged butterflies.

To fill the space with a lifetime’s work would be an achievement, but everything I see is dated 2008. Then again, he does have a team of workers making the work for him. And after regularly seeing estimates of £2.5m to £3m for some of the works, it doesn’t take long for the £20,000 estimate for small butterfly works to look rather, well, cheap. It doesn’t take long, either, to see everything in terms of its price tag rather than the quality of the work. That, and managing to keep prices high as well as bring so many to the market, seems a particularly Hirstian achievement.

A couple of days later – the auction is spread across two days to the accompaniment of meltdown in the financial markets – and the 223 lots have gone for a total of £111million. Financial crisis, what financial crisis? Where do I fit into all this? Where do any of us fit into it? I email my images, now backed up, and have interest from another gallery to show my work. Life, somehow, goes on.

Rain stops play

2008-09-06T23:32:00.005+01:00

The wet weather sketchbook: I nearly started one of these again this summer. I had one about 18 years ago when I was in the Lake District for only a few days. The rain was incessant then, too, and rather than take a perfect, dry, empty sketchbook home, I took a battered, stained, warped, torn, and yet full one home instead. Even a pencil doesn't get a firm grip on wet paper, unless you're using about a 16B, so the results were less than great. A coat pocket with a sketchbook sticking out of it becomes a funnel in a downpour, which only added to the problem.

I cycled through part of the Lake District this summer with brother and brother-in-law, going from Whitehaven to Newcastle, from west coast to east coast, which would be impressive if it was the United States or Australia we were talking about, but it's only about 140 miles in this rather thin part of the UK. Thirty-odd miles on the first day in relentless rain meant the sketchbook stayed in the bag — we wanted to get to the B&B to dry off rather than have me sit around like some pretentious idiot pretending to be like Turner strapped to the mast of some ship in a storm, or whatever it was he did. I bet the crew weren't too impressed with what he was up to.

Camping with the family in August wasn't meteorologically ideal either. The ground became a little soft for trifling things such as tent pegs, which had interesting consequences. But we stuck it out, because camping is still just so great, even in the wet. I didn't resort to a wet weather sketchbook then, either, not least because the marker pens I use now would take to damp paper in an even less successful way than pencil. But it didn't rain as much as all that. It sounds bad from inside a tent, but it's not, if you're outside.

A rough guide

2008-07-17T10:37:00.005+01:00

With a few days to draw a series of landmark scenes around London, I've found myself rubbing shoulders with international tourists seeing the side of the city that only tourists do. At Tower Bridge I spent a couple of hours working by the railings in front of the Tower of London, the water lapping against the pier, the only suggestion that the city is overflowing with cars being the stream of tiny vehicles crossing the bridge. The river is hardly teeming with craft, but it's lively, and it seems like the natural way to get around.

A yacht comes in, and the bridge opens, the first time I have seen it happen in all the years I've lived in London. A family visiting from Pakistan watch it as it happens, having been in town for all of a few hours, thinking it as regular an event as traffic lights going red. At Buckingham Palace, too, I am there for the Changing of the Guard, which I probably saw when visiting London from Cornwall as a boy in the 1960s, but never since. There's the band, horses, coachloads of French schoolchildren, and American tourists, who, I can tell from their well broadcast conversations, know much more of Britain's history than I do.

Becoming as much a fixture of the cityscape as lampposts and railings as I stand and draw, I come to be seen as a dependable travel guide: I offer suggestions for trips down the river to an Israeli couple; highlight the main points of interest in Trafalgar Square to two young women from the US; suggest the shortest route to Oxford Street from Piccadilly Circus; and tell the story of Ken Livingstone's downfall as the city's mayor on Westminster Bridge. Few want to engage me in conversation about what I am doing in the sketchbook. Not that I'm complaining.

The bard's bar

2008-06-26T10:17:00.007+01:00

Somehow, post children, I haven't got to the Shakespeare in Stoke Newington as much as I once did, and instead seem to find myself passing it with a small daughter in tow on my way back from dance or "movement" class, going at such a slow pace that I have time to look through its windows and remember the times I would go there with my late, great brother Dave and listen to its incomparable (then, at least, and perhaps even now) jukebox, sup dark beer that somehow has a way of tasting better because there is no carpet on the floor (I don't know how this works but it is a theory that demands further investigation), and wait for the toppling of the Tory government to gladden our hearts further.

I spend some windswept mornings drawing it from a variety of angles at a time when it is shut and therefore impossible to take refuge in. The drawing is for some friends who have left London for the country, friends who evidently managed to spend more time there than we have, building up the kind of long and enduring relationship with it in a way that calls for a print of its exterior to be hanging on their wall. And the walls of their friends. As they are from the acting and theatrical fields, it's a more than suitable pub for them.

And anyone else who goes in it.

At the Printroom

2008-06-03T21:33:00.009+01:00

Hampstead isn't so very far away from where we live — it's only about seven or eight stops on the overground line running west from our lovely grubby corner of north-east London — but in many ways it is a world away. Think of London in terms of lots of villages or towns crushed together so that the green lungs of rural landscape have more or less been squeezed out. Hampstead is closer to us than it should be. It's unmistakably London, it's unmistakably north London, and yet it throbs with a different beat to the one rattling our Stoke Newington windows.

But I came across a gallery there, Printroom, that, I thought, my work could fit into well. The owner and director thought so too, if I could come up with some local scenes that people were keen on. So I spent the day there, wandering through its quiet little backstreets, filling a sketchbook. There probably are pockets of poverty and deprivation in Hampstead, but I haven't come across them, either then or during the previous 20-odd years I've known it.

It proved continually surprising, however, and I found places I never knew existed. It's the kind of place where cats come brushing around your legs as you draw, where there are milk bottles on doorsteps and au pairs wander down to the cafe with their buggies and iPods. It's also the kind of place where locals go into galleries and ask for local scenes they can hang on their wall, and that's where I wanted to come in. But the working process is different to just turning up in a place and drawing what I want to draw, as I usually do — here, I am aiming to capture what people who live there may want to have on display, and that's not the same at all.

Fast forward a few weeks, and I leave a couple of prints in the gallery, one of the car-lined Church Row (shown top), which for some reason strikes me as much like Boston as London, and the other of Flask Walk (above), a quiet alley with a pub and independent shops. It's too early to say how things are going — they've barely gone on the gallery walls — so we'll just have to wait and see.

Wide

2008-05-16T14:44:00.005+01:00

From the island of St Mary's towards Tresco on the Isles of Scilly.

From the cafe in Amandola

2008-05-13T13:14:00.003+01:00

Amandola, as I mentioned before, is a little place about halfway down Italy. When we were there the piazza was stuffed with a market, overlooked, of course, by a shady cafe.

We left our borrowed bikes propped against a wall for a few hours while we explored the town. When we got back to them they were, surprise surprise, still there — a magical state of affairs for a cyclist from London, where any unpadlocked bike vanishes in seconds and is on sale in Brick Lane within minutes.

Cafes remain a favourite place for me to work. They are often fantastically located, in the heart of a town, offering outdoor seating, tables to spread out on and plenty of refreshments. Is it a lazy way to work? Would a drawing be better from another angle, one that doesn't have a conveniently placed table? Perhaps, but it stops the angles looking formulaic, and makes me look at what I wouldn't otherwise.

On the move

2008-04-24T11:20:00.006+01:00

Back from ten days away in Italy during the school holidays as the seasons work out which one is going to hold sway. Snow on the mountains is visible from our apartment's windows, and the swimming pool in its garden is still covered up, but each day the sun rises and shines and promises, but doesn't quite deliver. The hammock that hangs tantalisingly in the garden dries each morning in the sun before the next downpour makes it too wet to lie in.

Le Marche is an area of hilltop towns and rolling countryside, away from the crowds, and a gentle place to be. We cycle to nearby Amadola down ridiculously steep lanes, so steep that we end up pushing the bikes down, because the brakes aren't all they might be, and then, later in the day, push them back up again. We might just as well have gone for a walk.

The town has an arch in its central square, through which all its traffic must squeeze, and cafes overlooking a market. The kids' ice-creams are big enough to give me plenty of time to draw the piazza from a cafe, while a Birmingham couple talk loudly from the next table about their plans for a new extension to their house. Celia gets from the market a red and black striped AC Milan shirt with "99 Ronaldo" on the back, and wears it for the walk back. We visit our old friends and their children nearby who have moved to Italy to live, and drive up into the snow.

