City has often provided the landscape for some intriguing works of art

OVER the years, it’s been my pleasure to have known and talked to a good number of locally-based artists.

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They include Edward Mackenzie, the self-styled ‘assemblagist’ and Glenn Martin James, whose famous depiction of the modern Mock Mayor of Newcastle can be found in the Guildhall, overlooking the Stones.

Then there is Margaret Moxom, whose work features the Chartist Riots in Burslem among a large body of weird and wonderful artistic pieces, whilst Duncan Bourne of Penkhull is a superlative illustrator and cartoonist whose quirky drawings adorn the covers of his music CDs.

I could go on - and this is the point. North Staffordshire can boast of an abundance of artists and creative talents.

For many years, our location has inspired my own artwork, as you are about to hear.

I'd always produced cartoons and illustrations since childhood and was noted for drawing characters from kids’ comics whilst I was at Ellison Street Junior School in Wolstanton in the late 1960s.

I took O and A level art at Wolstanton Grammar School but found fame for the work I did outside of the classroom, producing cartoon books that were circulated among my friends but which were inevitably confiscated by teachers and then shown around their staffroom.

With this kind of background, I applied for a temporary job as an artist and signwriter at Chatterley Whitfield Mining Museum in 1988, managing to make myself sufficiently useful to be given the chance to remain at the museum for the best part of four years.

Here, I honed my skills as a creative all-rounder, producing line drawings of industrial locomotives, colliery buildings, canary resuscitators and snapping tins for the benefit of our visitors.

Of course, artists record passing history just as archivists do - think of Reginald Haggar and his determination to depict the under-threat bottle ovens in the Potteries.