Two of Cliff's large cityscape paintings on a railway theme, Passengers at Paragon Station (left) and King's Cross Station, appear in the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull 2020 Open Exhibition. The exhibition opens 15 February and continues until 26 April.

Another painting, Fountains, Queen Victoria Square, Hull is in the Beverley Open Exhibition, which opened in December and continues until 29 February. Both exhibitions are free.

Mary Aherne and I are reading at York Frost Fair, at 12.30 pm.

Sunday 1st December.

Do come along if you're in York. It's free! Mary and I will bring some of our books for sale. And also some freebies, including the latest issue of The Critical Fish.

Thin Ice Press Frost Fair

Sunday 1st December 2019, 10am – 4pm

King’s Manor, University of York, Exhibition Square, York YO1 7EP

Thin Ice Press invites you to our first festive Frost Fair, hosted in the historic King’s Manor. Join us to celebrate York’s printing heritage, find out more about historical adventures on the frozen Ouse, do a little bit of pre-Christmas shopping — and try your hand at letterpress printing.

In 1715, a London Frost Fair boasted nine-pin bowling, ‘Cripple Atkins roasting an Ox’, boys sliding, a printing booth, a music booth, a shoulder of mutton roasting in a string, a tavern, a rolling press, a geneva (gin) booth, a gingerbread stall, a goldsmith, ‘Huffing Jack’, and a husband-and-wife team of poets, ‘rhyming on the hard Frost’.

We’ve done our best to recreate that spirit. Join us for
– letterpress printing from Thin Ice Press and The Print Project, including a chance to print your own souvenir of the day;
– lino prints from Joanna Lisowiec, who has been working on some magical new prints for the occasion;
– gorgeous jewellery from Karen Ward;
– a pop-up bookstall from Fox Lane Books, with titles chosen by University of York English Department staff and students;
– gingerbread made to an eighteenth-century recipe;
– ninepins, children’s activities (including story times), poetry readings, and talks;
– the King’s Manor refectory, open from 10-4; serving mulled wine, mince pies ánd other refreshments.

Programme for Talks and Readings
11.00am Children’s story time I
12.30pm Poetry reading from Cliff Forshaw and Mary Aherne
2.00pm Talk on frost fairs and ephemeral printing from Professor Gillian Russell
3.00pm Children’s story time II

King’s Manor is off York Exhibition Square, next to York Art Gallery. The Frost Fair will be held in the Huntingdon Room and Anteroom.

Tables are free and we do have a couple of spaces still available. If you would like to know more, please email thinicepress@gmail.com.

The second issue of The Critical Fish has just swum off. It is free, in that it has been liberated from the printers, but also in that it costs nothing. The journal is an artist-led collaborative project which promotes critical and accessible writing about the arts and visual culture. It's centred on Hull, but also looks outward. The Fish supports creativity throughout the region and invites contributions and ideas from further afield. The second issue is "Brill"... each issue is named after a fish...  and has a couple of my poems in, one accompanied by my painting of Paragon Station, the other by my aquatint of the Truelove sculpture.

The Critical Fish is interested in creative, critical and collaborative writing. Insde you'll find essays, painting, poetry, photography, illustration, interviews and conversations.

The commissioning editors are Jill Howitt and Lauren Saunders, and you can get in touch with them via thecriticalfish on facebook or at hello@the criticalfish.co.uk

Smart Devices, an anthology of 52 poems from The Guardian website "Carol Rumens's Poem of the Week" has just been published by Carcanet. Each poem appears with Carol's original commentary. She's been choosing the poems, noting how they achieve their effects and leading lively discussions on them for over a dozen years. As the cover puts it:

"Do the maths: that's more than 624 blogs!" No wonder she has a large and devoted following. She's a poet reader, not an academic. She is fascinated by the new, but her interest is instructed by the classic poems she has read. They make her ear demanding: when it hears that something, it perks up. She perks up."

I'm very pleased to have my poem about the Tasmanian Tiger ,"Loop", in there, alongside poems by Peter Didsbury, John Ashbery, Denise Riley, WS Graham, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Yves Bonnefoy, John Kinsella, Marilyn Hacker and many others.

For Carol Rumens's Poem of the Week:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/series/poemoftheweek

I've not posted anything for a while, so here are two new paintings. First, the view of the Ferens Art Gallery across Queen Victoria Square, Hull, with its relatively recent City of Culture fountains. It's another large oil (102 x 127 cm) in the cityscape series, I'm thinking now more of people within urban environments... and also moving away from the focus on Hull.

One of the reasons I've fallen behind with the blog is that I've just started a new post as Royal Literary Fund Fellow, based in the English Department at York University. This, together with other commitments, means I'm spending a fair amount of time travelling, often at railway stations. The second of my recent paintings is of King's Cross, though I think York, its station, the university or town, might start to figure in new work.

I've been working on this view over the concourse of King's Cross Station for a few months on and off. It's a sort of companion piece to, and the same size (102 x 127 cm) as, my painting of passengers at Paragon, the Hull station from which I leave and return to at the other end of the line.

I started this very early in the year. During the time I was working on it, the large TV screen at the end of the departure boards was added. I noticed this almost by accident as I passed through the station in a hurry to get somewhere else. The light also changed dramatically as the days lengthened and cast stronger patterns on the brick. I added the screen and made much more of the light on the brick. The biggest challenge throughout was rendering the almost organic structure - part-tree, part-web - that rises up and spans the roof. 

Now I want to think more about people, singly, in couples, families, or crowds, in public spaces. Perhaps aiming at a sense of flow as people move past and through large urban structures. Maybe more stations, but also streets and parks.