Back in London, the local patisserie that features in one of my drawings agree to take one to hang on its wall, and then three other ones. I attach my contact details, and then get a series of emails and phone calls from potential buyers and people interested in commissioning me. Hang them on a wall and they start to sell themselves. Most of those who call me are leaving London and want to take something to help them remember their favourite places. Everyone seems to be on the move.

Corridors of power

2008-03-18T18:23:00.009Z

On my way yesterday to the Royal Academy to deliver the £25 entry fee for this year’s Summer Show in return for, well, nothing usually, I stop off by London’s City Hall next to Tower Bridge. The view of the city’s financial district from the new building, occupied by mayor Ken Livingstone until the elections in May, at least, is spectacular. An evolving clump of high-rise buildings gaze back from the north side of the river with only the dwarfed Tower of London and Tower Bridge in view to remind the tourists gathered here that the city has a history longer than the 40 years the architecture suggests.

Encouraged by Livingstone, more new huge towers are planned to be built in the city in the coming years, many of them changing this very view from City Hall. The Heron Tower, now being constructed at 110 Bishopsgate, will have 47 floors and 680,000 square feet of office space when it is completed in 2011. Broadgate Tower, straddling the railway lines at Liverpool Street and now almost complete, is 35 storeys high. The Walkie Talkie on Fenchurch Street, planned at 36 floors, is due to be ready in 2010, and so named because its top floors are larger than the lower ones. The Shard at London Bridge will be a whopping 72 floors, making it the tallest in the UK and Europe if it is finished on schedule in 2011. The 48-storey Cheese Grater, named because, well, work it out yourself, is another planned to be ready in 2011. And there are more.

But will they really be ready then, or will they really be built at all? As I drew the skyline from a cafe almost under Tower Bridge, the financial markets contained within the buildings before me were in a state of meltdown, with the FTSE 100 index down by 4% on just that day. Financial uncertainty is in the air. Turbulence in the markets has already delayed the construction of some of these buildings, so how do things look today? And even if they are built, who is going to be moving in to them? It was years before the 50-storey One Canada Square at Canary Wharf was fully occupied and profitable after it had been topped out in 1991.

A strong economy can only help artists hoping to sell their work, and having just had an art consultancy take me on that works primarily with clients in the corporate sector, the arrival of many acres of new wall space that will need filling just a few miles from our front door can be seen as a promising development. London has been transformed in recent years – a walk along the South Bank proves that – and its skyline looked set to change even more in the coming years. How does that vision look today?

From the back window no.426

2008-03-14T16:56:00.003Z

Views from a cafe no.233

2008-03-07T10:10:00.004Z

Juan Muñoz at Tate Modern

2008-02-20T20:43:00.003Z

A visit to the late Juan Muñoz’s retrospective at Tate Modern (until 27 April) is not a relaxing thing, and yet singularly memorable. There is the continual feeling that one is an uninvited guest, and that you’ve come in the wrong door and are seeing everything from the wrong angle. Backs are turned towards us, figures group in an excluding way.

In The Prompter, 1988, the back of a dwarf is visible in a prompter’s box at the front of an empty stage – but try as we might we can’t see its face, and there is no prompting, and no sound. A drum is propped against a wall at the back of the stage. It’s hard to know how to react, but by then we have already reacted – by feeling kept at bay and excluded.

In Staring at the Sea, 1997-2000, two standing figures look at their reflections in a mirror, but their faces are covered by cardboard masks. They each look like the other, and there is little to be gained by them looking in the mirror. Whichever way you look at it, it seems like the back.

Many Times, 1999, in Room 10 is filled with 100 figures representing a single Asian man modelled on an art nouveau ceramic bust Muñoz came upon in a hotel. The manically smiling figures gather in groups, conversing and laughing, but they are smaller than lifesize so that visitors meandering among them stand head and shoulders above their heads. We are the ones that are left exposed and unusual rather than them.

This show is a matter of reflections, shadows, light and theatre – and a sense of unease – rather than a sculptural event. They are powerful images, but hard to endure. The spotlight illuminating Shadow and Mouth, 1996, of two figures in a strong beam, has blown out, smashing its glass, according to the attendant. A makeshift replacement spotlight stands alongside it, picking out the few remaining uncollected shards in its beam. Even the lighting finds it hard to take.

Are you being conned?

2008-02-08T11:58:00.000Z

I have details about how to buy my works on my website and get interest from buyers from time to time, but getting two interested buyers ready to send me hundreds of pounds in one week without another question was always going to seem suspicious.

One email was by someone claiming to be a priest wanting to buy several works as a present for his parents on their 50th wedding anniversary, the other by a man wanting a wedding present for a friend. What made them stand out was their willingness to part with hundreds of pounds at the earliest possible opportunity, their poor grasp of the English language and a writing style that suggested they were ordering 15,000 ball-bearings rather that a piece of art.

Websites are a great first point of contact for potential buyers of work from unrepresented artists, but they don’t usually lead to mass orders and untold riches. So the appeal of such unquestioning enthusiasm to own one’s work is understandable – someone really likes my work and wants to buy some. It’s what you hope for from your website when you first get it set up – orders rolling in each week – but it doesn’t usually happen quite like that.

The style of email is instantly familiar. The writer is certainly a close relative of, if not the very same, person who wrote to me the week before to generously give me the chance of sharing the $10 million his father, the owner of a large oil company, left to him after his sudden death in Ivory Coast last year. Touched as I was by this kind gesture, it was an opportunity, like many other similar opportunities, I let pass.

I was suspicious, but curious too, about these people interested in buying my prints. The priest wanted to know the total cost of the list of works he was ordering. I asked for his address and phone number first. He lives, he claims, a couple of miles down the road from here, on the edge of London’s financial district, and can send a courier around to pick the works up without me having to pack them and pass on postal charges. The phone number he gives is nonsensical and obviously fake. Even though I would only accept payment by Paypal, and don't know quite how I would end up being out of pocket, I let it drop. There are better things to do.

Other artist acquaintances have had similar recent emails from people wanting to buy work in this way. How many artists have been conned like this already? How many have had their egos massaged enough to let the conmen slip beneath their radar? Anyone with an email address is accustomed to questioning the validity of what lands in their inbox each day, even if it doesn’t end up their junk box first. But if these scam emails are being sent out, and increasingly so, there must be at least a few artists who are losing out, somehow, because of them.

Racing the builders

2008-01-15T12:21:00.000Z

Some good friends are leaving the city to live in the country. We’ve mainly got to know Mr and Mrs B through going to the same childbirth groups, by watching our toddlers pretend to be snowflakes in dance workshops, and by chatting to them in the playground as we wait for the kids to come out from school. Now they are leaving our inner-city enclave and heading to rural Kent, where houses with gardens are still relatively affordable, and the pressures on growing little boys are perhaps fewer than in the urban hothouse.

Before they go, to remind them of their time here, they ask me if I’ll do a drawing of Newington Green, a historic square close to where we live, and upon which their flat looked. I’m happy for anyone to ask me for anything, and it’s a good excuse to work on something nearby that could have a demand locally.

Rather than just being a busy roundabout with a high crime rate, there are some great stories behind the place. A Tudor hunting venue, Henry VIII installed his mistresses there, Samuel Wesley and Daniel Defoe attended a school there, and it was a hotbed of non-conformity and radicalism from the 1660s. Four of the houses that overlook the green, built in 1658, are among the oldest surviving in London. Most important, for some, is that Newington Green is home to Belle Epoque, a sensational French patisserie and cafe that is the ideal bolt-hole when the call of tea and cakes becomes too overpowering.

I do some drawings and email them to Mr and Mrs B. There’s no rush because they are still waiting for the builders to sort out some problems with the new house, and they can’t move into it as soon as they had hoped. I’m busy with other things anyway, and it slips down the list of priorities. I do a few more drawings, and one or two get approval from a group of kids playing football on the green.

I have kept my text messages to Mr and Mrs B over this period. There is no urgency in getting the job finished, and I am enjoying working on it when I get the chance. “No rush for pic,” one text says. “It’s such a busy time of year coming up. We know it’s work in progress.” “Look forward to seeing drawings,” says another, “but no rush.” Isn’t that the best thing to hear when the pressure is on with other projects, and Christmas and all the other stuff we are dealing with?

