Talking to famed artist Bob Olley, at his home in South Shields, you get the feeling he has a soft spot for his best-known work, The Westoe Netty.

"Yes. It has been good to me," laughed the dad-of-four, who turned 70 last month.

Created in 1974, it shows the inside of a urinal in Chichester Road, South Shields, which, while no longer there, is available for all to see at a 3D recreation in Beamish Museum, County Durham.

Though not his most technically accomplished work, it's the one which caught people's imagination and helped put him on the artistic map, both in this country and abroad.

He said: "I don't really know why it's so popular. It's just a bit of fun now, but at the time it was very controversial. It has that little bit of magic that creeps into some works."

Over the years he has painted dozens of these scenes from everyday life in South Tyneside, depicting everything from bike shops to Colmans fish and chip shop.

Look at the picture on the takeaway boxes from the award-winning eaterie.

That's Bob's work.

Take a tour around his house, which is a museum of his life's work, and you can see that, like all great artists, he has gone through distinct 'periods'.

Starting in his living room-cum-studio, Bob showed me some of his earliest pieces from the early 1970s, inspired by his 11 years spent as a miner at Whitburn Colliery.

The paintings of muscular miners hacking away with axes have a whiff of 1940s Russian propaganda posters about them. Here the manual worker is a true hero.

The most striking picture is the incredible North Yard Seam Derby, based on a pit pony race the miners used to enjoy at the colliery in the 1960s.

It's looks like a depiction of the chariot race in Ben Hur restaged into some subterranean hell.

Only a distant archway of sunshine in the distant entrance lets you know there is light at the end of this ghostly tunnel.

When I told him it reminded me of The Potato Eaters by Vincent Van Gogh, he seemed genuinely pleased.

"That's my favourite painting."

Also in this room are a few of his lesser-known Aesop's Fables works which he completed for an exhibition at the Customs House in 2002.

He said: "I had done nothing for nine months, the equivalent of writers' block I suppose. Then on a visit to Paris I was taken to see an exhibition of Marc Chagall's work, and my pilot light ignited and inspiration returned. I produced 40 paintings in two months."

Fascinated by foreign climes, the next direction his work drifted into is apparent from the three paintings on his stairway; Argentinian Tango.

"I became interested in it in the late 1990s," he explained. "I think it's sexy and very evocative."

This racy theme continues in the main bedroom, which holds two of his more recent nudes. Dreamy and idealised, they're as far removed from his early socially astute character studies as it's possible to get.

"Do you use models?" I asked.

"No, not any more," he chuckled.

"Do you change your styles so much to keep your fans interested?"

"That's part of it, but also to keep me interested. It keeps my work fresh. Can you imagine Tom Jones being asked to sing The Green Green Grass Of Home every night for the past 45 years?"

No, I couldn't, and neither could he.

The thought of doing Westoe Netties and mining paintings forever was one that filled him with dread.

"I would have withered on the vine if I'd kept repeating myself," he admitted.

So to his spare bedroom, where a collection of his new paintings is stored.

Unlike anything I've ever seen before, I suspect even his most knowledgeable fans will struggle to identify them as 'Bob Olleys'.

I'm doing them a disservice here, but try to imagine the Kama Sutra re-imagined by a cubist.

"I spent five weeks on a tour and was greatly inspired by the bright colours of saffron, yellows, reds; the smells, spices and the tolerant nature of the Hindu culture," he said.

Echoing this vividness, the colours on these are as bright as any you'll see in his previous canon of works.

Being his newest 'period', it's clear he's still very much in the honeymoon phase with this 'Kama cubra' period.


Hopefully his fans will like them just as much, when they're exhibited alongside a retrospective exhibition of his works at the Customs House in June.

Tour over, he led me back downstairs where on the passageway he revealed the work of which he is proudest; a surprisingly small, yet intimate etching called The Old Hobo which he did back in the early 1970s.

He said: "He had his life in these plastic bags; socks on his hands and odd shoes on. I was also struck by why he would have a set of golf clubs."

With time racing by, we hadn't even got on to his cartoon work.

The caricatures he showed us of such people as Nelson Mandela, Bobby Charlton and Tony Blair were really quite splendid.

That's typical of him.

If he decides to do something, he does it incredibly well, as was the case with his much-lauded statue of Stan Laurel, now on display in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, where the comic spent his teen years.

Bob said: "I'm completely dedicated to what I do, be it painting, drawing or sculpting."

Asked if he thought he was a living legend, as his legion of fans believe, he seemed a little abashed.

"No. I just feel happy I've woken up every day for 40 years with the inspiration to do more work.

"I think 'What am I going to paint today?' That's a lovely way to live your life."

Bob Olley; a great artist who's happy in his work, and a true Northern gentleman.