Thursday 29 January 2015

Britain is a country where revellers in a town called Lerwick at today's Up-Helly-Aa Festival in Scotland's Shetland Islands, remember an old Jarl called Willie 'Feejur' Tait

Willie, who died earlier this month, will not be present at what would have been his 86th 'Up-Helly-Aa' today. He was recorded as being a boy 'fiddle box carrier' for a 'guizer squad' in the celebration held in 1928. He first 'went out' when he was eight years old, whereas today it is twelve and was probably born just after the end of the First World War in 1919 and passed away at the age of ninety-five.

What you possibly didn't know about Willie, that he :

 * had grandparents who might have remembered when they were very young in the 1870's, the old Yuletide and New Year festivities in Lerwick involving burning tar barrels with rival groups of tar barrelers clashing in the middle of the narrow streets and special constables appointed by the Town Council every Christmas to control the revellers, with only limited success.
and
* who then saw the new style celebrations introduced by a group of young men in the town with intellectual interests, who improvised the name 'Up-Helly-Aa', postponed the celebrations until the end of January, introduced a torchlight procession and a far more elaborate element of disguise or 'guizing' into their new festival.

* had parents who, as Master James 'Jamie' Tait and Miss Mary Fraser when they were young in the 1890s, saw the new 'galley' or Viking long ship introduced and in 1906 the new 'Guizer Jarl' or Chief Guizer arrive on the scene.

and
* who would have also recognised this squad of guizers dressed as sailors in 1912 and, when Willie was a small boy, just after the First World War, the first squad of Vikings, the 'Guizer Jarl's Squad', added to the proceedings.

* seen his first and 'the' first Up-Helly-Aa after the First World War, when he was five years old in 1924 and took part as a 'fiddle box carrier' when he was nine in 1928 and in 1932 when he was thirteen, saw it almost cancelled due to the dire effects of the Economic Depression on the town and between the age of twenty and thirty, witnessed its suspension until 1949, due to the Second World War, in which he fought in the Army as a private in the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders in Normandy on D-Day 1944, where he was wounded and returned to Britain.


* took part in the celebration, filmed by Pathe News in 1959, with Jack Scott as 'King Magnus Barelegs' : http://ow.ly/HTy2L and in 1960 at the age of forty-one, was chosen as 'Guizer Jarl' himself as the character, 'Olaf the Saint', presided over 38 squads
with the galley name,'Visund' and led the galley song :http://ow.ly/HTzBD

* wore a costume adhering to the first Viking Jarl's, with : 'a silver helmet, with raven’s wings rising high on either side, a corselet with sleeves of silver mail was worn over a jerkin, fastened round the neck and hung loosely from the shoulders. On the legs were thigh length black stockings and on the feet were rawhide sandals fastened with tan leather thongs which criss-crossed over the instep and all the way up the thighs and a large silver-headed battle axe and dagger hung from his belt', but carried a plain wooden shield, which deviated from the first Jarls which was : 'a round silver shield on which was engraved a raven'.

* could be seen, before he retired, operating a barber's shop in Lerwick on the southern part of  Commercial Street opposite Faerdie Maet, in what is now the southernmost part of the Shetland Times Bookshop and on occasion served Billy Thomason in chair.

* contributed to Up-Helly-Aa by making torches for the procession and was known as 'Feejur' and referred to as 'Indestructable' and in in January 2014, was photographed by Dave Donaldson in Gilbert Bain Hospital getting his.hands on the coveted shield and axe of Guizer Jarl, Ivor Cluness.

* was paid tribute this week at the meeting of guizers captured by Kevin Osborn, receiving their instructions for Tuesday's 'Up-Helly-Aa' from this year's Jarl, Neil 'Penguin' Robertson, when he said that Willie had been "such a stalwart guizer" who had attended the festival for an amazing eighty-five years..


P.S.
Word of Willie goes round social media :

Sunday 25 January 2015

Britain is a country where a town called Lerwick and its Festival called Up-Helly-Aa in Scotland's Shetland Islands, bid "Farewell" to an old Jarl called Willie 'Feejur' Tait



Willie, who died earlier this month, will not be present at what would have been his 86th 'Up-Helly-Aa' next Tuesday. He was a recorded as being a boy 'fiddle box carrier' for a 'guizer squad' in the celebration held in 1928. He first 'went out' when he was eight years old, whereas today it is twelve and was therefore probably born in 1919, just after the end of the First World War, which means he was ninety-five years old when he passed away.