Except now this project has been going on for long enough. I know that I could have turned it around in a couple of weeks if I really had to. Deadlines can be a wonderful thing. Mr and Mrs B are in their new home now, and I have taken even longer than their builders have taken to complete work on their house. Slower than builders: a damning indictment. It will be ready soon now, Mr and Mrs B. I promise. Thanks for being so patient.

Fired up

2007-12-17T11:12:00.000Z

Online chat forums for artists always seem to have a section on what it is that gets people inspired to make work. Nature is, inevitably, nearly always mentioned, and why not? There’s enough to keep anybody occupied for a lifetime and beyond, and despite, or perhaps because of, the repeating ritual of the seasonal cycle, there is a continual supply of new things to get people going and an almost infinite range of subjects that can be looked at in new ways.

Nature does seem thin on the ground around here though. Our inner city back garden, about 15 feet square, has for a long time been surrounded with a variety of foliage, mostly growing in other people’s gardens, giving us privacy and a therapeutic dose of greenery to temper the brickwork, cement and things manmade. There is bamboo, some white flowering climber related to the potato, a willow tree, clematis, and something similar to the hawthorn that lean over the fence to join the visual splendour of our own potted plants. Sparrows, blue tits, blackbirds, a robin and those ornithological thugs magpies and jays put in occasional appearances in an attempt to make things seem more rural than they really are.

Yesterday, though, the sound of a chain saw from our neighbour’s garden heralded the fact that although we may have been enjoying the foliage, their own space had become engulfed and shrouded by it. Now, suddenly, the robin is hopping around the fence where a dense thicket once was, and we can now get a good look in our next door neighbour’s windows where previously we had been separated by greenery.

A good job then that I don’t depend on “nature” for “inspiration”. London is a green city, but not really from where I’m standing. Forests of road signs, street furniture and architecture feature more in what I do. And these are kind of seasonal too, in their own way. Road signs come and go, street lamps change, buildings break through the soil, blossom and then grown into maturity, or get demolished if they are 1960s social housing. Urban change is more glacial (I heard recently that glaciers can move metres a day), but it changes nonetheless. Bus stops sprout. Olympic villages take shape. Railway stations to international destinations take root.

I draw the city because that is what I see, not necessarily because it is what I am inspired by. It is not inspiration that I depend upon, it is finding the time to draw. When inspiration has deserted you, you have to keep going. Who can afford to wait for inspiration?

Doris Salcedo at Tate Modern

2007-11-16T11:14:00.000Z

When I was an art student a group of us paid a visit to the painter Patrick Heron’s house on the coast of west Cornwall. During the time he generously spent with us – we had a tour of his house, Eagles Nest, and its gardens, and he was gloriously indiscreet in his anecdotes – he told a story of the time when he was a trustee of the Tate Gallery and was accompanying the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, around the gallery. As they walked through the Duveen Galleries, at what is now Tate Britain, Thatcher took to encouraging them to install larger sculptures in it, gesticulating with her right arm as she marched along. Heron imitated her for us, illustrating how uncannily at home she would have looked if she had been attending the Nuremberg rallies in Nazi Germany.

Heaven knows what she would have made of Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (until 6 April 2008), a space that makes the Duveen gallery appear cupboard-like in comparison. Artists commissioned to make work in the hall for the Unilever Series have to take on the fact that it is a huge space, 35,000 square feet, they are dealing with. And it goes up and up.

You have to look down to see her work, though, which is, in a kind of way, something that is not there. It is the space she has created, what she has taken away rather than what she has imported, that has attracted the crowds. The long, wandering crack, more than 500 feet of it, snakes from one end of the hall’s floor to the other. It looks authentic, as if it has been created naturally, large enough in places for fingers and ankles to go into and set the minds of personal injury solicitors racing. Nobody is looking up. Thatcher would probably twist her ankle in it, except it is most likely that she has never set foot in a gallery since that meeting with Heron.

The kids come to see it with us, with some of their cousins. It’s interesting what they like and don’t like, and the Unilever Series has captured their imagination more than once. Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project did it, as did Carsten Holler’s slides. They run along the crack, stick their arms into it, someone falls into it and then a Tate attendant closes in on us. I feel you really haven’t experienced Shibboleth unless you have stepped into it, or at least twisted your ankle. It is the act of consummation that it deserves.

It doesn’t seem as if the Tate Modern building is falling down for the simple reason that the crack is in a gallery, just as I didn’t feel as if I was in a playground when Holler’s slides were installed. And anyway, the slides in Pirate’s Playhouse in Stoke Newington are just as good, there is a shorter queue, and you are surrounded by people who are simply out to have fun rather than read anything more into it.

Whether or not the children are touched by what Salcedo says it is about – colonial exploitation, racism and the uncomfortable truths that we are forced to confront (how Thatcher would have hated it) – they play natural games about boundaries around it. How kids respond to a piece of work is often more enlightening than how the critics do.

Nip and tuck

2007-10-12T09:54:00.000+01:00

There is the crackle of money around London this week as the Frieze Art Fair opens its doors - or, more accurately, as it's in a huge marquee in Regent's Park, opened its tent flaps. It's an international event, with the biggest and most influential commercial galleries from around the world selling work, and it's not just the big UK money it attracts.

In fact, it’s hard for a while not to take your eyes off the people around you as they make their way around, or eavesdrop on their conversations. The richest seem to be mostly American, over no doubt, to add to their collections or museums. There is a discussion between four American seventy-somethings in the Lisson Gallery space about the currency of the 400,000 figure they have just been given by an employee for a piece on show. Was it euros, pounds or dollars? They couldn’t help but laugh, and may even have smiled if their nip-and-tuck faces would allow it.

For them, and for many others, Frieze, now in its fifth year, is the newest port-of-call in the art market tour. Minions linger around them, personal assistants and curators I suppose, with clipboards in hand. Alan Yentob from the BBC, the presenter of Imagine, waits dutifully in the queue to speak to one remarkably preserved couple, who are pickled in haute couture, and bedecked with pinnacles in the art of dentistry, ophthalmology and plastic surgery.

Around town, too, everyone waits. Big shows are timed to open this week, while the international art set are in town. The auction houses time sales so that they fit in with Frieze. New magazines launch.

What about the art? There are the eye-catching exhibits that catch the media’s attention: Berlinde de Bruyckere’s dead pony, Rob Pruitt’s flea market (a whole stand given over to what appears to be a jumble sale), the Chapman brothers cheerfully defacing the Queen’s face on twenty-quid notes, and Gianni Motti’s live cross-legged policeman (described as an intervention, presumably because it is beyond the walls of a gallery space).

But there are lovely things tucked away in smaller galleries, though, such as Peter Callesen’s works at the Emily Tsingou Gallery, who works with little more than sheets of A4 paper and a scalpel. With the whiteness of a Reinhardt and the precision of a surgeon, Callesen makes small, witty, understated monuments. In a sea of work that appears to have been assembled quickly to leave a unfinished feel, they sing in their craftsmanship.

They sound as if they could easily be overlooked, but they can’t. There’s a crowd of young people around them, art students perhaps, taking photos of them on their phones. None of them seems to be a collector.

Rush hour

2007-10-05T10:34:00.000+01:00

St Mary's, one of the Isles of Scilly off the coast of Cornwall, looking towards the islands of Tresco and Bryher from tea gardens near Porthloo beach. Not too busy, even in peak season.

Back home

2007-09-16T11:51:00.000+01:00

London isn't really as far away from Paris as it seems. Cycling it may take three days for the likes of me, but it is sobering to sit on a train and be back at Waterloo station a little more than two hours later. The most we cycled in a day was the 72 miles from Gournay en Bray, Normandy, to the base of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, but it really didn't seem that far, and my muscles didn't really give the impression it was that far, either. A small team welcomed us in the gardens at the tower's base, and the champagne corks popped.

The group has raised more than £54,000 for Marie Curie Cancer Care, a figure that continues to rise. It was fun to do, and no hardship - I'd do it again tomorrow - so thanks again to those of you who have donated.

This is my brother Simon (right) and me at the end. He could have done it in half the time.

I'll stop going on about it now.

