Lowry

As a Yorkshire Pudding, it pains me to confess that one of my all-time favourite artists is the Lancastrian - Laurence Stephen Lowry. Born in Manchester in 1887, L.S. Lowry died in Glossop in 1976. He was an odd fellow - a tall bumbling bachelor with a pipe and trilby, an untidy and unmodernised house, few friends but he possessed an abnormally strong bond with his mother even long after she had died.

In the twenties and into the thirties, he was mostly focussed on the grim workaday reality of his sprawling home city. He said, "I saw the industrial scene and I was affected by it. I tried to paint it all the time. I tried to paint the industrial scene as best I could. It wasn't easy. Well, a camera could have done the scene straight off".

His painting came to an abrupt halt in 1939 with his mother's death. "After she died, I lost all interest".

After World War II, he was drawn to painting individual people - often ordinary people who inhabited his neighbourhood. He said, "I feel more strongly about these people than I ever did about the industrial scene. They are real people, sad people. I'm attracted to sadness and there are some very sad things. I feel like them".

In my little gallery below I have posted three of my favourite Lowries from the nineteen thirties:-

A Procession 1938... And an old man turns away from the
passing throng at the end of his street. He has seen it all before.

Man With Red Eyes 1938... The gaze is intense and unsettling. The mind is troubled. Perhaps it is a metaphor for Lowry himself.

A Fight 1935... It's a community event. Who knows why they are fighting? It seems so petty. Like a scene from some slapstick silent movie.