Art is a process, not a product.

 

Art is a process, not a product.

I started this painting in April 2023 – my first session got rained off.  While oil paint is waterproof, canvas is not, and oil paint does not want to behave on a wet canvas.  My second session was more productive, but it was still nowhere near to being resolved.  I worked on it periodically in the studio over the next year, going back for photographs and sketches for more information and ideas then eventually ran out of steam.  I turned it to the wall, knowing that someday I’ll come back to it.  

Some paintings just seem to manifest into existence; a sudden idea or inspiration, you attack a canvas and within a few hours or days, you have a painting you are happy with and no idea how it happened.  Other paintings you fight with for what seems like eternity.  I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said, and I paraphrase,

“You put the first mark down then it’s just a continuous problem-solving exercise until the last mark.”

A constant battle where you win an inch here and lose a mile there.  The canvas begins to resemble a scarred battlefield of brush marks, scratches and impasto lumps; lines drawn and redrawn. 

You many never get to a point where you’re totally satisfied, perhaps at best where you reach an uneasy amnesty and decide it’s time to leave it.  Or you decide you have nothing to lose and just start throwing paint at it, ignoring all your best instincts and any formal ideas about how painting should be done.  

Suddenly you find the exciting possibilities of being beyond your comfort zone, and I’m now curious to see how this one ends up.  What you must never do is get too precious – never be scared to ruin a good painting.  

These are the paintings we learn from.  

A Pigeon's Tail

I put a net over my balcony to stop the pigeons getting in.  They were a constant threat – they would shit all over the place and generally make a mess of my one wee bit of outdoor space and sanctuary of calm in my 15^th floor flat in a tower block in Newcastle; my home back in the late 90s.  The problem now being the net was a couple of years old and a few holes had developed so pigeons could occasionally find their way in.  Whenever I left my flat to go away for any length of time – back then I was regularly off touring with a street theatre company – the last thing I did before leaving was secure the net and check the balcony was pigeon free.

I was all packed up and ready to leave.  Passport, bank card, sketchbook & pencil case, toilet bag, clothes; everything needed for a week of stilt walking in a warm European country.  Organised and on time, just one final balcony check and there are two pigeons.  I opened the balcony door.  One pigeon nimbly dived through a tiny hole in the net and the other shot straight between my legs, into my living room.  I was no longer organised and on time; I now needed to catch a pigeon.

I was running, diving, waving, grabbing at a flapping, panicking pigeon.  My uninvited guest was on the back of the couch, on the sideboard, under the table, on the bookshelf, behind the chair, and all the time I’m at least one step behind.  I was working up a sweat and felt like I could be in some manic children’s cartoon, some chaotic slapstick comedy of errors, but the athletic little pigeon showed no signs of fatigue.

Eventually I got a lucky break.  It perched on the top of the door into the hall which was slightly ajar, with its tail between the door and door frame.  If I could quickly close the door, I’d trap it by the tail and get a hold of it.  I dashed at the door and closed it. 

Ha! Got you!  I looked up in disbelief as the pigeon flew across the room, now standing on my record player.  I was certain I had it.  I opened the door and a load of feathers fluttered down in front of me.  Shit!  I had just inadvertently plucked the poor bugger’s tail.  I didn’t feel particularly good about this development, however, it had curtailed the pigeon’s acrobatics enough that I managed to grab it.

I studied the terrified bird in my hand.  I could feel its wee heart going eighteen to the dozen and was rather concerned that it appeared to have only one remaining tail feather.  Can a pigeon even fly with only one tail feather?  What do I do with this poor thing?  I was now running late and had to be pragmatic.  I surmised that if it couldn’t fly, it was a goner; there were plenty local feral cats, crows and children who would see it off.  Sorry pigeon, but you’re just going to have to take your chances.  I launched it off the balcony and to my horror, it tumbled straight toward the ground some 15 stories below.

Down and down in a seemingly endless loop of turning, twisting ruffled feathers, then at the very last moment, what looked like just inches from the ground, spread its wings and took flight, soared high across the road with graceful aplomb, up, up, away, and disappearing over distant rooftops.  I took a moment to breathe a sigh of relief, threw my rucksack over my back, locked my flat and headed out.  That was one lucky pigeon.

A few weeks later, I was relating this story to a friend who was giving me a lift back to my flat.  She found it quite hilarious.  I told her if she ever spots a pigeon in the West End of Newcastle with only one tail feather, she will know how it came to be.  I got up to my flat and heard a familiar cooing from the balcony and there it was, a very brave wee pigeon with its one tail feather.  

I grabbed it, gave it my sternest look and told it in no uncertain terms should I ever see it on my balcony again, the last tail feather would be coming out, although secretly I was happy it had survived its ordeal.  I headed straight down to Wilko’s and bought a new net.

A Dark Night In Ushaw Moor

 

Here’s a story for you.  

On a Saturday morning back in February of 2024, my neighbour, Billy, told me he had seen someone mooching about the back lane, trying garage doors and cars, so I checked my car to find it had been unlocked and my guitar amp and bag of pedals with assorted gubbins had been removed from the boot.