On my bike

2007-09-06T06:04:00.000+01:00

I'm about to set off on the much anticipated sponsored cycle from London to Paris - so thanks to those who have generously made donations. The weather is looking good, the wind promises to be at our backs, and I have a healthy supply of cycling shorts packed. (I've decided against the bright idea of using bubble wrap instead.) It is going to take us three days, leaving tomorrow, Friday 7 September, and returning - by train, thankfully - on Monday. But there is still plenty of time to make a donation. I'll keep you posted.

Soft sell

2007-09-01T07:17:00.001+01:00

It’s the first such art fair I’ve participated in so I don’t know quite what to expect. With the car stuffed with work, hanging materials, folding table, browser stand for unframed works and directions about where to park I arrive, too early.

It’s a big old building, with two floors. The experienced ones, the ones who return each year, are upstairs, where the ceilings are gilded. Downstairs, through a corridor that takes as long to walk as it does to dawn on you that maybe it’s better to go to the cafe upstairs after all, are the late bookers, the new ones, like me.

We each get a few six-foot-high screens, the number depending on how much we’ve paid. They are covered with a kind of hessian that means smaller works can be attached with Velcro. If God had wanted us to attach paintings to walls with Velcro he would have put strips of the stuff on the back of frames. As if to prove the point, my immediate neighbour, who thought she had stolen a march by hanging her work early, returns to her space to find she has to pick her work from the floor among broken glass.

I have a friend who says that for him the two most demoralising words in the English language, the ones that make his heart sink and give him the urge to run to the hills, are “craft fair”. It’s people selling things that nobody wants, he says, to people who don’t know what to spend their money on. Harsh, perhaps, because they are the people out there doing it while others may only think about it. At the art fair, too, there are exhibitors who it is impossible to imagine going too far, but they are doing it and believing in themselves.

The ones with spaces near mine are an interesting lot, most of them having been to art school at some point or other. Over the days we get to know each other quite well, offering congratulations and commiserations as sales are won and lost, and musing about where all the buyers must be. The opening night flies by, some friends come over, and the space packs out. I get my first catch with interest from an art publishing group that wants to see more work. It’s a long-term prospect, but it immediately vindicates doing such a show. The group’s representative would have been unlikely to have seen my work if I hadn’t been showing.

The fair is only a few days long, and most of us make sales. I try to perfect the art of drawing people in to look at my work by standing at a distance so that people aren’t intimidated by having to speak to someone about the work before they want to, if they ever do. If they are interested in buying, they’ll seek you out anyway. Does the hard sell work with art? Can it be sold as if it was a car? Not by me, certainly.

The excitement of having someone you have never met before look at your work, mull it over, decide they like it, and then get out their wallet is one that established artists with galleries to handle their work must miss out on. It is a genuine thrill to turn bits of paper, and odd marks and strange ideas into something that people want, and then escort those people to the sales desk.

The work comes down, and unsold work is packed away, but it is not the end of the story. Days later, emails continue to come through from people with offers of promising projects and exhibition opportunities. Would I do another art fair? Having done one, I have everything I need to do more. It is less a case of can I afford to do another, as can I afford not to?

Deemed acceptable

2007-07-18T10:41:00.000+01:00

Before I sign the forms for my space at the art fair I find in the small print a line about all works on sale needing to be “original”. As my works are scanned drawings with digital colour printed in editions of 100, they are originals, in the sense that they don’t exist in any other real form than a print, and yet not, because there are (or will be in time, hopefully) 99 others knocking about.

A flurry of emails follows. The organisers don’t want artists showing reproductions of paintings, and are careful about whom they accept. Time is short, and the only spaces they have left are bigger than I really want, but I find I have built up anticipation and enthusiasm to make it work and will be disappointed to not be able to attend.

My work is printed using the giclee process using archival quality papers and inks. The questions to ask myself, another art fair organiser advises me, are:
1 Am I a digital artist?
2 Does the work exist in another form?
3 Are the prints of high enough quality and small edition?
If the answers are yes, no and yes then giclee prints are deemed acceptable.

I can tick and cross the right boxes, and eventually I get the OK, and the rush is on. I mark out a wall at home the same size as my space to get an idea of what I can take. I can hang about eight works at any one time – then it is a matter of working out how many other works I may need to take the place of those I sell, and then get them printed, framed, priced and labelled.

Naomi, in an act of supreme support, makes the frames. Spare moments are spent in framing suppliers, glaziers, and a fantastic local framers, S’graffiti, that mitres the moulding for us. I make more drawings and get them printed.

The joy of a deadline. It’s amazing what you can get done.

Drawing a blank

2007-06-21T12:01:00.001+01:00

I’m standing with my sketchbook on College Green opposite the Houses of Parliament, finding out that making Big Ben look believable is every bit as difficult for me as drawing someone’s portrait, when a police officer suddenly bears down on me. He asks, in a rather polite, apologetic way, if he can see what I am doing. Pleased to get any interest in my work, I show him the half finished drawing, and then the rest of the contents of the sketchbook. I don’t care who it is – if they ask, they can see it. He’s rather complimentary. “Ooh,” he says. “Are you professional then?”

What he was worried about, along with the other police behind the concrete barricades around the government buildings, was that I might have been undertaking “hostile surveillance”. I don’t know what such a drawing may look like, but it only took a brief glance for him to be convinced these weren’t hostile. “I don’t want you to think I’m accusing you of being a terrorist,” he says, as he leaves. “I don’t want you to think I am one,” I answer. We both return to our jobs.

With an art fair looming I had to get some new work done, and a spell in Guantanamo Bay was the last thing I needed. I had a bit of time to make some new work, but it wasn’t so straightforward. The things that looked so perfect to draw when I couldn’t — because I had a hungry five-year-old in tow or the car was parked next to an overdue parking meter — had suddenly become impossible to get to grips with. The 30-second drawings I usually manage to do in my small sketchbook seem full of vitality compared with the first few laboured efforts I churn out when I have two whole days before me to make something.

Take my visit to Paddington station earlier that same day. Usually, when passing through it in a rush before or after a train journey, it had always seemed so full of things to interest me: the soaring arches, the rhythmical columns, the energy and noise, the scale of the place. When confronted with the time to get some of this into a drawing, nothing seemed to work. Nothing seemed quite the right view, or the right format, nothing seemed to capture those things I enjoy so much about it. I walked around the concourse for about 20 minutes drawing a blank, watching the day ticking away.

Upstairs, though, there was a cafe with a table that had a view down one of the long arched aisles of the station that looked ideal to draw. By the time I had queued to buy a coffee it had become occupied. In the time it took for them to leave, and for me to take their place, I’d finished a few small drawings of things I wouldn’t have tackled otherwise and the views that had seemed so impossible before had become that much more doable. Cafes really are the great source of inspiration for me. Making a drawing at a table somehow takes the tension out of having to make a good piece of work.

But, ubiquitous as cafes may seem, they aren’t next to everything you may want to draw, and the contrasting demands of capturing the stationary architecture above and the very mobile elements of passengers and trains below took their toll. From near the clock on platform one I had nearly finished one drawing when a train arrived, obstructing half the view I had included. When it left, after its disembarked passengers had been replaced by those heading out of London, it revealed another train on the platform immediately behind it, so the obstructed view remained.

Twenty minutes later, and seeing yet more of the day slipping away, I consulted the timetables of arrivals and departures to find that there was a four-minute slot about half an hour later that would present me with the scene I had started and so nearly finished. The clock ticked around, and with Swiss efficiency the trains departed, like stage curtains, to reveal the view, leaving me to scrabble to finish the drawing. It is only a train arriving at the same platform two minutes early to re-obscure the view that spoiled things. I made up the rest of the drawing. The imagination is a wonderful thing.

Fly on the wall

2007-05-25T20:56:00.000+01:00

I bumped into the friend of a friend of a distant relative when I was on the bus recently, and, not knowing them so well wondered what on earth we were going to talk about for the ten minutes until I had to get out at my stop. I needn’t have worried. “I can’t tell you what pleasure we get from your drawing hanging in our dining room,” he said. (It was a drawing of a town in Cornwall.) “It brings back such happy memories of when we were there.” I settled back and was so carried away talking about it with him I nearly missed my stop.

The thing is, I had quite forgotten that he had bought it. I had an exhibition about 10 years ago and invited as many people that I could, and the trickle-down factor – the network of family and friends gossiping away - meant that quite a few people turned out. As I wasn’t present at the exhibition all the time it was on, I didn’t know just how many had turned up. But there were a few sales, mostly to people I didn’t know, and some to those I did.