What you possibly didn't know about Willie, that he :

 * had grandparents who might have remembered when they were very young in the 1870's, the old Yuletide and New Year festivities in Lerwick involving burning tar barrels with rival groups of tar barrelers clashing in the middle of the narrow streets and special constables appointed by the Town Council every Christmas to control the revellers, with only limited success.
and

* who then saw the new style celebrations introduced by a group of young men in the town with intellectual interests, who improvised the name 'Up-Helly-Aa', postponed the celebrations until the end of January, introduced a torchlight procession and a far more elaborate element of disguise or 'guizing' into their new festival.

* had parents who, as Master James 'Jamie' Tait and Miss Mary Fraser when they were young in the 1890s, saw the new 'galley' or Viking long ship introduced and in 1906 the new 'Guizer Jarl' or Chief Guizer arrive on the scene.

and

* who would have also recognised this squad of guizers dressed as sailors in 1912 and, when Willie was a small boy, just after the First World War, the first squad of Vikings, the 'Guizer Jarl's Squad', added to the proceedings.

* would have his first and 'the' first Up-Helly-Aa after the First World War, when he was five years old in 1924 and took part as a 'fiddle box carrier' when he was nine in 1928 and in 1932 when he was fourteen, saw it almost cancelled due to the dire effects of the Economic Depression on the town and between the age of twenty and thirty witnessed its suspension until 1949, due to the Second World War, in which he served in the Army on D-Day in Normandy in the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders in 1944, where he was injured and returned to Britain.


* took part in the celebration, filmed by Pathe News in 1959, with Jack Scott as 'King Magnus Barelegs' : http://ow.ly/HTy2L and in 1960 at the age of forty-one, was chosen as 'Guizer Jarl' himself as the character, 'Olaf the Saint', presided over 38 squads
with the galley name,'Visund' and led the galley song :http://ow.ly/HTzBD

* wore a costume adhering to the first Viking Jarl's, with : 'a silver helmet, with raven’s wings rising high on either side, a corselet with sleeves of silver mail was worn over a jerkin, fastened round the neck and hung loosely from the shoulders. On the legs were thigh length black stockings and on the feet were rawhide sandals fastened with tan leather thongs which criss-crossed over the instep and all the way up the thighs and a large silver-headed battle axe and dagger hung from his belt', but carried a plain wooden shield, which deviated from the first Jarls which was : 'a round silver shield on which was engraved a raven'.

* could be seen, before he retired, operating a barber's shop in Lerwick on the southern part of  Commercial Street opposite Faerdie Maet, in what is now the southernmost part of the Shetland Times Bookshop and on occasion served Billy Thomason in chair.

* contributed to Up-Helly-Aa by making torches for the procession and was known as 'Feejur' and referred to as 'Indestructable' and in in January 2014, was photographed by Dave Donaldson in Gilbert Bain Hospital getting his.hands on the coveted shield and axe of Guizer Jarl, Ivor Cluness.

* was paid tribute this week at the meeting of guizers captured by Kevin Osborn, receiving their instructions for Tuesday's 'Up-Helly-Aa' from this year's Jarl, Neil 'Penguin' Robertson, when he said that Willie had been "such a stalwart guizer" who had attended the festival for an amazing eighty-five years..


P.S.
Word of Willie goes round social media :


Thursday 22 January 2015

Britain is no longer a country for and says "Farewell" to an old TV presenter and Godfather of Model Railway builders called Bob Symes

Bob, who has died at the age of ninety and brightened our tv screens in the 1970s and 80s with his bewhiskered, country-gentlemanly presence and infectious enthusiasm on 'Model World' and 'Tomorrow's World', was in fact the son of an Austrian aristocrat, who had spent his youth on the family country estates of Schutzmanndorff' and its palatial Viennese residence in pre-Second World War Vienna.

