Joseph Skipsey

If you have been reading regularly you will know that one of the exercises we did when working with Charles Reid was to use old photographs of people to hone our figurative work. Having brought that idea home I decided to start a little project whereby I would continue to practise in similar fashion but to use images that had some relationship with the local area. So off to the library to seek out source material. It was easily found, pictures galore of the working people of NorthEast England. As you can imagine mining features strongly in such imagery and I decided to start with something from that industry. I discovered a rather haunting image of Joseph Skipsey, known as the Pitman Poet, and used it for my first effort.


Joseph Skipsey, Pitman Poet - Watercolour on Not paper 14" x 11"