My record of sales isn’t perhaps as well maintained as it could be, and is a document I should read more often, firstly so that I remind myself I have sold quite a few paintings over the years, which is kind of cheering, and secondly because those buyers are exactly the people I should be keeping up to date with current and future artistic ventures. But thirdly, it is worth remembering that those paintings and drawings, although largely forgotten by me, still mean something to the people who have them.

That our paintings go and have a life of their own when we part company with them was brought home to me even more forcefully just the following day when I had an unexpected phone call. It was from a man in Portugal who was trying, he said, to trace an artist called James Hobbs, as the collection of art in Lisbon he was employed to catalogue held a number of his paintings.

Perhaps I have been watching too much bad TV lately, but my first reaction was to look around to see where the hidden cameras might be. I was standing in an office corridor as I took the call and expected for a moment that I was going to be the subject of one of those fly-on-the-wall programmes. But the paintings sounded from his description to be like mine, and the phone number showing on my mobile phone was an international one. Besides, why shouldn’t my work be bought by someone on the other side of Europe? If someone was playing a trick it wasn’t a very good one, because a private collection is just the kind of place that an artist’s paintings could end up.

I gave him my email address, and later that evening he sent me jpegs of the four paintings. They were mine. He also sent me details of the collection of 4,000 works of art, built by mining millionaire Joe Berardo, which happens to have some of the biggest names from 20th century art among it. “But why have they got yours?” a friend bluntly put it later. My inner voice has also been asking that question and wondering how soon they will sell them, but another voice (perhaps a few too many voices in my head at the moment, but I promise I’m not cracking up), this other voice keeps saying, “You’ve been making work for years, and this is what can happen if you stick at it.”

I sold those paintings more than 15 years ago, and how I wish I could have been a fly on the walls upon which they have been hanging during that time. How the hell did they end up in Lisbon? Who has bought and sold them during that time? Where have others I have sold gone? Where have yours gone?

Philip Thompson 1928-2007

2007-05-25T09:06:00.000+01:00

Last week I went to the funeral of Philip Thompson, who created cartoons for the letters and agony pages of Artists & Illustrators magazine throughout my time as editor there from 2001-2004. Cartoons is perhaps not quite the word - they were drawings with a kind of spontaneity that sprang off the page, belying the experience, knowledge, sense of humour and humanity through which they had percolated.

After several years, I met Philip with Roger Bates, the writer of the agony page (and of an obituary for Philip in the Independent), for lunch in a Soho restaurant. They got on well immediately - we all did - and Philip's rich past as an artist, illustrator, designer, lecturer and author was gradually revealed, as was even more of Roger's extraordinary artistic knowledge, wit and insight. Their conversation was an education to me. That they both usually tended to spurn such social occasions made it particularly miraculous they met and were able to develop this friendship.

The highlight each month during my time at Artists & Illustrators was to receive Roger's singular, knowledgeable and hilarious responses to readers' queries and then Philip's cartoon to illustrate them. It was a marvel they would work for us within our meagre budget. They worked together on this page for more than 12 years, until a few months ago when Philip became too ill to work. A relaunch for the magazine, now under new owners, means that Roger's wit and wisdom will now also be lost to its pages.

The two worked on a book of their work together, and despite Philip's distinguished publishing past, they were unable to find someone to take it on. "I've written to scores of publishers but they don't bother to reply," Philip wrote to me. "I spent my early years as a designer in the fifties doing book jackets for every publisher in London but all my contacts are either dead, doing time or in homes for the terminally incontinent. It's like starting all over again with 12-year-old editors and art editors."

I will most remember Philip's quiet voice as he answered the phone each month, the beauty even of the envelopes in which he would send his drawings, the visual splendour of his invoices and the ever-present threat of his Lyme Regis home being covered in a landslide. We left his coffin to the sounds of Miles Davis, retired to a nearby pub, and laughed in his memory.

Fair trade

2007-05-03T22:44:00.000+01:00

Things here being the way they are – ie, artistic production still inexplicably outstripping public demand – the house has gradually filled up with works of art. Artist partner, too, has been cranking up creative production since the children are now both at school, so competition for having a work hanging in the sitting room’s much-coveted chimneybreast spot has hotted up. We are reaching the stage when we need to have regular rehangs, similar to those at Tate Modern, so that works don’t have to languish for too long in storage.

A leaflet arrives as an insert to a magazine with details of a way that may help our situation. Ever tried showing at an art fair? You hire wall space at a large venue and sell your work directly to the public. There are a number of advantages of doing this over showing in a gallery. You don’t have to say goodbye to a hefty percentage on each sale, you come face to face with your buyers and other artists, and show what you want to show at the price you choose.

It looks promising. The dates are convenient, and I’m up to a new challenge. A deadline gets my creative energy going. Before anything, though, I get the calculator out. The list of expenses soon mounts up. Hiring of the space, framing, printing, transport, time spent manning the stall, the loss of other paid work… Some services are included in the cost of the space, including publicity, packaging and a credit card payment service for buyers. But how many paintings can I show in the space at one time, how many am I likely to sell, and how many spare ones will I need to take the place of any that sell? How many works, in short, do I need to sell just to break even?

I have a track record of letting my imagination run riot before my work goes on sale; how much will I make if I sell everything I show? How much could I turn this into annually? But selling out has, of course, rarely troubled either me or extended the abilities of my accountants. I usually manage to sell something, and have sometimes surprised myself by selling more than I expected, but usually – and perhaps this is true for the majority of artists – I’m left thinking that things could have been an awful lot worse, as well as bit better.

We can make art for a variety of reasons, not all of them to do with making money, which is why most of us have day jobs. But while I may want to get some paintings off our walls and onto somebody else’s, I’m certainly not prepared to be out of pocket for the privilege. Would it make me feel any less an artist if I handed out my paintings to passers-by in the street who wanted one if it worked out a cheaper way of disposing of them than arranging to attend an art fair?

What an art fair can offer, though, is the opportunity of contact building and finding new, perhaps regular, buyers. Maybe that’s what I’m hoping for most now. I give the organisers a call, and they ask for a selection of jpegs of my work so that they can decide whether it is good enough to include. I may appear to have occasional wobbles about my work, but as I hit the send button I don’t have the slightest doubt that they should agree to include me.

But let us remember that success in such a venture is not just down to the quality of the work, the right frame, the right subject, the right price and unerring self belief. There is one more vital ingredient that defines whether such an event is a success or failure: the right buyer. Without a good supply of potential customers with cash in their pocket our chances of a satisfactory result are low, and how many of these lovely people will turn up we can only wait and see.

In the galleries

2007-03-31T22:13:00.000+01:00

One of the great things about living in London, one of the things that I have never quite become used to since first moving here almost 20 years ago, is the extraordinarily rich and varied selection of exhibitions that are a short distance from home. Feel like finding out what artists were making in Papua New Guinea at the end of the 19th century? Drop in to the British Museum. Wondering about what all the fuss is about with the Turner Prize? Get to Tate Britain. A few old masters? The Wallace Collection. Current state of prawn painting? Go to the National Gallery of Crustaceans. OK, that probably doesn’t exist, but I wouldn’t be so surprised if there was one applying for lottery funding to open right now.

Of course, you don’t need to live in London, or go to London, to delve into this other world – there are plenty of fantastic museums and galleries around the country. But when I am in some London museums, the big national ones especially, it seems that they are mostly being visited by people who have travelled half way across the country, if not all the way around the world, to be there. They are some of the best and most inspiration reasons for coming to London.

I get to galleries quite a lot – it’s part of my job – but perhaps not always the galleries that feed my own practice as an artist particularly well. I was in a library-quiet commercial gallery the other day close to Oxford Street, a contrast of mad bustle on one hand and eery stillness on the other, emphasising the great gulf between the average punter on the street and some contemporary art. But silent galleries let works speak, giving us visitors a chance to get a cosy one-to-one with what’s on display. When did the Mona Lisa last speak? The poor thing is being held under house arrest behind bullet-proof glass by the banks of the Seine and if her muffled cries did manage to escape her sealed world they must surely be saying “get me out of here”.

