The Art Agency gallery launches 11 October

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first 63,000 paintings from the nation's public collections have just gone online on the BBC Your Paintings website (see update below). 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.

Update: it has now been captioned correctly and BBC Your Paintings has become Art UK. Still no news of A Smitt though.

From sea to sea

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

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...

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?

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

From Waterloo Bridge

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

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.