Ms McEvoy<\/a>\u2019s past as one of the buildings in her childhood home of Westbrook Villas, the extraordinary street of Victorian villas off North Road, has been picked out.\n<\/p>\n\n ![]()
Lola McEvoy and Ivan Chapman with the painting (Image: Chris Lloyd)\n<\/p>\n
\n \u201cThe difficulty was getting the balance between the old and the new,\u201d said Ivan, who originally comes from Brotton on the east coast but after a career teaching art in Aberystwyth retired back to Yvonne\u2019s hometown four years ago.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u201cI didn\u2019t want the old buildings to dominate completely so I had to work with the colours and textures to prevent that, and I wanted to get it so that the people coming out of the North Road works, which closed in the 1960s, merge with the modern people going into the new Bank Top station.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u201cI really hope people will enjoy exploring the details I\u2019ve worked into the picture.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
\n Ms McEvoy, who is the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, also had a serious message as the painting was revealed in front of invited members of the town\u2019s cultural community.\n<\/p>\n
\n Praising what the S&DR200 festival had done for Darlington, she said: \u201cWe have to actively encourage art, to facilitate it and fund it. Underfunding of the creative sector has real time consequences, in mental health terms and in the degradation of civic pride.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ivan Chapman\u2019s painting celebrating the past and present of the town is now hanging in pride of place…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":746645,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-746644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=746644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/746645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=746644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=746644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=746644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}