I usually parked the car with the boot right up against the garage where it couldn’t be opened but had left it in a different spot that night, never thinking about the stuff stashed inside.  

I reported it to the police and started seeing all these Facebook posts of other stories of similar things happening all over the village that night, along with camera footage.  They were using some kind of electronic relay device which can create a link between your car and key fob if the two are close enough which can unlock your car as easily as with the key.

That Saturday night, there had been a load of police sirens late on, about midnight, and Sunday morning there was a police car stationed outside the pizza shop.  The shopfront was now heavily decorated with police tape and the glass door smashed in.   The scene was still the same by Monday morning. 

It turned out there was a break-in, a stabbing and a hostage situation, the perpetrators arrested and some poor guy in hospital.  Once forensics had been in, my neighbour down the road got the job of clearing the flat - house clearing being one of his many sidelines, and low and behold, among the blood splatters and everything else, he finds my Marshall amplifier and a big bag of guitar pedals stashed behind a couch, which are now in my possession.  

It would be reasonable to question the integrity of a police forensic investigation not finding them first, but I was more than happy with the outcome.  The only thing that was missing was a battered old M&Ms tin, probably because it had some loose change in it, about 3 quid at the most. 

They likely had little idea they were in possession of around £1600 worth of gear and even less idea how to sell it.  A pair of absolute idiots on an all-night thieving rampage in their own village, taking all the stolen gear back to their own flat, then get wasted out of their nappers the next night and coerce someone back to their flat, tie up and torture the poor guy for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

They are now well on their way to lengthy jail time – not their first offences by far as it had transpired, and I shall never leave anything in my car again.  Life lessons; ignore them at your peril.

Banana

When she saw me, the wee girl ran over with her drawing book and crayons.  She lived next door to a friend I was visiting and knew I would always be up for drawing pictures with her.

“Can we draw a picture?”  She asked with big, imploring eyes.

“Of course we can.”    We sat down on the warm grass of the front garden where she carefully opened her new box of Crayola crayons.  Their bright waxy colour glowed in the sun and a fresh, white page of her drawing book was turned.

“What shall we draw?” I asked.

“A man,” she answered with no hesitation. “You draw him, and then we’ll colour him in.”

I picked up a black crayon and lightly drew the outlines. 

“I’ll give him a jumper, trousers, boots and he can have a big hat on his head,” I suggested.

Once the outlines were drawn, I asked, “Why don’t we start with his jumper – what colour do you reckon?”

She picked up a red crayon and said, “Tomato.”   Then with absolute concentration, she carefully coloured the jumper in the finest tomato.

After complimenting her colouring prowess I suggested the boots might be next.  

Upon careful consideration of the colours available, she picked up the brown crayon and declared, “Chocolate!”

So, chocolate colour boots it was.  Once finished she then announced that the trousers would have to be sky.  This clearly meant blue, like jeans, and before long, our man’s blue trousers were complete.

By this time, I was totally invested in her inventive use of colour names, and to prove I was with the programme, I picked up the yellow crayon and confidently suggested, “maybe his hat could be banana?”

She gave me a rather perplexed look.  “That’s not banana, that’s yellow.”

A Beautiful Hour In Sibiu

A Beautiful Hour In Sibiu

In 1998 I was on a trip to Romania as a street performer with Neighbourhood Watch Stilts International and as always, I had some drawing and painting materials to make the most of any spare moments captured from the chaos of travelling street theatre. We were in the beautiful city of Sibiu in Transylvania for four or five days, at a time when food there was sparse and alcohol was ridiculously cheap; Romania was still an extremely poor country nine years after their revolution put a violent stop to the horrific regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu's communist party. Away from the post-war cold, brutalist housing blocks remained the beautiful old centre of the city with its once grand buildings and ornate churches; the area we were lucky to be staying and performing in.

I managed to find an hour for myself on a warm sunny evening and sat with my paints and drawing pad in a doorway opposite The Lutheran Cathedral of Saint Mary - one of Romania's famous gothic style churches.  There was heavenly choral singing coming from inside the church and the peace was only broken by a very pretty and rather flustered young lady on a bicycle rattling towards me. She dismounted and breathlessly asked if I was going to be there for the next hour, and would I watch her bicycle as she was late for choir practice and of course, I said yes as she ran across the road.

I got back to my painting and a while later a young boy carrying a huge carrier bag of clothes walked up to me. His English was excellent and I soon learned he was only eleven years old. He wanted to know what I was doing so I showed him what I was painting and he asked if he could sit and watch.  I gave him a sheet of my paper and told him to draw a picture using my pencils; he happily set to it, saying it would make a good present for his mother.  He sat down and we got to talking.  

Even though he grew up in poverty, and poverty in Romania at that time was real, brutal and everywhere, he had such a happy outlook on life and a wisdom beyond his years.  I learned he went to school Monday to Friday, on evenings he helped his mother do other people's laundry, hence the bag of washing he had with him, and on weekends he laboured on building sites with his grandfather and uncles. He never knew his own father who died during the revolution.  To me, his life story was tragic; to him it was just matter of fact. He was most excited about the World Cup which was on at the time in France, and Romania and Scotland were both in.  He said with great confidence, "Romania are going to win."  

