Paying tribute to the artist who made Londoners iconic

Every so often, the press debates whether the art of painting is dead. One artist who proved that painting is still with us was Simon Black, whose career was cut short in March this year by his death from cancer, just a couple of weeks before his 50th birthday.

His widow, Raina Sheridan, has worked with friends to organise an exhibition of his last works in London, which will then travel to Manchester Jewish Museum.

Black was born in 1958 into a close-knit Jewish family and he grew up in Prestwich, Manchester. Raina, whom he married in 1986, recalls: "He had a very strong sense of being Jewish - I actually met him on a kibbutz. At the time, he was doing a lot of watercolour and etching connected to the Israeli landscape. He was always responding to the environment he was in." Perhaps Black's most important commission were a series of six paintings he made for the Royal Free Hospital, in North London, to celebrate the hospital as it entered the new millennium.

"The huge irony about those paintings," says Raina, "is that everything he painted he then went on to experience himself as a patient. Those paintings are very powerful and they are now on permanent display at the Royal Free, a huge testament to his talent."