Art Basel Miami Beach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the cafe in Amandola

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

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

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

Views from a cafe no.233

Juan Muñoz at Tate Modern

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 an erudite spontaneity that sprang off the page, drawing on his vast experience, knowledge and sense of humour.

After several years, I met Philip with Roger Bates, the writer of the agony page for lunch in a Soho restaurant. (Roger's obituary for Philip was published in the Independent.) 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, they claimed, 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

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

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

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

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.