As it happens, the works I was looking at in the commercial gallery weren’t saying much to me, and what they were saying I wasn’t so keen to hear; at least, I didn’t think they were going to help the art I was going to make when I reached home. The works on show were based on movies, and by the time I left I had my own idea: a video installation made of clips of “The End” appearing at the end of some of the great films in history, perhaps in a loop, so that viewers are caught in continuous track of finality, raising questions of death, reincarnation and immortality, and challenging the viewer to reappraise the place of happy-ever-afterness in their lives.

Oh dear. I needed help. It was at hand. Twenty minutes on the Tube and I was at another exhibition, of contemporary drawings this time. There were a handful of attentive people making their way around it. Some of the drawings were funny and immediate, and made me itch to draw. Then there were some by an artist who sits with a bunch of pencils in each hand mimicking the hand actions of people she selects around her, such as someone cooking in a Hong Kong noodle restaurant, so creating an elaborate abstract trail of marks. Her drawings made me want to experiment more with the ones that I make, to push things further than I do. There were works by other artists that also encouraged me in different ways, to try out new ways, to think about why I do things the way I do.

I find that a good exhibition can be the best boost to my artistic morale, and it is rarely a blockbuster exhibition that is six-deep with visitors. I left with a burning desire to draw. Mind you, I still quite like my “The End” video idea, but I expect a first-year art student somewhere has already done it.

Making a point

2007-02-28T23:07:00.000Z

Over the years I have collected a wide and rather curious range of artists materials that are stored in an old cupboard in the corner of the studio. Sorting through it recently in the hunt for an A5-sized sketchbook – shades of an alcoholic rifling through the house desperate to find a forgotten and unfinished bottle of scotch – I realise just how much I have restricted myself in the materials I use.

A pile of redundant materials mounts up: aquarelle pencils, rabbit skin glue, hard pastels, soft pastels, oil pastels, oil paints so rich in pigment that a couple of tubes would serve perfectly well as dumbbells, student quality acrylics that look as if they came free with a packet of corn flakes, watercolour masking fluid so old the lid has fused tightly and permanently shut, box upon box of charcoal from, seemingly, every known manufacturer in the western world… And there, lurking at the back, is a blast from the past, a reminder of happy, innocent days from years ago: a bunch of pencils bound together by a now corroded elastic band.

How the memories flood back. There was a time when I hardly went anywhere without a 2B pencil or two in my jacket pocket, along with its inevitable companions, the Swiss army knife and the little black sketchbook. Its place in my pocket has gradually been taken over by the marker pen, which has its advantages, but none of the beauty and naturalness of the pencil. For a start, you cannot look at a marker pen and see how close it is to running out. A one-inch stub of pencil leaves you in no doubt you need to get a new one. And pencils are cheaper, too.

The pencil is still, however, a thing of beauty to me: to bring one to a fine point with a good, sharp knife, to feel that very sharpest point ping and break as it first hits the page, leaving a little splash of graphite dust across the page; to have at one’s fingertips that infinite range of weights of lines and tones that graphic software packages can still only dream of. A pencil is small and light, and available in every high street. It looks and feels organic, the high fibre option. I would even venture to say that, if pushed, a well-sharpened H pencil could be used to perform an emergency tracheotomy. And they work just about anywhere; NASA still uses them on the International Space Station.

In an age obsessed with upgrading and improvement, the pencil is a towering monument to getting something right almost first time. We are now on no more than Pencil 3.0, and considering that it first shipped about 450 years ago that is something to shout about. Of course, there are more recently introduced mechanical pencils and all kinds of coloured and aquarelle pencils that no doubt deserve similar adoration, but the core product, the humble and wonderful graphite pencil, remains gloriously similar to those that appeared in the 16th century. The great lumps of graphite first found on a Cumbrian fell may no longer used in their manufacture (the local shepherds found them useful for marking their sheep), but Nicolas-Jacques Conté’s big innovation in 1795 was to mix graphite powder with clay in varying quantities so that a range of hardness and softness became available. Otherwise, they haven’t changed so much.

There was correspondence in a paper recently about some of the more boring museums that can be found in the UK. The Museum of Lead Mining at Wanlockhead and the British Lawnmower Museum in Sheffield were mentioned. Then someone suggested the Cumberland Pencil Museum in Keswick. Boring? Pencils? I have visited this museum, and suggest you do too. Where else could you find a 26-foot pencil, the world’s longest? It is the pencil lover’s dream.

And so why have I relegated my pencils to the darkened corners of the studio cupboard? It’s a question I am still asking myself. At the moment at least, I am looking for a line that is thicker, blacker, less likely to smudge, and less pencil-like. But they are back in my jacket pocket now, and a relationship has been rekindled.

In the city

2007-01-26T15:19:00.000Z

I have a day off work and plan to head outdoors with the sketchbook. Inevitably, it rains. Of course, it is the middle of winter and there is no reason to expect that it should do anything else. Who knows what a better climate – induced by global warming or otherwise – might do for our landscape painting tradition?

But having spent too much time in front of a computer – for the day job as well as for scanning in drawings, getting the website set up and applying for things – I’m not going to be put off getting outside to draw. A dose of elemental forces, in the shape of wind and rain, is a relief after too much time spent working in offices.

Discomfort, for me at least, doesn’t preclude creativity. At art school we’d be encouraged to stand up as we worked, which could mean, despite the usual preconceived ideas about art students, that we were on our feet next to an easel for eight hours. Painting can be, should be, a physically draining exercise. Of course, a day spent drawing is a doddle compared with patrolling Basra or being a nurse, and we usually had the strength to stay on our feet by the student union bar in the evenings.

(I still think it makes sense to stay on your feet at an easel if you’re fit and mobile enough: it makes it easy to get in position to make the right marks, especially if you are working large, and it enables you to move away from the work to see how it is going. Sitting down seems to me to be just a little too comfortable.)

King’s Cross in London is hardly the most comfortable place to be drawing either. The area is currently in the grip of developers, as what was once a congested drug-riddled area frequented by kerb-crawlers tries to turn itself into a cosy inner-city neighbourbood where a flat is worth more than the GDP of some African nations. I like its transitional period anyway. The scaffolding is up, cranes abound, and there is an energy about the place that is infectious. The lines of the scaffolding accentuate perspective, shrouding the shape of George Gilbert Scott’s magnificent Midland Grand Hotel.

Drawing somewhere so busy – people are pouring in and out of the railway station, and it is hard to find a place to stand that isn’t in the way – means that one becomes more or less invisible, in a way that is impossible in less populated locations. There is, in my experience, less chance of someone coming up to you in a busy place and asking the dreaded “What are you doing then?” than there is in quieter places.

A few years back I spent six months travelling around England in a camper van loaded with pencils and sketchbooks, drawing every day. I soon became accustomed to people coming over and chatting to me as I worked. At rural Bradford-upon-Avon a man came over to see what I was doing as he waited for his wife and children to finish shopping. As they all left in the car on their way home, his wife wound down the window, and invited me to their home for dinner and to park my van in their drive for the night.

When I turned up at their house on the edge of town that evening, there was roast chicken, home grown vegetables, bottles of beer, and a warmth and generosity that was quite breathtaking. When I left in my van the next morning to head for the next town there was a touching farewell ceremony in the drive, and gifts of home grown tomatoes and apples (that helped keep scurvy at bay). Throwing their doors open to complete strangers isn’t what the English are renowned for. Mind you, if I’d had a similar invitation from someone as I drawn at King’s Cross, I’d have turned it down.

Going dotcom

2006-12-28T23:57:00.000Z

The idea of having a website for my drawings had been brewing for a while and, after the protracted grind of filing a tax return, it took on the appearance of rather enjoyable and straightforward project. The internet is an important marketing tool for the artist, we hear. How, otherwise, are people supposed to believe you are an artist if you don’t have an exhibition on or they haven’t seen your unsold paintings lying around your house? A website means your work can be seen anywhere from your next-door neighbour’s house to Kazakhstan and Peru. This is the theory, anyway.

Art is, in some ways, ideally suited to the internet. A good website will give potential buyers, gallery owners or curators some idea of which direction an artist is coming from. It is now the easiest way of letting people see your work, but what about selling it? Let’s be realistic. You wouldn’t agree to marry someone by meeting them only on the web, and you wouldn’t buy a house just by reading the estate agent’s details online, so why expect people to do something really important, such as buy a painting, after just seeing it on a website? But going dotcom should, hopefully, make some potential buyers interested in seeing the real thing.

