The Race

A painting based on drawings made at a factory in Trimdon Grange when I was artist in residence there for the UK Year of the Artist Millenium project. The company sales director is sitting at a minimalist desk focused on the task at hand whilst in the background outside a black horse stands still in the snow resting a hind leg in the air. Behind the horse is a typical County Durham terrace of miners cottages from when Trimdon was a busy mining village. The factory is on a small very non-descript trading estate which was erected after the mine was demolished. The black peat heap once stood where the horse now stands in the white snow. Things seem fixed but everything changes in time. I met Tony and Cherie Blair when they came to see my exhibition at the factory which was just up the road from their constituency house in Trimdon Colliery. This was when things could only get better early in Tony’s first term as Prime Minister. He knew everybody’s name. Brilliant mind. Pity about the Iraq War and its bloody aftermath a few years later and the legacy of PFI contracts. Tony was all smiles in those days which isn’t surprising when you think what he was achieving - an electable Labour Party. Nowadays he looks like he has the world on his shoulders. I’d like to paint his portrait one day!