What you possibly didn't know about Bob, that he :

* was born Robert Alexander Schutzmann, in 1924 in Vienna, the son of his writer mother and Austrian lawyer father and ardent Zionist, Herbert, Baron Schutzmann von Schutzmanndorff, educated at the Real Gymnasium and recalled : "I've been lucky enough to bump into models all of my life right back to my earliest days in Austria. We occupied a section of what was once the family palace on the Vienna Ring on the Great Boulevard of Vienna. A tram went past our house on its way to the spa suburb of Baden. You could get a meal on board complete with white table cloth and fine china and even at the early age of three, I like it so much that my Grandfather gave me a model of the tram."

* developed his interest in railways on the family estate, set in forest outside Vienna and helped to maintain the private line which hauled timber around it and  'grew up in a family which had its bedding from its own land and I well remember the goose down duvet which I had as a child – very warm but heavy'

* was thirteen years old when his Father died in 1937 and when Hitler engineered the Nazi takeover of Austria the following year http://ow.ly/HKzNr, facing persecution escaped to Palestine with his mother and sister by way of Trieste and after the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, desperate to fight the Nazis, contacted a former British diplomat based in Vienna who helped him gain a commission in the Royal Navy in 1942.

 * served as a lieutenant, without a naval beard, in torpedo boats out of Alexandria and took part in the naval landings which led to the liberation of Crete and less seriously recalled that, on board, out of the chalk sticks used to record the ship's course on a blackboard "one of our ratings used the chalk to make tiny chalk models (of ships) out of them. The trouble was these models never survived because the chalk was used again and the model was literally written off."

* demobbed after the War, visited the BBC to find 'Monica Chapman' who had produced the music request programme, 'Forces Prom', wanting to thank her personally for the choices he had submitted and married her after a six week courtship at the age of twenty-three in 1947, then took British nationality adopting one of her family names, 'Symes'.

* after several years in the Merchant Navy, utilised his knowledge of German, French and Arabic when he joined the BBC's Overseas Service in 1953 and saw Monica's career prosper, who by 1956 was a producer working with Roy Plumley on BBC Radio's 'Desert Island Discs' and was photographed with him and island castaway, Dame Margot Fonteyn in 1965.

* at the age of thirty-two in 1956, had his London-based work interrupted by a two year stint as a 'Broadcasting Officer' in the Eastern Region Colonial Office in Nigeria, to install radio transmitters in Lagos and Enugu, before resuming his career with the BBC where he also became a radio producer of 'Desert Island Discs' before moving to television in his forties in the 1970s and later reflected : "When I went into television I started again as an assistant. It was called a 'production assistant'. Then it was an 'assistant producer'. You did research. You rang up and fixed filming sessions. You filmed it. You wrote the script and you edited it and submitted it to the programme editor who put it in a programme like 'Tomorrow's World' and an awful of times I'm not in it, but did the work."

* in 1967, with the advent of colour tv, took advantage of an empty black and white transmission studio, to make a model railway layout and filmed the models in action to the tune of 'Wheels' and in 2012 recalled : "The controller of BBC2 came in and saw this film being made and said : "What is this ?" And I said "It's a railway" and he said : "When that's finished Boyo, let me have a look at it" and I did and he said "We'll use it as a filler film." And that gave me my bona fide, as it were : 'A', I could make films and 'B', I loved railways. And from then on, Rake's progress has been glorious." http://ow.ly/HKrw6 (half-way through clip).

* at the age of fifty, in the February and October 1974 Parliamentary elections, stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate for Mid Sussex with 30% of the vote and in the 1970s was also involved with the unsuccessful 'Waverley Route Preservation Project - the Border Union Railway', focussed on reopening, for enthusiasts and the public, the abandoned railway track which ran south from Edinburgh through Midlothian and the Scottish Borders to Carlisle and worked on the possibility of acquiring locomotives for the line.

* had more success when he started to present the 10 programme series, 'Model World' for BBC TV in 1975, dealing in turn with : how to build planes from balsa wood with radio controls explained and demonstrated ; yachts and power boats; model soldiers to model battlefields and finally three episodes devoted to his beloved railways, through initial plans of building the track, stock and scenery and on to running trains with movements shown on the 00 Gauge model of Horsted Keynes and then on Gauge One with live steam, battery-powered and diesel-electric locomotives : http://ow.ly/HKJ14

* in 1982 presented a 'Tuesday Documentary' for the BBC, 'The Danube Power Game' and returned to the river whose banks he had stood on as a boy in Vienna, fifty years before, to uncover the plan to tame its flow from Germany to Russia, which had the potential to make it the centre of a new power struggle which could threaten the security of  Western Europe : http://ow.ly/HKNjD

* in 1984 presented 'Ad Hoc Adventures' on BBC Radio 4 on which he, as a 'steam enthusiast and amateur cook, deserts his kitchen and sallies forth in search of leisure occupations suitable for a gentleman of increasing age and girth' and broadcast from the series : 'The Call of the Wild' and 'Mountains are easier to scale if a trek pony does the leg work.'