So I spend time checking out other artists’ websites to get ideas about what may work best for mine. Some are like stepping inside the thatched Cotswold cottage of a major purchaser of Beatrix Potter collectibles, with flowery borders and the effect of pixellated potpourri. Others engulf with a blitz of shifting graphics that are as disorienting as travel sickness and draw more attention to the art of the designer than the artist. Some are fantastic, but there is no way I could adapt a similar approach because I am not as prolific, or well exhibited, and am not frequently asked questions of any sort.

The simpler and more direct a site is, the more I like it, and this is good news for my old mate Colin Bowling, who is designing it for me. But there are questions to ask myself first. What really is the point of having this website? Who do I think will view it, and what questions about me as an artist will they want answered by it? What images do I want included? How detailed does my CV have to be? It isn’t a ten-minute job to get together what I want to go in, and although I can improve things in time, it is important to get things as right as possible first time.

Another vital thing to do is register a good address for a site. The best, I think, is a simple yourname.com, but it is likely this has already been taken by a large tractor dealership in Wisconsin or a classical guitar tutor in the Scottish Highlands. Sure enough, other James Hobbses have got in there before me; I have to settle for james-hobbs.co.uk.

So Colin designs it and we spend a week or so bouncing emails to and fro until we have something we are happy with. Soon after he has finished, and it has gone live, I email the people in my address book with its details. I check the statistics page that comes as part of the website package: a generous wave of people logged on as it launched. Someone even contacted me expressing an interest in buying a drawing.

But within a few days the number of people logging on has dropped to a handful. A website is just one club in the bag to take around the artistic golf course. Rather than preparing to employ a full time framer and retire to the coast, the struggle to get people to look at the website has only just begun.

And you can see it at www.james-hobbs.co.uk.

Contact Colin Bowling at info@colinbowling.com.

High street blues

2006-11-27T10:04:00.000Z

A large sign appears in the window of our local art materials store. “Stock clearance,” it says, “we’re moving!” It’s not as if it is the only art shop around - there are a lot of artists in the area in which we live - but it still comes as a bit of a shock.

The shop is in the middle of a popular high street not so far from where we live. It is an average-sized shop, but with a surprisingly broad range of products inside. It isn’t, perhaps, the cheapest place in the world to buy things,  but it’s certainly not the most expensive either. But it was where I would often - not often enough, I now realise - drop in to buy a sketchbook or two and a few pens.

What I dropped in for as much as anything, though, was to chat with Steve  behind the counter. Without wanting to over-romanticise it, the shop could  be considered the equivalent to the artistic community of the village  stores. We would spend some time catching up on news, he’d help out with some query, such as making a telephone call to a pen manufacturer for me  about the lightfastness of their range, and I’d walk out with a small bag of products that would keep me creative. Buying a new shirt or a pair of jeans is the cause of prolonged agony for me, after which I often leave the shop with something unsuitable. I have never, however, had to return a sketchbook for being either the wrong style or the wrong size (although I did, I think, once return a marker pen for being the wrong colour). If I have to be in a shop, let it be an art shop.

What had changed for Steve was the rocketing overheads and the changing nature of his shop’s customers: the  growing number of people who order his products online  couldn’t care less where, geographically, they are being dispatched from, as long as they arrive quickly. Why pay over the odds for a shop that depends less and less upon passing trade, if you can find yourself a barn and office with broadband in the Hebrides or on the Northumberland coast?

Steve’s new place will be off the  beaten track and free of the high rents, and he is hoping in time that he’ll be able to  spend more time with his family and get some of his own painting done, instead of just enabling others to do theirs.

I’m certainly no expert in business, but it is a mystery to me how small businesses can keep going on a busy shopping street, especially ones  with relatively low margins, like art material retailers. Steve has been paying a rent  of £35,000 a year for his average-sized shop, plus business rates of more than £6,000 (“and that doesn’t even cover refuse collection,” he groans, which is another extra), and a wage bill of £60,000, plus loans that need to be paid  off... I marvel at how he has survived so long and been so cheerful when I have been in to buy something.   

The most rudimentary mathematics suggests these overheads of more than  £100,000 a year, or £2,000 a week, are hardly dented by my occasional purchase of a sketchbook and marker pen. If Steve gets, say, a £2 margin  from a £4 sketchbook, it means he would have to sell more than a boggling  1,000 of them each week just to cover these overheads, let alone pay himself a wage. Don’t even think about how many pencils that would  translate to.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that such shops are disappearing from the high street. Choice is something we are always having thrusted upon us as being a good thing, whether it is for schools or hospitals. Buying art materials online is here to stay — getting good art materials at a reasonable price is always going to be an important  consideration for artists — but it will be a sad day if the small, independent art materials retailer becomes a thing of the past.

Baring all

2006-10-20T16:38:00.000+01:00

What exactly is the point of doing life drawing? I was suddenly reminded of this thorny old question when I caught sight of a sign nailed to a tree as I came home from work on the bus. “Life drawing classes” it read, with a telephone number beneath, which I managed to store in the memory of my mobile phone as we went by.

And there the number has remained for several months as I try to decide whether or not it is something I really want to do. On my foundation course we hardly seemed to be out of the life drawing class, and our rate of progress through supplies of charcoal must have been the cause of major deforestation. We would be next to our easels through long hours of the ritual progression of the typical life drawing day: firstly, quick poses of just a few minutes, or even seconds, to get us warmed up (and, more importantly, the model), then a few longer ones during which you realise you will run out of paper shortly before lunch, and then, in the afternoon, by which time you have stocked up, or reverted to drawing on newspaper, longer poses. By about 4pm you find it perfectly normal to stand around chatting to someone who is completely naked with charcoal dust smeared across your face.

This way of working was an excellent way of building up an impressively thick portfolio of work in a very short length of time, in preparation for interviews for degree courses that seemed to start after about three weeks of term. And during the course of this process, drawing soon became, for some of us at least, the most normal and indispensable thing in the world.

But what of the work we produced? I sent mine up in flames years ago, needing the space in the studio, and realising that the drawings weren’t nearly as good as I liked to remember them. I began to think, perhaps, that the act of creating them was often more important than the end result. Maybe that is what the tutors at my degree college thought: I remember their reaction when a group of us asked if a life model could be made available to us to work from for a couple of days. It was as if we had politely requested the slaughter of their firstborn, although later they agreed.

On holiday in the sun this year, sitting on the banks of a quiet Italian lake up in the mountains, the urge to draw the human form stirred once more. It was the usual scenario: children playing happily, partner snoozing contentedly, leaving me with a few minutes to spare with a sketchbook and pen to hand. Around us sat a fairly plentiful supply of potential subjects, albeit slightly more clothed than the average life model.

There is, I found, an art to this, er, art. Unless you want to ask if your fellow sunbathers are happy to model for you (my Italian certainly isn’t up to that and besides, they may demand payment), there has to be an element of subterfuge to the process of beach work. Drawing does involve looking and scrutiny, which can arouse suspicions even among those perfectly happy to expose their bodies on a beach. The secret, I found, was not to draw anyone sitting too close, avoid eye contact, and work quickly. When people did give me a look of suspicion I would hastily move onto my next subject, while making out I was checking the children were OK. I think I got away with it.

The disadvantages, of course, were that I found myself having to draw people quite far away and, in order to avoid suspicion, those looking in the opposite direction. Thus I ended up with a few too many drawings of distant people’s backs. It was a start though. I’d be glad of suggestions from other artists who have tried this out in time for next summer. In the meantime, I still have the number of that life drawing class in my phone.

Worst suspicions

2006-10-13T17:54:00.000+01:00

Oh dear. I upset Mrs Traylor of Llandudno in a recent entry by mentioning that I ride a bike. She goes to the effort of writing to the Artists & Illustrators office to express her disappointment. "So Hobbs rides a bike," she writes in the November issue. "This confirms my worst suspicions." And that is it. Thank you, Mrs Traylor.
And thank you, too, to Beatrice Hoyland (any relation to John?) of London, who starts her letter "Cyclists are rude and arrogant" before going on at length about what a grim bunch cyclists are. Oh yes, and Pru Harris of Surrey, also keen to get into the act, signs off her letter with "I hate cyclists too!"
Calm down. I'm only going to work.

