I love painting Stockport. It's a visual feast

Major exhibition for most important living artist in the north’ who has documented changing face of her home town

- NEAL KEELING

M ONET had water lilies, or a wind-battered pine beside the sun-struck Mediterranean sea in Antibes. Helen Clapcott has the A6, and all you can survey from the 192 bus.

She is proudly a one-town woman.

Bill Clark, the Hale-based art dealer, says: "If she went to London to paint she could make a fortune" But Helen doesn't want to.

She has built a career painting the place where she grew up, known for its railway viaduct, cotton spinning and hat making - Stockport. Next month the town will stage a 100piece retrospective of her work at the War Memorial Art Gallery.

In his book A Northern School Revisited, Peter Davis compares her with Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico, in that she uses 'an eerie almost otherworldly light with long shadows. Her visions of the town's changing urban landscape do have the feel of an alien world while at the same time capturing its detail authentically.

Landmarks such as the 27 archways of the 1840 Grade II listed Viaduct and the town hall as well as the M60 motorway, roundabouts, the River Mersey, infamous Pyramids, and modern industrial units are her world. But she has also captured slow decline a dog guarding a mountain of tyres in the yard of a semi-derelict mill, the demolition of a power station.

She said: "Art and games were my favourite subjects at school and they were frowned upon as not being academic subjects and a way to go in the future. I never got bored with it.

"I tried all sorts of jobs when I left school and I thought 'this is the one thing I never get bored with'

"So after three years out of school I had this brilliant idea of going to art school - I went to Liverpool and it was wonderful."

Helen studied for four years at Liverpool Art School and then got a place at the Royal Academy in London - but home was in her heart.