* became a familiar face to tv audiences of the 1980s through his appearance on 'Tomorrow's World' http://ow.ly/HIMNe  in which he showcased smaller inventions in dramatised vignettes such 'Bob Goes Golfing' and sometimes presented challenges for the film director when a close-up was required of his hands, which had parts of some fingers missing, as a result of accidents with his own invention-related exploits in the workshop.

* at the age of sixty-two, made six programmes of 'Model Magic' for Ulster TV and Channel 4 in 1986 : http://ow.ly/HKJNO and co-presented with Mary-Jean Hasler, the series, 'Making Tracks' in the 1993 -95, for the BBC dedicated to little-known lines and networks worldwide which specialised in steam operations with episodes filled with train sounds rather than background music : http://ow.ly/HKUgc 

* himself the inventor of toilet ventilator, was also instrumental in setting up and chairing the 'Institute of Patentees and Inventors' for inventors and patent attorneys to provide advice on issues relating to invention and innovation, ranging from 'intellectual property rights' and 'originality searching' to 'manufacturing and pricing practices', 'presentation techniques' and 'funding.'

* in 1992 launched 'National Invent-A-Thing Week', said the image of the 'mad professor' had to be discouraged and in 1994, wrote and published jointly with Robin Bootle 'EUREKA ! Book of Inventing'

* at the age of seventy-three in 1999, narrated, with love and unabated enthusiasm, 'Model Building International' based on 'The Pendon Museum' http://ow.ly/HHAE8 in Long Wittenham, Oxfordshire and considered by him to contain the best scale model railway in the world, centred on the Great Western Railway of the 1920s and a typical village in the Vale of White Horse.

* in 2012 took the trouble to write, with characteristic charm and good manners to the Manufacturers of a baavet or 'matress topper' he had bought :

'Dear Lesley and Roger,
As a broadcaster on Tomorrows World for many years I came across many unusual inventions and I am sure that yours would have merited viewing. I grew up in a family which had its bedding from its own land and I well remember the goose down plumau which I had as a child – very warm but heavy. Therefore I was delighted to receive your Baavet which is equally warm but so much lighter. Having reached the grand old age of 86 I am very conscious of the cold. Since receiving the Baavet it is the first time that I have slipped into bed and not felt chilly for more than a minute and then neither too hot nor too cold all through the night. The Baavet also solves a well know marital problem – ‘the cold spot between husband and wife’! The Baavet also works very well as a mattress topper – so soft and comfortable to lie on. One might have expected a degree of country smell from this natural product  – i.e. sheep wool – but there was no trace of farmyard. My congratulations on your product and also on the presentation -the small bag of lavender tucked into the Baavet was delightful. I must say that as myself, Bob Symes, I would recommend anyone to change over to this so aptly named Baavet.
PS. Archie the cat loves it too !'

 * in 2012, at the age of eighty-eight, was still running his 'Dene Green Railway', set in the grounds of his beautiful house, nestled in a Surrey forest, with rides on open days on three locos on his 10 1/4 inch gauge running for about 1/4 of a mile in a U shape from the 'Top Sheds' to the 'Lower Station', with funds donated to 'Children in Need' and the facility of a smaller gauge layout where visitors could bring their own trains and enjoy shunting up and down the tracks all day long : http://ow.ly/HIMnc This photo of Bob : courtesy of Gullwing Photography.http://gullwingphotography.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/bob-symes-steamdays.html

 * in 2012 undertook a house move from Surrey to Mid Wales, completed in 6 days, with 6 men and a convoy of 6 trucks and with his wife, set about plans to rebuild his garden railway ,with a view to opening, once again, to the public and on his ninetieth birthday in May 2014, drove his newest loco and prize possession, the Great Western, Lady Melrose'.


