A while ago I posted about Adolphe Valette who painted in Manchester and was a tutor at the Manchester College of Art. His atmospheric pictures of a polluted, Impressionist, Edwardian Manchester are now well thought of and a big draw to the Manchester art Gallery. And no one has, as yet, fallen into one of them and slashed it!
Valette has been eclipsed, perhaps, by his most famous student at the art college, L.S. Lowry. I’ve posted about his art as well in the past. He loved to draw and paint the industrial scenes he saw about him as he travelled around Manchester doing his day job, collecting rent. He never gave up his day job even when he began to get famous and quite wealthy. He was a modest man who wasn’t given over to showing off.
Here’s an example of his pictures. This one is called ‘The Fever Van’ and is set in old Salford well before Media City was built and probably well before the word ‘media’ was coined as well. Someone in the little street has caught ‘fever.’ This would have been a bad thing in the slums of industrial Manchester so they are getting the victim out before the fever spreads to the rest of the community and we had an epidemic on our hands. Such was life before antibiotics. It’s a typical picture of Lowry’s with the little houses, the scurrying figures and the restricted palette of colours. This picture is in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
I tried looking for pictures Lowry did of Manchester. They are few and far between. He didn’t like the grand buildings in the city centre, preferring the back streets and mills of the working class industrial areas. He would have liked the Northern Quarter, I think, before it went cool and trendy. It would be interesting to know what he would have thought about the Lowry Theatre complex, all grand statement and stainless steel clad, or the plate glass 5* Lowry Hotel in the city centre. I don’t think he would have approved of either being named after him. And he certainly wouldn’t have approved of the ugly 70s, concrete tower office block named after him just off Market Street. It’s on MY list of buildings that need tearing down as well. We will never know as he died before any of these places appeared in the city.
I did find this little pencil drawing he did of the Central Library with his trademark people rushing past. Like me he must have liked the classical look of the building. It would have been cool if he’d turned it into an oil painting but he never did.
The only one I can find is this one of Piccadilly Gardens before it had it’s makeover. The gardens were sunken having been built in the basement of the demolished Royal Infirmary before it was moved to its present site on Oxford Road across from Whitworth Park. There’s a little fountain in the centre and flowerbeds laid out around it. The gardens are still there but the new layout is radically different. The buildings in the background are still there though. Rylands is now Debenhams department store while buildings on the left used to be Lewis’s department store but are now the bargain hunter’s paradise (if you like cheap clothes that look tatty after 5 washes), PRIMARK.
Click the link below to take you to The Lowry website where you can learn about L.S. Lowry and view more of his work. They have the world’s largest collection of Lowry’s work. It’s good that a lot of it is still in the city where he worked.
http://www.thelowry.com/ls-lowry/
This is Rolf Harris. Rolf is Australian by birth but came here when he was a young man and opportunities for him, as an artist, were restricted in Australia. He broke into TV over here and has been working ever since. He has become one of our imported, national treasures. On his earlier TV shows he would do a piece where he took a pot of paint and in a few strokes would produce a good picture, usually while someone was singing or something. He did it in such a way that you weren’t quite sure what it was at first and he would shout his catch phhrase ‘Can you tell what it is yet?’
These tricks for TV hid the fact that he was a talented artist and it’s taken a long time for him to be taken seriously. One of the commercial art galleries in the city did an exhibition of his pictures recently and they were stunning and he has been to Buckingham Palace to do an official portait of the Queen.
He’s recently done a series of programmes for the BBC on artists. He would choose an artist and then take you through their lives visiting the places where they lived and worked. While he was doing that, film of him doing a painting in the style of the artist was interjected into the story. It was a good series.
He came to Manchester to do a programme on Lowry and chose the Piccadilly Gardens picture to base his work on. He also invited local artists to join him to do their interpretations of the Lowry picture. This is Rolf working on his picture. Sadly I’ve not been able to find a picture of it close up.
One of the artists who took part was a woman called Claire Stringer. Here’s her interpretation of the picture.
Another local artist who took part was Joe Hesketh. Here’s his contribution.
