Four Liverpool artists paint pubs, streets, landmarks and faces by hand. Their stories, their work and why slow looking matters in the age of AI.
One Liverpool artist has painted more than 150 of the city's pubs by hand, and is trying to record roughly 285 of them before he stops. Gary North works outside on pavements and street corners, in watercolour and acrylic, capturing buildings like the Pig and Whistle, the Baltic Fleet and the Lion Tavern before they change or disappear.
North is part of The Liverpool Artists, a collective of four local painters working outdoors in the wild. While digital image-making and AI tools have made visual work faster than ever, these four spend hours standing in front of Liverpool's streets, deciding by eye where the light falls and which crooked brickwork stays crooked.
No single house style holds the group together. Alexis Butterfield, Gary North, Tammy Walters and Ste Hanno have different backgrounds, use different techniques and care about different subjects. What connects them is Liverpool, and how long they are prepared to spend looking at it. The collective does not publish a definitive membership list, so these four are not everybody involved; they are the artists whose work and stories we looked at for this feature.
I came to visual work through a computer rather than a sketchbook.
I was about 13 when I started messing around in Macromedia Fireworks. Photoshop came later. I could lose an evening moving a line a few pixels, changing the spacing between letters or nudging text backwards and forwards until it looked right. A reader might look at the finished graphic for three seconds.
AI has changed the speed of that work. At L1Local we use it for some research, editing, ideas and visual work, but not for all of it. Jobs that took me hours can sometimes be done in minutes.
I have mixed feelings about that, particularly about artists' work being used to train these systems and whether anyone gave meaningful consent.
Something else happened too. The faster image-making became, the more I noticed people doing the opposite.
Someone standing outside a Liverpool pub with paint still has to decide which crooked line stays crooked. They decide what to leave out, where the light falls, whether the colour in the painting should match the colour in front of them, and when to stop.
Once I looked properly at The Liverpool Artists, that interested me far more than a simple argument about old technology against new. These are four people who arrived at art by completely different routes.
Alexis Butterfield describes himself as “a painter, a lover of old places and a designer of new places”. It fits someone whose working life has moved between fine art and the built environment.
He first trained in printmaking in Manchester, then spent around 25 years working in architecture, historic conservation and neighbourhood development before returning seriously to fine art. He was a partner at the placemaking practice Pollard Thomas Edwards, working on regeneration programmes with councils, housing associations and other organisations.
Liverpool Everyman says he moved to Liverpool in 2022 and developed his Take a Line for a Walk project by exploring and drawing the city and its surroundings. Read the Everyman's profile of Alexis Butterfield.
In an interview with NewStart in August 2026, he talked about the “legacy of place”: buildings carry evidence of the people who designed them, adapted them, paid for them, used them and sometimes loved them.
That thinking runs through the paintings. On his website he describes work that moves between figurative and abstract, graphic and painterly, architectural accuracy and deliberate simplification. Most of it is mixed media, combining paint, ink, printmaking and collage.
He builds a surface in stages. Lines and blocks set the structure. Translucent washes and stronger colour follow. Parts are wiped back so earlier decisions stay visible underneath.
Liverpool suits that method. Walk around long enough and you find buildings where several eras show at once: old brick beside a newer shopfront, original stonework next to a later extension, a removed sign that left its marks behind.
St Michael's Hamlet: Another World is a large 120cm by 90cm mixed-media canvas. It sets the almost dreamlike centre of the Hamlet against the Victorian terraces around it. Butterfield does not dismiss either side. He likes both, and wanted the painting to celebrate the contrast.
The same range runs through his collection: the Cunard Building, The Dog and Collar, Falkner Street, Penny Lane, Lark Lane, Hope Street, Granby, Woolton churchyard and pubs most people walk past. His website lists works from The Quarter on Falkner Street to The Pig & Whistle and The Racquet Club.
He has also just had a solo exhibition at Liverpool Everyman. The Land Across the Water ran from 1 to 15 September 2026 and covered New Brighton, Birkenhead, Port Sunlight and Chester. The Everyman described his interest in humbler, overlooked places as well as recognised landmarks.
He knows how buildings are put together. Then he gives himself permission to pull them apart again.
Gary North turns places into projects.
The West Lancashire painter is self-taught. Lancashire County Council says his nan encouraged him to draw as a child, but he fell out of love with art after a teacher discouraged him. He came back to painting after a serious injury ended his sporting pursuits. He names Appley Bridge painter Theodore Major as one of his biggest influences.