* in Surrey, until its closure in 2014, was patron of 'Hospital Radio Lion' based at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford and served as President of the Guildford-based model railway circle, 'Astolat MRC' and once extolled the virtues of model making when he said : "We always wanted to be bosses in our own lives, where we give orders and what better than a model railway ? You switch it on and it comes. You switch it off and it stops. It goes where we put the tracks. In fact, we are total masters and sometimes this hobby takes hold of you like me and you can even use it in your job." 

would have appreciated 'Flanders and Swann' singing 'The Slow Train' being offered to him as a mark of farewell and affection  : http://ow.ly/HL2mb

No more will I go to Blandford Forum and Mortehoe
On the slow train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road.
No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat
At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street.
We won't be meeting again
On the Slow Train.

I'll travel no more from Littleton Badsey to Openshaw.
At Long Stanton I'll stand well clear of the doors no more.
No whitewashed pebbles, no Up and no Down
From Formby Four Crosses to Dunstable Town.
I won't be going again
On the Slow Train. 
                                                                                      
* was perfectly captured in this wonderful photo :   courtesy of Gullwing Photography 
 http://gullwingphotography.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/bob-symes-steamdays.html




         
 


                                                                                   

























































 


 
  



 











Monday 19 January 2015

Canada is a country which has said "Goodbye" to an old serigaph artist called Ted Harrison, but not yet "Hello" to his work in its National Gallery



Ted, who was born and bred in the 1930's in County Durham, England, emigrated to Canada when he was forty-one and became one of its most popular artists, whose love of the land and the people of the Yukon brought him international acclaim, has died at the age of 88. One of the influences on Ted was the work of the Lancashire-born artist, L.S.Lowry, who has twenty-six of his paintings of working class life in Manchester hanging in the Tate Britain in London. Ted, on the other hand, despite accolades and recognition in his lifetime, has not a single serigraph hanging in the National Gallery of Canada.

With his passing, Yukon Premier, Darrell Pasloski, has petitioned the Gallery to consider placing some of his work alongside the 2,000 works by the Canadian artists who are represented : http://ow.ly/HWbBQ

What you possibly didn't know about Ted, that he :

*  was born, Edward Hardy Harrison in 1926 with a twin sister Algar, in the village of Wingate, County Durham, England, where his father, a coal miner would have known these 1920's Wingate Colliery pitmen, who like him, were dressed in cap, waistcoat, jacket, scarf and trousers and carried a miner's lamp and as a boy would have known the Colliery with its heaps of waste, loaded coal waggons and buildings with winding gear and six chimneys.

* at the age of eleven, attended the new A.J.Dawson Grammar School, opened in 1930 for children from his and surrounding villages, with Mr Ingram as Headmaster and would have been seated on the ground as a 'first year' in the 1937 school photo.

* at school had his interest in art and design, already encouraged by his parents, particularly his mother who was keen on fashion design and photography, stimulated and had a fond memory of illustrating a book of MG motor cars when he was twelve and in the sixth form was encouraged to apply for a place at Art College.


*  in 1943, at the age of seventeen, enrolled in the West Hartlepool College of Art for study of classical art and design, but restricted by the Second World War, with canvas hard to come by, painted with oils on stretched sugar sacks.

* also had "a tough art teacher who hardly taught art. He told you what you had to do, and left it at that. There was no leaving it to you, no freedom. But anyway, that didn’t affect me" and had his studies interrupted when he was called up to serve in the Amy at the age of nineteen in 1945 and said later : “I thought I’d be going to the Far East to fight Japan. But the war suddenly ended the day I joined.”

* was first posted to India and struck down with dysentery : “There are more germs there per square inch than anywhere else in the world, and I happened to pick them up. It nearly killed me” , followed by East Africa and Egypt but recorded later in life, that his post-war experience had affected him deeply : " I had some awful experiences when I was in the Army, you know, death and destruction and God knows what not. 'When I get out of this', I thought, 'I'll try to be positive and look on the positive side of life."

* demobbed from the Army in 1948, returned to College and in 1950, received a 'Diploma in Design' but was uninspired to continue his painting because, as he later said : "I'd been trained so academically, it just took all the joy out of painting" and decided to go into teaching and the following year gained a certificate from the University of Durham and began his twenty-eight year career in education.
 