"No chance," I said, "Scotland will win."  He was adamant, however, that Romania were certain to win and he happily explained his logic.  "You know how Brazil are the best football team?  Because they're really poor. Well Romania is even poorer than Brazil."

I had to admit, I had no come-back for that one and felt rather humbled. He'd finished his drawing, said he'd best get home and off he went, laundry in one hand, drawing in the other. I got back to my painting.  

Soon the etherial choir singing stopped and the pretty girl came back for her bicycle. She too was curious about my painting which she politely admired and we got talking for a bit.  She found it exciting that I was one of the stilt walkers in the huge, brightly coloured bird costumes which had not gone unnoticed in the town centre.  She wrote her name and address on a piece of paper and asked me to send her a postcard from my next location on my travels, which, of course, I did.  And that was my beautiful hour in Sibiu.

A good lesson.

When I was a wee boy, probably around eight years old, I asked my dad to help me with my homework.  I was to draw a picture of a cow and I wasn't very good at drawing cows (I suppose we must've been doing a project on farming or dairy produce.)  My dad took the pencil and paper and quickly drew an outline of a cow with the idea that I should finish it off.  I noticed right away the cow was missing an udder, so with great enthusiasm, I quickly scribbled in an eight year old boy's idea of what a cow's udder looked like.  My dad smiled, shook his head,
    "Whit's that? A bunch o' bananas?  That's no whit it looks like."

We needed a picture of a cow.  I found one in a nursery rhyme book - it was jumping over the moon.  My dad took a fresh sheet of paper and the pencil and began the drawing lesson.  He showed me how to look at the outline of a shape, told me about proportions, how to compare the length of the leg to the width of the body, the angle of the neck to the back,  how to hold the pencil very lightly and draw over and over again till I got the lines right, and not to be afraid of making a mistake.  He taught me that most important lesson of all - that drawing was all about looking, looking harder than you ever looked before.  The result was, for the first ever, I'd drawn something that looked like the thing I was drawing; for an eight year old, that was terribly exciting.  It was like I'd been given a key that unlocked one of the great mysteries of life.

That was a very important lesson for me, not only because all these years later, I still remember it, but because it was the start of a journey.  That drawing lesson made me best in my class at art, and that felt good; I'd not been best at anything before.  That in turn, led to me being the best in my year at art when I went to secondary school, where I got into the habit carrying a sketch book everywhere, and every morning on the school bus, other pupils wanted to see what I'd drawn, and my ego didn't mind the attention.   By the time I was seventeen and getting ready to leave school to go to art school, I was selling drawings and paintings of local views and saved up a tidy college fund.  Art school opened up a whole new world of possibilities which in turn led me to many new experiences and adventures.

My dad died last week after a period of illness and I came to realise that when you lose your dad (or anyone close) they leave stuff behind.  You know, the usual things - and I'm being general here - signet ring, wrist watch, fishing rods, books, tools and in my case, some snazzy shirts and a dazzling array of geraniums.  All lovely and sentimental stuff to hang onto, but these are not so important.  The things that matter are not the material things, but the memories of the times you shared, and the inspiration they've given you to look at the world in your own unique way;  that's the real inheritance which you will carry with you always.  I'm very grateful for that.

In memory of James Prott McGinn.  1937 - 2013

My Dad

My dad is ill.  Fit, strong and healthy all his days then in the weeks leading up to his 76th birthday, he lands himself in hospital with pneumonia, suspected pulmonary fibrosis and possibly cancer.  (Maybe the 35 years in a coal mine are catching up) They can’t confirm the latter two until the pneumonia is dealt with but something is showing up on these CT scans, making it a worrying time for us all.  He’s now home by his fireside on a cocktail of steroids and antibiotics, trying to build his strength back up; he’s lost a frightening amount of weight.

Having healthy parents lasting happily into their seventies is a blessing not everyone gets to enjoy and one I am ever more grateful for.  No matter how you consider the possibilities, nothing prepares you for the sudden realisation that they are not invincible;  that they, and in fact, all of us are fragile and only here for a fleeting time in the grand scale of things.  We shall all one day return to the dust from whence we came to be scattered and forgotten.

Back in 1989 when my grandfather (on my father’s side) was falling into that slow, insidious failing health of old age, both mentally and physically, I remember going with my dad to visit him in hospital.  We walked into the ward and there on the first bed on the right hand side of a big old Victorian room, he was lying perfectly still, mouth open, face sunken and eyes half shut and for one horrible instant we both thought we were looking at a corpse.  What has stuck with me all those years wasn’t how my papa was but that look on my dad’s face, a frozen moment, quickly dispelled when my papa woke up.  I’ll never forget that, and I was reminded of it when I went up to Scotland last week to see my dad in hospital.  My once fit-as-a-butcher’s-dog dad shuffled through, skeletal, breathless and vulnerable and at once I knew what that look on his face all these years ago truly meant; when someone close to you is facing their own mortality, it’s also your own mortality that stares back at you.

He’s always been a good dad, and at the age of seventy six, he can still teach this forty five year old boy a valuable lesson or two.