Six years ago, Tyneside artist Peter Burns held a very popular exhibition here of drawings and paintings depicting scenes from the river’s shipyards where he spent his working life as a plater.
We are delighted to welcome him back with ‘Shipyard Faces and Intriguing Spaces – a drawing and painting retrospective’, which includes a broad selection from over the past 50 years.
These include characters and scenes inspired by his many years working across shipyards on the Tyne, while others capture ‘intriguing spaces’ he has come across at home and abroad, including urban and rural landmarks.
One of his favourite shipyard paintings is of Tommy and his cat Tiger.
Tommy was a general labourer at Swan Hunter’s Wallsend yard. His duties included operating the lifts that some of the larger vessels like tankers needed to move men and equipment between the decks. This portrait shows him inside his office (Billet) under the crane track with his own drawings on display. Peter often popped in to see him and would ‘chat about this and that’ over a cup of tea. Over the years he got to know Tommy quite well. Tommy ‘adopted’ Tiger, one of the yard cats that kept the rats bay, looking after him very well.
One of Tommy’s other duties was clearing debris from the berths which would always have water in them. A slight man at 5’1” his choice of footwear for the task was waders. Like all yard workers, he had a nickname and his was ‘The Duke of Wellington’.
Another of his favourites depicts St Andrew’s Church in Lamesley, in the vale of Ravensworth, south-west of Gateshead.
The vilIage still preserves much of its old-world beauty, surrounded by farms with cultivated fields. The church is the village’s most prominent landmark, built in 1759 on what was the ruin of an earlier medieval chapel. The view in the painting was from 1980, showing the village’s signpost back then. Today, the church remains a popular wedding venue.
Peter, who now lives in Gateshead, was commissioned by British Shipbuilders in 1978 to undertake an 18-month secondment capturing shipyard people and working scenes. These resulted in a major exhibition at the University of Northumbria. His work has also been exhibited in other galleries on Tyneside and in London.
Dave Young, who has curated the exhibition said: “While the exhibition will include a broad selection of Peter’s artwork, I know that visitors to the Old Low Light will be very pleased to see drawings and paintings depicting characters and scenes from the shipyards, which were so prominent in our local area.
“Although Peter has become known as the ‘shipyard painter’, he was very keen to also display other drawings and paintings from urban and rural scenes that have inspired him over the years.”
The exhibition will include some originals and prints for sale.