*  got a job in Malaya, teaching art, social studies, British history and religion and recalled : “I taught my art students processes. If it was line or blocking printing, I taught them how to do that and then I let them loose. I said, "You can do any subject you like, in any media, but it has to be your choice and you’ve got to work at it and improve it," and that’s what they did. It should be their feelings, not the teacher’s feelings. Once you let them loose and they realize their creative ability, there’s no trouble.”


* at the age of forty-one in 1967, after teaching in schools in England and New Zealand, where he came under the spell of  the curvilinear shapes of Maori art, travelled, with his wife and son, to Northern Alberta in Canada.

*moved to the Yukon the following year, as he said :  "received a job to teach in the land of the mighty Moose - where weaklings need not apply" and settled in the small town of Carcross just outside of Whitehorse and found that, in his painting :

      "I opened up, that Canada opened me up."


* refined his technique : "I was painting at first realistically and I suddenly realised, if I painted the mountains, it would look like B.C. or somewhere else, so I kind of fell into a very simple style. I simplified everything down and then I saw the rhythms in the land and the sky and portrayed those rhythms. They're always there. If you ever get bored, all you need to do is look up at the sky and the varied moods" and in 1969, had his first art showing at the Public Library in Whitehorse and began his illustrative journey as a working artist in Canada

 * pushed colour to the forefront and "realized I could do anything any colour I wished, so I just played with colour and then I grew really interested in colour. It’s not necessarily the colour you see, but you can feel it.”

* was influenced by the work of L.S.Lowry and his matchstick men figures in the city of Manchester and the work of his friend and fellow County Durham-born painter, ex-coal miner, Norman Cornish http://ow.ly/HAk4Q ,who inspired him to paint people as well as places, reflected in his statement that : "Elements of loneliness also come into my painting to reflect alienation of the native people in particular. They're in lonely little villages, or they're lonely with great skies above them, or you'll find women with children but no man in the picture. The mother is solely looking after them."

* also admired the work of Austrian painter Hundert Wasser, Japanese print maker Katsushika Hokusai and the American painter Winslow Homer, but acknowledged the strongest influence on his life and art was living in the land of the Yukon where he found his 'Shangri-La'.

* became a Canadian citizen at the age of forty-seven in 1973, published his first book for 8-14 year old children, 'Children of the Yukon', concentrating on life throughout the year in its settlements in 1977 and two years later gave up teaching to become a full-time artist and illustrator.

* saw parallels between his own life and that of Lancashire-born poet Robert Service and said : "We both came to the Yukon almost by accident and found it liberating in many ways. He became a poet, and I became an artist, reflecting what I call the magic of this place. I often wonder if I'd gone to live in another part of Canada whether I would have painted the same—I don't think so."

* in 1986 produced, with illustrations Senior's 1907 poem 'The Cremation of Sam McGee', which was subsequently widely read in elementary schools : http://ow.ly/HzMyJ , followed in 1988 with his illustrated 'The Shooting of Dan McGrew'.

* undertook his largest commission with the 'Yukon Pavilion' for Vancouver's 'Expo 86' Exhibition, where he drew cartoons for the visitors : http://ow.ly/HAkT1 and in the following year was made a member of the 'Order of Canada' for his 'contributions to Canadian culture'.


* in 1992 published the first illustrated edition of the Nation's anthem, 'O Canada', in which he translated its beauty into his serigraphs on his ocean-to-ocean, east to west journey and the following year, in 1993 at the age of sixty-seven, moved to Victoria, British Columbia and three years later created the design of a Canada Post Christmas stamp.

* in 2001 at the age of seventy-five was interviewed on Canada AM Television http://ow.ly/HAkoW and in 2005, was inducted into the Royal Conservatory of the Arts and four years later donated his 'Vast Yukon' mural to the University of Victoria http://vimeo.com/23382059 and had his biography, 'Ted Harrison : Painting in Paradise' by Katherine Gibson published.

* was paid affectionate and appreciative tribute, 'Ted Harrison and his joyful paintings', in a 'Times Colonist' obituary by Robert Amos http://ow.ly/I0Ruh, in which he noted that : 'our National Gallery doesn't own any of his work ... yet.'

* on his passing, his website recorded :.

'He lived a full life and brightened countless lives. His art will continue to make the world a better place.'

What better epitaph might an old lad from County Durham and adopted son of Canada have ? How many more lives might he brighten with his work on the walls of the National Gallery ?