On the Greenwich sketchcrawl

I joined the London Urban Sketchers sketchcrawl around Greenwich last weekend, along with about 50 other artists. Greenwich is still recovering from the Olympic Games; the equestrian stadium is still standing, so parts of the park are closed, and local traders are reported in the local press as saying their takings were down by as much as 50% over the Olympic period, although things seemed busy last weekend.

It was a great day for a sketchcrawl, and there are more planned for the coming months. Dates will be announced on the London Urban Sketchers website.



Top: Royal Observatory, and above, Astronomy Centre, Greenwich, London

Still at an IKEA store near you...

My A5-sized Kort art card range of London scenes is still available at IKEA stores. You can find out if they're in the store near you by looking here.

Update: they are no longer at an IKEA near you, although we still find the odd one in a frame around the store in Edmonton, north London.

Showing now on the South Bank...

I have a few more drawings and prints than usual on show at Skylark 2 as part of its featured artist rota, to coincide with the Thames Festival this weekend (8-9 September). Framed and unframed, big or small, there's possibly a work for you. The gallery is on the first floor with a great view of the river.

The show is on for a few weeks - it closes on 16 September. Follow me @jameshobbsart.

Ackland Museum of Art fundraiser show

I am one of the 38 international artists who have a drawing on show — and on sale — at the Ackland Museum of Art store, Chapel Hill, South Carolina, as part of an Urban Sketchers education programme fundraiser. More information here.

Seeing the World, One Drawing at a Time continues from Thursday 16 August until Saturday 6 October.

London's Olympic Stadium

The Olympic stadium in Stratford is a few miles away from where we live in north London, close enough, like most of London probably, for us to see its lights beaming into the night air on the evening of the opening ceremony's rehearsal. Tonight is the real thing.

Are Londoners cynical and moaning about the Olympics? Many are, but many of these moaning cynics were among the millions that went to see the Olympic torch as it passed around the country. I know: I was among them...

The finished Shard: Europe's tallest (for now)

James Hobbs, The Shard from Southwark Street

Having posted drawings of London's newest tallest building as a promising stump in 2010 and as an unfinished, unfurling skyscraper in 2011, I thought I'd mark its recent opening with another of the finished thing.

The 310-metre building launched with a light display at the beginning of July 2012. We live a few miles to the north and went up on to the roof of the house to watch the lasers beaming around the city. Perhaps our expectations were, like the Shard, too high: it wasn't so exciting.

Is the building any better? The angles of its sides means it invariably reflects the colour of the sky, which I like, even though this particular summer that colour has, until now, been that of rainclouds.

The Shard is distinctive, certainly, but dwarfing and isolated. And how do the £50 million penthouses, luxury hotel and £24.95 adult ticket prices to the as-yet-unopened viewing tower relate to what's happening in the streets it has risen from? How many people from Southwark are working in its offices? I have the feeling it is probably better to be on the inside looking out, than on the outside looking in.

Urban Sketchers London show opens at Foyles bookshop

James Hobbs, Foyles bookshop

The exhibition The Art of Urban Sketching, which is linked to the book of the same name by USk founder Gabriel Campanario, has now opened at Foyles bookshop, London. It features five monochrome drawings by me straight from the sketchbook, including one that was reproduced in the book. (So not the one on the right here, which I drew on Charing Cross Road last week.)

There are five other London-based artists showing in the exhibition: Nathan Brenville, Barry Jackson, Olha Pryymak, Katherine Tyrrell and Zhenia Vasiliev. You can follow the evolving introductions to each artist at the Urban Sketchers London blog, which is being updated each day of the show.

Foyles, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0EB
Monday 16 July to Sunday 22 July 2012
More about the show here.

