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.