Artist Margaret Clarkson at Fast Frame Gallery, in Goodramgate, York, November 28 (From York Press)

Artist Margaret Clarkson at Fast Frame Gallery, in Goodramgate, York, November 28

2:46pm Friday 26th November 2010 in Exhibitions

WOKSOP artist Margaret Clarkson visits the Fast Frame Gallery, in Goodramgate, York, on Sunday to launch her new limited-edition print of York Races.

Officially the launch will be from 11am to 3pm, but Margaret promises she will be there from 10am to 4pm, ever keen to meet enthusiasts of her nostalgic work.

“I’ve been going to Andrew Eccles’s gallery for about ten years, usually once a year for a gallery visit, and the past two years I’ve gone twice a year,” she says.

“It’s a chance to sign prints, meet potential customers and past customers, and the day works well. Doing visits twice a year hasn’t diminished its popularity, as I came in August and that went very well.”

Andrew has work by Margaret permanently on sale at Fast Frame, but centre stage on Sunday goes to the new addition, and you are in for a surprise. Contrary to its name, York Races does not depict an equine scene from Knavesmire, but children playing in Shambles.

“Andrew had been asking me for some time to do a piece with a York theme, and his dad suggested a painting of shopping in Shambles. I like my titles to be cryptic, so I thought, ‘Well, they race a lot at York Races’, and it struck me as a snappy title that fitted perfectly with a scene of a little running game in the street,” says Margaret. “So I pinch titles like that for my work.”

Two hundred prints of York Races are available, while Andrew has 80 selections from Margaret’s print collection, plus five or six originals, varying in price from £600 to £1,200.

York Races is typical of the storytelling style of Margaret’s paintings. “I’ve seen lots of tight and accurate depictions of York’s streets, but though my work is accurate, it’s an impressionistic representation of Shambles rather than historically accurate,” she says.

“My priority is storytelling, maybe based around my own childhood and the things that happened around me in the post-war 1940s and 1950s – a time of austerity but freedom, when provided you were back by dusk, you could go off in the morning with some water and a jam sandwich and get up to things that parents never knew about.”

Things that Margaret has since recorded in her paintings.