City sculptor gives Sir Jack the chill

It may have been a long old winter but it's not been long enough for Geoff Pope who creates extraordinary paintings using frost.

The neighbours in his picturesque Wolverhampton cul-de-sac think he is "stark raving bonkers" as the quirky artist wanders through his garden at night clutching a painted sheet of glass.

But the workings of Mother Nature are rarely predictable and despite the coldest winter in 30 years it has been a full decade since he has been able to capture any images.

Geoff, who studied at the Royal College of Art with pop artist David Hockney, had hoped to add to his collection of frost paintings for an exhibition in London in September, following a succession of mild winters.

But he said: "Despite all the frost and snow this year, the conditions were not right.

"There has to be a sequence of weather events and the paint has to be the right thickness, there are lots of factors involved."

It took him four years to get his first image after noticing a tiny pattern in a recently painted gatepost. One of his early successes also features a paw print after a cat or fox inadvertently stepped on to his unusual work of art.

It led to other nature-inspired work including canvases featuring magnetic fields and experimental paintings involving black paint being dripped on to paper and separating into its constituent colours.

Despite the unusual nature of his work, the 73-year-old was trained traditionally and examples of his more conventional work can be found around the country.

Close to home, his bronze sculpture of former Wolves owner Sir Jack Hayward stands in the Molineux reception. He recalls how he had to engineer a meeting with the multi-millionaire businessman, posing as a magazine journalist to get a good look at him, as the bust was to be a surprise.

The son of a water board inspector, he was brought up in a cottage on Penn Common with no gas or electricity.

"It was in a row of cottages that hadn't been adopted because they fell on the border between Wolverhampton and Sedgley. We had candles for light and one fire for heat.

"As a result, weather was very important to me and the energy of nature has been the inspiration behind a lot of my work."

The grandfather-of-two now lives in Victorian splendour in an elegant three-storey house on Park Dale West, Chapel Ash, filled with examples of his work.

"As I child I was convinced I could hear the frost creeping over the roof and it was only recently that a physicist friend of mine told me that when frost forms the crystals make a popping sound.

"I found that fascinating. The weather has been a lifetime obsession."

* The artist can be contacted via his son at calvinpope@blueyonder.co.uk