On the rebound

2006-09-22T11:29:00.000+01:00

So the rejection letter comes through the letterbox and there is that usual rush of disappointment. I scour the single slip of paper several times hoping that I can detect an element of ambiguity, but there is absolutely no doubt. "R in the column above denotes rejected," it says, and there above it is an R. It's a flamboyant R, an R that shows no sign of equivocation. It's bold, in upper case, and couldn't in any way be confused with the A that would have denoted that the work had been accepted. It has been written, I can't help thinking, by someone who has taken some pleasure in it.

This is the kind of rejection that is familiar at one time or another to all artists who enter competitions. I think this to myself quite a lot to cheer myself up. In order to win you have to be ready to lose. Entering art competitions is like falling in love: you can get hurt. There is always the chance that the object of your affections won't see you in quite the same way as you see them. I open my heart by sending in a painting, and get a swift slap around the chops in the shape of an R for rejection in return. (I check the slip one more time to see if I could have made a mistake, but in the intervening hours the R seems a little larger, perhaps a little bolder.)

It's easy to look on the dark side when you're an artist. Every step promises disaster. The work wasn't selected for the exhibition, which was a failure. If it was selected but then not noticed by a talent-spotting gallery, that would be a failure. If that gallery offered me a show and nothing sold, that would be a failure. If the show sold out and received bad reviews, then that, too, would be a kind of failure. It's hard to know where this trail of misery could end, and at the rate I'm going, it's unlikely I am going to find out.

The next job is to collect the rejected painting, which is as discomforting as buying condoms in the chemist for the first time. Anyone you meet when you're picking up a rejected painting is probably there for the same reason and so there's the opportunity for mutual sympathising, but people are quiet and in a hurry, and in no mood to chat.

With anther entry deadline bearing down, I download entry forms for another competition, the Jerwood Drawing Prize, that is more suitable for my kind of work, and enter it on the rebound. It's a squeeze finding time to get things ready for it: I'm framing one of the two drawings I enter on the evening before they need handing in, and crack the glass soon after midnight, and have to frame it all over again. Then I have to cross town on the morning of elder daughter's birthday party to deliver it, which isn't the best timing when there's lots to do, like blowing up balloons and hiding breakable things while 12 eight-year-old girls bear down on the house. If I hadn't already paid the entry fee I may well have persuaded myself I didn't have time to enter at all.

About a week later the phone rings. One of the drawings, of Buxton – another from a series completed sitting in a cafe - has been accepted. I whoop around the house a bit, which draws concerned glances from the children. The feeling of triumph is somehow even better because I had been through the R for rejection episode just the week before. There is a CV to write, a statement to shape and perhaps now I can get around to getting that website sorted out. It's suddenly much easier to look on the bright side.

Mounting tension

2006-09-22T10:56:00.001+01:00

In an effort to stem the rising tide of drawings accumulating around the house, I use January A&I’s handy annual round-up of competitions to see if one or two could catch the eye of some judges somewhere. Experience proves that entering open competitions usually takes the form of a short-term loan rather than any permanent departure, but, hey, they aren’t going to catch the eye of anyone if they sit around the studio, so I download the entry forms and set about choosing which works to enter.

Artists, as we all probably know to our cost, are not always the best judges of their own work, so, as usual, I enroll the help of my partner Naomi, who is more qualified than many a competition judge. We whittle the drawings down to a shortlist by sticking them up around the front room and then try them out in temporary frames and hang them over the fireplace. Things are going well until the daughters then also add their views. Celia, who is five, offers an immediate ego-massaging “cool, Dad” but Esther, eight, suggests a “larger, darker frame”. I can see the day coming when the quality threshold required to get past my family is higher than that needed to get past the actual selection panel.

This in-house selection process is fast in comparison with the framing. Has anyone anywhere ever cut a 45 degree mount without wasting at least four sheets of A1 mountboard? I now have enough products that promise to help me cut the perfect mount to open a National Museum of Angle Cutting. If I manage three good cuts – in itself an undertaking likely to take the best part of an evening - the tension is such when I come to make the final one that it invariably becomes banana-shaped. Just as Mr Coleman made his millions from mustard left on the side of the plate, so too must the mountboard manufacturers from the wasted acres of their essential product. So frustrating and time-wasting does this become it is tempting to make new pieces of work to fit the perfect professionally cut mounts I already have.

But the night before the closing date they are ready, and I’m off on my bike - stopping at traffic lights on the way, grumpier A&I correspondents will be pacified to know – with the drawings strapped to the back in a pillow case. On my way to the delivery point I stop off at the Royal Academy to see this year’s Summer Exhibition. As the world’s largest open submission exhibition there is such a variety of work on view to encourage anyone who is wondering if they should bite the financial bullet and enter. However, to be hung is one thing, to be seen another; many of the works are hung so high on the walls that they are impossible to see as intended.

One work on show, however, is a reminder of how selection judges see what they want rather than what the artist may have hoped. David Hensell was delighted to hear his jesmonite sculpture of a laughing head had been selected, but what he didn’t know until the exhibition opening was that the plinth upon which it stood had become detached, and it was this section that had been judged and put on show. The head itself had been rejected.

I’m glad that the stunted work, which is a little wooden fitting on an outsized stone slab, remained on show, rather than being reunited with its upper half. The episode does, as Hensell admits, say something about the state of the visual arts today, and perhaps something about the judges. But I can’t help thinking that if, say, the reverse side of one of my drawings was selected in the competition I was entering I would be more than slightly miffed. Not least because of all the effort I’ve put into cutting that mount.

What’s the big idea?

2006-09-22T10:56:00.000+01:00

To get your work noticed it helps if your artistic marketing package can offer the pithy one-liner that puts your name immediately in context. Jenny Saville, the painter who paints close-ups of fleshy, contorted female nudes, Georg Baselitz, who paints people upside down, Howard Hodgkin, the painter of colourful sweeps and dots that spill onto their frames. These descriptions hardly do justice to what they’re really doing, and simplify to a ridiculous degree, but it is the kind of tabloid description that they will be partly remembered by.

Where does that leave the rest of us? Have you had your big idea? For some the idea behind what they are trying to do appears to be more important than how well they carry it through. As long as it looks good on paper – by which I mean in writing rather than as a drawing – then success is assured. But what constitutes a good idea? This is the nitty gritty for conceptual artists. I recently heard of one such artist making sculptures out of carpet fluff and another whose work involves viewers taking off their own shoes and putting on others that he kindly provides. We’ll have to wait and see if the names of these artists become household. But at least they have ideas.

So what about the artists who go out and paint and draw what they see? James Hobbs, the artist who draws what he looks at. That’s hardly going to get me anywhere, is it? It’s hardly one for the epitaph. But that is how, at times, it feels as if I work. Inevitably I’m drawn to some subjects more than others, but I often find I do better if I draw what all my instincts tell me not to. What about this then? James Hobbs, the artist who draws what he really doesn’t want to. It’s hardly any better.

Perhaps finding the big idea involves a little analysis of exactly what you are doing with your art. For the lack of anything else to say about their work, some artists resort to the good old staple of describing it as “raising questions”. A sculptor makes work “raising questions concerning hollowness and solidity”. A painter “raises questions about cultural and artistic identity”. I read about an exhibition recently that “raises questions about what constitutes site-specificity” (which sounds like a mealy-mouthed apology for work not looking as good as it should in the place it has been put). Rachel Whiteread’s recent installation Embankment at Tate Modern, which featured thousands of casts of cardboard boxes, encouraged us, a gallery handout told us, “to think about the space they inhabit”.

Do these artists realise that they are continually posing these queries as they make their work, or is it just the PR people and critics that imagine it? Do you, for instance, consider what your work may be asking as you make it? Is there – and this is the point I’m really trying to make here – is there a chance that, unwittingly, my drawings are already raising questions about something or other?

So what’s so good about asking questions all the time? And how about some answers to go along with them? As anyone who has lived with small children will know, there’s nothing quite as tiring as a continual stream of why-thises and why-thats, lovely as it is to see an enquiring mind develop at the breakfast table. And do people want to buy work that asks questions?

So the hunt for the big idea goes on, for me at least. I’m pondering this in a cafe, and with a little time to spare I get out my sketchbook to draw the scene through the window. Flicking back through it I realise that I do an awful lot of drawings as I sit in cafes. Is this my big idea? It certainly raises questions about how much time I spend drinking coffee.