First Look: We visit Pete McKee ahead of his new Gallery opening at Leah's Yard in Sheffield
Pete McKee is about to open his new gallery space in the newly renovated Leah's Yard units on Cambridge Street in Sheffield's Heart of the City. Yorkshire Post photographer, Tony Johnson, caught up with Pete to talk about the changes to his new gallery space and his up and coming projects. He also explains the repainting of The Snog mural on Fagan's pub.
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00:00My name is Pete McKee and I'm an artist and I reside in Sheffield.
00:07So we're currently in my new gallery in Leah's Yard which is a redevelopment of a little
00:14network of little messes, factory units just on Cambridge Street in Sheffield city centre
00:19and the council have stumped up a lot of cash to bring it back to life and I couldn't wait
00:27to get in and say look I want to be in these units because it looks so fantastic and they've
00:32done a great job of bringing it back to its almost original condition when it was in full
00:39force as a unit of little messes and the whole development, it's got about five or seven
00:46new shops in this development and office spaces and it opens on Saturday at ten o'clock.
00:56The unit itself is quite smaller than my original gallery which I've moved from now
01:00so we're offering smaller prints for a start so we can get plenty up there and because
01:05a lot of people in Sheffield have got so much of my work they're in and out of space so
01:09I thought if I go smaller we'll get more prints in your house.
01:13So that's one thing, I've got two new limited editions open for grabs and the first hundred
01:19people that come into the shop and buy something get a free signed mini print.
01:30Well the snog itself when I originally painted it, the render on the wall was terrible on
01:34the side of the pub Fagans and it was my paint that was keeping it in place and over the
01:39years that paint started to fall off to the point where there was hardly any of the snog
01:44left and the pub had to do the rendering again because it was letting water in and
01:52that meant the snog had to go and so I offered to repaint it back on the wall once the render
01:59had been finished and we did that, we managed to do that in a day and it was about three
02:05or four months ago.
02:06I really did enjoy doing it, I went back and I corrected some errors in the original, just
02:11some bits that had bugged me ever since it had been up there so I just did a few little
02:17tweaks and I'm really really pleased now with how it looks.
02:20I was never happy with his flat cap and I think her hand could have been better so I
02:26tried just to correct those two things and also I brightened her up a little bit and
02:30gave her a new hairdo and a new coat for the repaint.
02:35I've got an exhibition coming up in November at Western Park Museum called The Boy With
02:42A Like Name Brian and it's a biographical piece and it's going to be up for quite a
02:47while while it's there and I'm still working on it now but it's going to be amazing.