This article first appeared in The Press as 'An Ode to Yertle the Turtle' on 13 May 2015.

I recently wrote about Louise Henderson's painting Addington Workshops (1930) for the Press, and wanted to locate the place in which she stood to make the sketch for the work. It's a complex image and I wanted to understand more about its internal space as well as its history, but the workshops were demolished twenty years ago.

For many years, the piercing whistle of the railway workshops off Blenheim Road was Addington's alarm clock.

Here's a little from behind the scenes. Shifting Lines opens tomorrow, 9 November, and runs until 19 January 2014. It's a show about drawing as an idea, which is permitted here to take very different forms. It includes work by six artists – Andrew Beck, Peter Trevelyan, Katie Thomas, Pip Culbert, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano – all of whom use line to investigate space and structure in unexpected ways.

As a supplement to the article in today's Press GO section, highlighting the recent purchase of Ivy Fife's Untitled (Towards Worcester Street from St. Elmo Courts), here's a modest selection of paintings of rooftops, backyards and urban scapes from the collection...

This article first appeared as 'Hello and goodbye' in The Press on 5 October 2012.

A new exhibition of stage and costume designs by Russian avant-garde artists Natal'ya Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov opens this month.

This article first appeared in The Press on 13 October 2004

Laurence Stephen Lowry painted Factory at Widnes in 1956, at which time he was Britain's most famous living painter. Lowry's fame increased in that year as he became the subject of a BBC television documentary, though his work had already been popular in British homes and schools as reproductions since the end of the war. If appreciation for his individualistic painting style was widespread, there was also fascination with L.S. Lowry the artist, who had projected in the press the image of a lonely recluse.