Before the pubs, North decided to paint every bridge on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal between Parbold and Gathurst. One of those paintings, Spring at Bridge 39, won the public vote for Lancashire Artist of the Year 2025. When the result came out, he said he painted mainly for enjoyment rather than to build a commercial career.
Then the scale went up. By 19 August 2026, he had completed about 150 paintings from an estimated 285 pubs in Liverpool, according to BBC reporting on the project. After the Lancashire win he told the BBC he had started thinking about “legacy rather than sales”.
The project is obsessive, but it is not 150 copies of one painting with a different pub name underneath. North changes technique to suit the building, working in watercolour and impressionistic acrylic. The list already includes the Pig and Whistle, Baltic Fleet, The Vines, Ship & Mitre, The Grapes, Peter Kavanagh's, Lion Tavern and The Bridewell.
He told the BBC that Liverpool's pubs act as “community hubs”.
That lands close to home for me. My mum has worked in a Liverpool pub for more than 20 years. When I look at these paintings I do not only see signs, windows and brickwork. I think about people who have stood behind the same bar for years, regulars who sit in roughly the same spot, old brewery lettering, odd little rooms, and the stories attached to a building you stop noticing because it has always been there.
Gary still has not reached my mum's pub. At about 150 paintings, he is getting close.
North said he wanted to create a “pub crawl of my art” through Liverpool city centre to St George's Hall ahead of the beer festival on 24 September.
Gary North, speaking to BBC NewsOne pub painting is a picture of a pub. Dozens together start to become a record of Liverpool at a particular moment.
Tammy Walters wanted to be an artist when she was young. She was encouraged to have a back-up plan instead.
Born in Kirkby in 1968, she went into accounts and later corporate HR, according to a Visual Artists Association interview. That career took her to Azerbaijan and Dubai, where she kept developing her art alongside work. She returned to the UK in 2016 and moved into painting full-time.
The change was not overnight. She spent two years as resident artist at Aintree International Equestrian Centre, held her first solo exhibition, A Gallop in Time, in 2022, worked with galleries around the UK and began selling internationally. Horses became an important part of her work.
Her account of making a painting explains her Liverpool work too. She does not follow a rigid process. She starts from a reference image and looks for forms, shapes and lines. Black ink strengthens those shapes, then the colour develops on the paper or canvas. On larger pieces she rarely works everything out in a detailed sketch first.
There is permission in the way she paints: permission for the apple to be purple rather than red or green, and for the colour to do something other than copy the reference. She says the aim is often the feeling of the finished work, whether it triggers a memory, lifts a mood or makes someone look at a subject differently.
Yes, that is the Pig and Whistle again. The painting here is Tammy's, and The Liverpool Artists confirmed the attribution to L1Local.
Put the two versions side by side and they explain the collective better than any shared philosophy could. Same pub, different pair of eyes. Gary's version belongs to a methodical attempt to record the pubs of a whole city. Tammy's comes from an artist working with shape, instinct, black line and colour, letting the picture change as she makes it. Neither behaves like a photograph.
Walters also has a racing connection. In the same interview she said she spent four years producing bespoke artwork for the winning owners of the Patrick Coyne Memorial Race at Haydock Park. The owners received a piece of art instead of a conventional trophy, and she named it among the achievements she is proudest of.
The back-up plan came first. In the end, the art stopped being the thing sitting behind it.
Ste Hanno is, according to The Liverpool Artists, the most recognised artist in the group. That is their description, not something we can measure, but his is the widest-ranging story of the four. It moves through design, model-making, carpentry, Liverpool and London club culture, large-scale portraiture, exhibitions and charity work.
He studied at Medway College of Design in the late 1980s, learning model-making for architecture, industrial design and film. After leaving London in 1988 he returned to Liverpool and began a carpentry apprenticeship, hoping to get into film-set building and model-making.
The club and rave scene he came back to at the end of the 1980s, and into the 1990s, has since become material for his art. He has written about it, and those memories feed his more personal figurative work.
The series that brought him the most attention is Scousers: large portraits of people associated with Liverpool. His own public posts document paintings of Stephen Graham, Natasha Jonas, Paddy Pimblett and Kevin Duala. The Liverpool Artists told L1Local the wider series includes Jodie Comer and Katarina Johnson-Thompson.
Some of these portraits took around 100 hours each, and Hanno has said the whole collection took more than a year to build.
