Richard Sharpe shares his thoughts from
The Study Window, February 2012
Readers of the Parish News will recognise both the artist and the subject of this painting. L.S. Lowry painted Piccadilly Circus in 1960. It belonged to Lord Forte. It was sold at Christie’s last year for £5,641,250. In the picture, traffic and London ‘buses spin around Eros. Pedestrians, packed together, walk briskly, legs apart and heads down. You sense that Lowry is looking at them but is not one of them. They are a shifting, anonymous crowd. Fifty two years later, we would need to add in mobile ‘phones and ear plugs. The essential message remains the same.
The Auction House was delighted with the price. Only one other Lowry has ever fetched as much at auction. 2011 was Christie’s strongest yet for 20c British and Irish Art, realising a grand total of £49,000,000.
A picture called Head of a Man with Red Eyes waspainted by Lowry in 1938. Some allege it is a self-portrait, painted either before or after the death of his domineering mother. The red eyes stare straight out at you, or is it that they stare through you? All life has gone from them. The lines of the eyebrows, cheeks and red nose meet in a sunken pit. The lips are closed. I do not hear a voice. The upturned collar and the tightly-wrapped scarf suggest someone who is cold. The background is blue, painted in vertical lines.
I saw this picture before Christmas at the Djanogly Gallery by the South Gate of Nottingham University. Sadly, this exhibition of Lowry Pictures closes on Sunday February 5th this month. The grim northern industrial landscapes, of smoking chimneys and dark figures were there. I also saw empty landscapes with no figures at all. I wanted to learn more.
Marina Vaizey wrote of Laurence Stephen Lowry that his pictures are probably the most familiar, the most loved and the most appreciated of all twentieth century art. Other distinguished critics have said that his art is unique. The interesting thing is that it came from a man who was intensely lonely, working as a rent collector and clerk. Michael Leber wrote the impulse to paint, which had maintained him for so long…was all that he had. Lowry told Edwin Mullins that I’m attracted to decay…in a way to ugliness too. In another recorded interview he said I can’t make people look cheerful. Recognition came gradually. He came from the wrong end of the country. He had been taught in the wrong places. He didn’t do self-promotion. The big exhibition of his work at the Royal Academy came after his death. Yet think what he saw, around Pendelbury, Manchester and what he felt. He once said If I had not been lonely, I would not have seen what I did. Hugh Casson wrote of the pictures in the 1976 Academy Catalogue: So much bustling group activity can conceal so much individual loneliness. Lowry had to know it to recognise it in others
Last month the Bigger Picture Art exhibition opened at the Royal Academy . The artist David Hockney has filled twelve rooms with new work. These are landscapes, painted, on-the-spot, on the Yorkshire Wolds, around Bridlington, where he now lives. This is where my own wife Jill. grew up and went to school. We know the area well. But how well do we see it? This is the challenge behind the new exhibition.
The title comes from an earlier work, Bigger Trees near Warter. We saw it last year, or rather, we stood in it. Hockney’s aim is to see and to connect with the natural world; to do so by intense observation, over time and in many directions, rather than a photograph, taken, in one direction, in a split second. To achieve this, he uses i-pad drawing and multi-cameras.
He quotes with approval a Chinese proverb To paint you need the eye, the hand and the heart-two won’t do. The East Yorkshire Wolds is rolling countryside, sitting on chalk, of huge arable fields, compact villages, wealthy farms and empty spaces. This suits Hockney’s solitary way of working. Unlike Lowry, these canvases have no people.
The significance of the exhibition is that landscape painting had largely disappeared. Why paint what we can record on a mobile ‘phone? The significance is that we live in a society in which the visual, the image are central to our ways of seeing and portraying. We can stare every day at hundreds of T.V. channels, magazines, i-phones and Facebook. We may have High Definition. Yet the speed of life and of presentation has meant that we see little, connect with little and understand even less. The media noticed the Exhibition generously. Not all critics were impressed. The one I heard from the Observer called it disappointing.
Jesus never painted pictures in the way Lowry or Hockney have done. Yet, to listen to Jesus’ stories or Parables, you can hear and see the artist’s eye. To list a few at random, there are stories about farming, seeds growing, trees budding, birds, weeds and wheat. There are even more stories about people. Jesus told stories to describe something which is dynamic, alive, bursting into life, life-giving, joy-giving. This something is called The Kingdom of God; God at work in the lives of human beings and human society. This dynamism comes from Jesus.
This is why the Church or People of God will fail if they are concerned about their image. This is why in the Bible, the worship of images or idols is forbidden. These are essentially dead and death-dealing. The Mission of the Church only makes sense and does any good when it is living His life of grace, service and forgiveness in ways which others can see, feel and enter into. It is the opposite of personal or corporate obsessions with money, protection, survival, getting on and image.