No more brush strokes

You can’t miss them - warm, vibrant watercolours of a Sheffield now gone for half a century, full of drama and bustle.

And if you look closely most have one or more of his ’trademarks’ hidden somewhere in the scene - a little black cat, a Sheffield United supporter and a Star newspaper seller.

But Terry, now 72, has painted his last one. For the last year or so he’s been suffering from tendonitis in his wrist and fingers which make it difficult for him to hold a pencil or brush.

“I’m weary of getting the period details right in the clothes and it’s hard work conjuring up different faces,” he says, for a Gorman painting is usually full of people.

Now 40 or so of his paintings of the Forties and Fifties, which he began more than 20 years ago, have been collected for a new book, Then & Now With Terry Gorman (ALD Print, 11.95), a retrospective of his work.

Publisher Alistair Lofthouse selected them to be shown alongside photos of the scenes today.

Terry, from Bradway, is modest. He enjoys the pleasure his paintings have given people but says: “To be honest, I can’t see what people see in them.”

The paintings may come with a big dose of nostalgia - they are popular with expats - but they are also full of information.

In a painting of London Road a man pushes a barrow made out of crates for Oxydol, a forgotten soap powder.

St Paul’s Parade, seen in a painting of Pinstone Street, clearly shows the Hobbies shop where young boys bought balsa wood and model kits.

Another, of Townhead, where Telephone House has become Steel City House, shows a van with the legend Holmes & Younie.

It looks like a misprint but they were car dealers on Suffolk Road.

You can almost guarantee that what you see is accurate although he does take a bit of artistic licence with angles. “I’ve got a very retentive memory,” he says. The pictures throb with colour. “Most of us probably think of old Sheffield in black and white as in many collections of photographs,” he says.

He took up painting seriously when he retired from the ambulance service after nearly 30 years with a lifting injury, although he had painted for colleagues, often given away for a few quid or for free.

He’s not made a fortune. His later works have sold for up to 2,000 although he once heard from a woman who had paid 6,000 for one. “I hadn’t the heart to tell her I’d got only 1,000 for it.”

Those 40 paintings in the book represent about a quarter of his output but Terry has only one Gorman original on his walls - his last painting, of Moorhead around 1950.

“My wife Barbara said I had better have that myself,” he says.