The Pimblett portrait shows where that time goes. It is not a flawless photographic copy. The face is built from colour, shape, contrast and layers. You recognise the subject at once, and the longer you look the more small decisions appear.
Scousers became Hanno's first solo exhibition, at Cass Art Liverpool in October 2025. In his own account afterwards he thanked world champion boxer Natasha Jonas and BBC presenter Kevin Duala for coming. Duala was not just a guest, because Hanno had painted him for the collection. The Liverpool Artists also told L1Local that Duala interviewed Hanno on radio about the series.
Hanno has also exhibited in London.
Charity is part of the story. After the Cass Art show, Hanno said the Scousers paintings would be signed by their subjects and auctioned, with the money going to local charities the sitters choose. His public posts also show him selling limited-edition hip-hop, rap and grime prints to raise money for Zoe's Place Liverpool. The collective says he has recently finished another large charity piece.
Then there is the smallest detail: a red jigsaw piece. The collective says that if you see one attached to a work, you are looking at a Hanno. It is a tiny signature on work that can be physically large.
His newer figurative paintings look quieter than the celebratory Scousers portraits. Material shared with L1Local shows larger faces, simpler backgrounds and a more introspective mood. The people are still recognisable. The mood has changed.
You can see more of his work in his Outside In gallery.
Put the four stories together and hunting for one Liverpool Artists style looks pointless.
Alexis Butterfield spent decades thinking professionally about how places are designed, regenerated and altered. Now he paints buildings that are assembled, disrupted and layered again. Gary North turns repetition into a record: a canal bridge becomes a series, and one pub becomes 150. Tammy Walters came back to art after years in accounts and HR, and works with colour, line and instinct rather than architectural fidelity. Ste Hanno moves between buildings, memories and faces, sometimes giving around 100 hours to one portrait.
The city changes underneath all of them. A pub gets a new frontage. A shop sign disappears. A church is repurposed. A familiar face gets older. A painting keeps one version.
That is where the nostalgia in this work comes from for me. I do not mean a perfect Liverpool frozen in time. Ordinary things become history while most of us are busy walking past them.
The Liverpool Artists describe themselves like this:
“The La's or Liverpool artists are a collective lunacy of artists based in and around Liverpool. We paint in the wild and can pop up at any time.”
I keep coming back to the word lunacy.
We live in a strange time for images. I can make something in minutes that once took me an evening. We all carry cameras. We photograph buildings, food, dogs, sunsets and each other without thinking about the cost of one more picture. Then the images disappear into a feed with hundreds more. We scroll, post, prompt, regenerate and move on.
Meanwhile someone from The Liverpool Artists might spend an afternoon looking at one pub. They notice the window most of us stopped seeing years ago, the old lettering above a door, a roofline that is slightly wrong, the colour stone turns after rain, a face that still looks wrong after the twentieth adjustment.
Technology is getting extraordinarily good at making images quickly. I am not convinced it is making us better at looking at them.
Painting a Liverpool pub for hours may not be the strange part. The strange part may be how normal it has become to give everything three seconds.
In a world chasing faster technology and instant images, perhaps the collective lunatics are the sane ones.
For more Liverpool art and the streets that inspire it, see our report from the Liverpool Art Fair and our Liverpool waterfront walk.
The collective has announced a "great wild paint" at Liverpool Anglican Cathedral on Saturday 17 October. The Liverpool Artists say the cathedral police know a large number of artists may turn up and have said everyone is welcome as long as they leave the site as they found it and do not block access to the cathedral.
They suggest painting from the public land at the front, where there is space and concrete blocks to sit on. Anyone attending does so at their own responsibility. The group says there is no competition and no time pressure, and that work can be finished at home. Their message puts it this way: "There are no good or bad artists on this day." The invitation asks anyone interested to reply to the collective. It gave no start time.
For more paintings, works in progress and where the group turns up next, follow The Liverpool Artists on Instagram at @theliverpoolartists. The artist links above lead to their own websites, galleries and social accounts.
The Hanno details about Jodie Comer, Katarina Johnson-Thompson, the Kevin Duala radio interview, London exhibitions, the red jigsaw signature and the recent charity piece come from information The Liverpool Artists supplied to L1Local.
Image credits: Artwork and photography supplied by The Liverpool Artists and the individual artists is used with permission. Gary North's paintings are from his social media accounts, including @garynorthart on X. A cropped version of his Pig and Whistle painting also appeared in the BBC News report. Ste Hanno's jigsaw-piece portrait is from his Outside In gallery. Copyright remains with the respective creators.
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