Coming soon at Foyles, Charing Cross Road, and much more

Seventh Avenue cafe

I'm going to be exhibiting work, along with other London-based Urban Sketchers, from the hugely successful The Art of Urban Sketching by Gabriel Campanario at Foyles Gallery, on the third floor of the bookshop's Charing Cross Road store, from 16 to 22 July. The book features work by urban artists around the world who contribute to the Urban Sketchers blog. The show is part of the Foyles's Sketching the City season, which continues until 4 August. I've written an article about Urban Sketchers for the summer issue of Artists & Illustrators magazine, out now.

More? My work continues at the Fat Cat cafe, along with that of fellow N16 Pop-up artist Deborah Sandersley, at 119 Stoke Newington Church Street until Tuesday 17 July.

And, of course, my work, is also on sale at IKEA stores worldwide and always on display at Skylark 2, in the Oxo Tower Wharf, on London's South Bank...

Show at Stoke Newington Church Street extended to 17 July

I'm the latest N16 Pop-up artist, along with Deborah Sandersley, to show at the Fat Cat cafe on Stoke Newington Church Street. There's new signage going up on the cafe as I write, which makes it a bit anonymous at present: the cafe is at the junction with Marton Road.

My work is on show there until 10 July 17 July, and it's all for sale. Seen my work and like it? Give me a call on 07891 611919 or email me at info at james-hobbs.co.uk.

There's more about the N16 Pop-up artists here.

The Fat Cat cafe is at 119 Stoke Newington Church Street, London N16 0UD. It's worth a visit. Most of Stoke Newington is worth a visit, frankly. A 73 bus will bring you here.

A day in New York City

Broadway at 35th Street, New York City

I had a week of (journalistic) work at the first Frieze New York art fair recently. At the end of my visit, in order to get a cheaper ticket home, I stayed an extra day in the city before an early flight the next morning. A day in New York could turn out expensive for people good at the retailing thing, what with the shopping opportunities people lead me to believe the city has, making the whole exercise pointless.

But it is free to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, and along the High Line, the raised park along a disused industrial railway line, and around the 9/11 Memorial. Later, I walked 30 blocks from the Guggenheim Museum to meet New York Urban Sketcher Melanie Reim for tea.

The High Line, New York City

I had an idea of going to the cinema in the evening, but I was a bit aimless, and there was plenty going on in the streets, so I drew and drew around Times Square as the sun went down. It's the way New York rears straight up at you, so the sky becomes a very different element of the composition, compared with, for instance, the way it often is in London. There's one hell of a lot of drawing to be done in New York City.

Times Square, New York City

London sketchcrawl: Saturday 26 May

Defoe Road, Stoke Newington

Urban Sketcher Pete Scully is coming to London this weekend, and he has arranged a sketchcrawl around Fleet Street on Saturday 26 May from 10.30am to 4.30pm.

The starting point is at Temple tube station, but there is more information on the Urban Sketchers London website.

All you need is something to draw on, something to draw with, and a few hours. No charge.

The Art of Urban Sketching: London launch on Saturday

The Art of Urban Sketching by Urban Sketchers founder Gabriel Campanario is having its London launch this Saturday 19 May at Cass Art, Islington, from 12.30pm to 5.30pm. Six of the artists with work in the book will be there during the afternoon (including me - I'll be there from 3pm onwards). We'll be taking some sketchbooks, and things to draw with and the book will be on sale.

Everyone welcome! It's free! Who could ask for more? It's close to Angel tube and a host of bus services.

How to find Cass Art, with a printable map. See you there.

Coming soon at Grand Designs Live

I'm showing work at Grand Designs Live at Excel, London, with Skylark Galleries from 5 to 13 May. I'll have framed work on show from Wednesday 9 May until the show closes. Find out more about the fair, and book tickets at a discounted rate, here. I'll be on the Skylark stand (L141 in the Grand Interiors Hall) on Tuesday 8, Wednesday 9 and Sunday 12 May, if you're around. Come and introduce yourself...

