ART - After Lowry

Xavier Pick has already managed to raise the 'fly-on-the-wall' documentary to an art form.

His tools may be pen and ink, but his series of instant sketches of North Yorkshire police in 1998 had all the immediacy of a TV documentary.

He spent three weeks shadowing the police, immortalising the activity of riot squads, underwater rescue teams and dog handlers as he followed them around, sketching them at work.

Together with drawings made during the 'night shift' at Tesco supermarket in York and at Radio York, they made the basis for an exhibition at York City Art Gallery last year - York At Work.

Since then, the irrepressible, balding 27-year-old former Pocklington School pupil has moved on to other things. He was appointed last year as Artist in Residence during the building of Manchester's new monument to one of the greatest figures in British 20th Century art, LS Lowry.

Xavier's mission was to sketch the builders at work. But now, with the multi-million-pound Lottery-funded gallery and theatre complex - to be known simply as The Lowry - set to open on April 28, he has turned his attention to the great artist himself.

He set off in Lowry's footsteps to find the places the artist knew and loved. And this time, instead of taking only his pen and drawing pad, he took the TV cameras too.

His three-part series 'Looking for Lowry' will be screened as a series of inserts in BBC Look North programmes across the region in the three days leading up to the opening of The Lowry.

It was a journey that took him from Manchester to York to Berwick-upon-Tweed and the Holy Island, Lindisfarne: all places Lowry immortalised through his art.

"He used to catch a taxi, or any old bus or train to end up somewhere, anywhere, and then just start drawing," Xavier said.

Lowry, Xavier insists, was far more than just a drawer of matchstick men who haunted bleak industrial landscapes.

"I think he's the Van Gogh of Britain, I really do," he said. "My own work is about the trials and tribulations of what it is to be a human being. I'm interested in what people do when they relax, when they're on their own, when they're bored. Lowry did that as well. He has got an appeal because he spoke to everybody."

Lowry, Xavier admits, was an intensely lonely man. "His paintings are more to do with the loneliness that you feel in a crowd than anything. I think my life is a bit more happy! Lowry had a definite barrier between himself and his subject matter. He was almost a voyeur, where I'm right in there. But we're dealing with the same things. "

During the course of his travels in the making of Looking for Lowry, Xavier met art students from York College sketching beside Clifford's Tower, the monument immortalised in a Lowry painting that hangs in York's City Art Gallery.

He also visited Berwick-upon-Tweed - "he loved Berwick," Xavier says - where he sits in a bus shelter on the pier once painted by Lowry and meets Marjorie Ellison, the young woman for whom Lowry once had a soft spot and who used to throw away the drawings he gave her.

Finally, he visits Lowry's home in Manchester and talks to members of the young rock-and-roll band The Prodigal Son who now live there. "Lowry's mother didn't encourage him to paint, she was only interested in playing the piano and it's still a musical house now," Xavier said. "They're a great band and they actually do a song in the house where he used to live."

'Looking for Lowry' will be screened on BBC's Look North and North West Tonight regional news programmes between 6.30pm and 7pm on April 25, 26 and 27. Xavier is now working on a new series of half-hour TV programmes, Drawn to Life, for Pilgrim Productions.