Marine Parade, Shaldon, Devon

Early summer, Clissold Park

With the short-lived arrival of summer last week, Clissold Park was soon well filled. I had time while the daughters were off with their friends to sit with the bike and a cup of tea. There were no real shady spots to keep out of the sun: the summer temperatures had arrived before the leaves had come out to offer shade.

Just down Stoke Newington Church Street at the Fat Cat cafe, the first round of the N16 Pop-up work, by Annie Morris and Stewy, is now on display. My turn comes up around 12 June until 10 July. More information here soon. And in an evolving N16 Pop-up website here.

From a Turkish cafe, north London

Stoke Newington has Church Street, with numerous cafes, organic stores, independent shops and all the trendy stuff, and the traffic-laden High Street, part of the old Roman Ermine Street running due north from London Bridge, which morphs culturally through Shoreditch, Dalston, Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill, but with an essentially edgier feel. Church Street and High Street: one would be pretty much unbearable without the other.
The High Street has a good line of Turkish restaurants and cafes, too, one of which I drew this from. Dear old Gilbert and George can occasionally be spotted eating in one of the restaurants down the road. That's definitely one for the I-Spy book of Contemporary Artists.

New: Urban Sketchers London blog

The London Urban Sketchers blog has gone live: Katherine Tyrrell is first up, followed by me, with more London-based artists blogging over the coming days and weeks.
Visit www.urbansketchers-london.blogspot.com.
The blog is the latest regional offshoot of the international Urban Sketchers - you can find the main website here.

James Hobbs images on sale at IKEA

News! I'm very happy to say that five of my images have just gone on sale at IKEA. Wherever you are in the world, there's a chance they're in stock at your nearest branch. But check here before you make a special journey: www.ikea.com.

My original digital prints are still on sale at Skylark 2, The Art Agency and Printroom, London.

If you've never visited my blog before, hello. You can, if you like, follow me on Twitter or even Facebook.

And you can find out more about my work on my main website: www.james-hobbs.co.uk.

Grayson Perry, fashion victor

I wasn't so sure about Grayson Perry when I went to see his show at the British Museum last week, but it was impossible not to warm to him. He communicates very directly. "Don't look too hard for meaning here," he greets us. I wrote it down, and then found more comments by him that resonated for me that I also noted, until I realised I couldn't possibly copy everything he said that I liked and be out of the museum by closing time. I was still resisting the urge to copy quotations by him from books in the gift shop on my way out.

Part of the reason for this is being from the same pre-Goldsmiths art school generation as him. Perry gave the title "Unpopular Culture" to an exhibition of postwar British works he selected from the Arts Council collection in 2008, which rings true. The first show I really went to at the Tate Gallery was "The Hard-Won Image" in 1984, which I remember as consisting of works by Kitaj and Auerbach and others that suggested slow grind in a variety of shades of brown. Art was much less fashionable then.

In fact, Perry's British Museum show ("The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman", extended to 26 February 2012) suggests his works come from much further back. They are interspersed with works from the museum's collection, as a tribute to the craftsmen and women who have made them, and often it is difficult to know which are his and which are 400 years old and from Ethiopia, or wherever. By the end I'd lost all faith in my judgement in knowing which were which. If that isn't a sign of his work being unfashionable I don't know what is. But to make works that chime so well with those from the British Museum? How much better could it get than that?

The Art of Urban Sketching: a quick flick through

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

The Art of Urban Sketching

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

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

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

N16 Pop-up: open now

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

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

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

And follow their tweets at @n16popup.

Built in Miami

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

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



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

On sale this Christmas...

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

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

Still showing at the Art Agency, Esher

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

The Art Agency
93 High Street
Esher
Surrey
KT10 9QA

Right, Regent Street, digital print, £120 unframed

My stolen bike

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

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

Frame number JB11640GJD037

* Let's face it, no.

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

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

Need more information? Visit www.affordableartfair.com.

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

St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, London

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

The Art Agency gallery launches 11 October

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.