Seemingly empty of meaning, his seascapes in fact teem with philosophical weight. Like the silences of Ingmar Bergman or Harold Pinter, or the stillness of Frederic Mompou’s piano pieces, the very absence of incident and detail is what speaks so profoundly. They compel you to view them and Lowry in a different way. Shelley Rohde commented that they are ‘of such power that to look at them is to risk drowning in the depth of their mystery. The sea’ she continued:
… absorbed and thrilled him. It was something he remembered, with a fascination bordering on obsession, all his life. He saw in the inexorable ebb and flow of the tides the same vain struggle for survival that possessed the people among whom he was to live and work. It was a theme to which he would return, and return again, all his life.
L S Lowry himself said:
It’s the battle of life – the turbulence of the sea – and life’s pretty turbulent, isn’t it? I am very fond of the sea; how wonderful it is, yet how terrible it is. But I often think … what if it suddenly changed its mind and didn’t turn the tide? And came straight on? If it didn’t stop and came on and on and on and on. That would be the end of it all.
So, the sea is calling. I’m heading up over the Elizabethan walls to the cliffs that face its huge indifference. On the ridge, there’s a golf course where a few bedraggled men are whacking balls about. Tiny figures absorbed in their funny game on the fifteenth green, dwarfed by the sheer and eroded cliffs and the grey immensity of the North Sea. There’s something profound here to speculate on, but my attention is distracted by a man with a huge Alsatian dog. He’s throwing a ball for the beast using one of those plastic ball holder things that stop you having to bend down. But he’s throwing the whole thing, not just the ball, thus defeating the whole object of the bloody contraption. I wonder if I should tell him, but he might take it the wrong way, and he does have an Alsatian.
After the northernmost tee, the course gives out, just as the day is starting to give out – the last of the weak sun failing to penetrate the gloomy sheltered bays scalloped in the cliffs above the beach, that’s deserted today. The forlorn golf club house has a couple of cars parked outside, maybe someone nursing a cheering whisky. Looking back to the town, you see the higher buildings peeping up above ramparts. In the other direction is a sheltered little beach which must ring with kids’ voices in high summer. But today it is all spray and white horses and looking at the grey and indistinct skyline you don’t think of sundaes or beach balls but the prows of longships coming over the horizon.
With rain in the breeze, I head back to town through the faux streets and avenues of a deserted caravan park. The storms have scattered the bins around, leaving a flotsam of foam chip trays and cans of Irn-Bru and chocolate bar wrappers. ‘There are no valuables in this caravan and the alarm is on’ says a sign outside ‘Rio’. It’s maintenance season; a young man in blue overalls is taking away the Calor gas heaters and his mate with a roller tray of white paint nods as he passes me. Two girls are filming what must be some college project or arthouse short, and I walk up past to the basketball court and back into the outskirts of Berwick past a huge stone structure where a plaque reads ‘Sounding the Alarm’ and tells me that here Elizabeth’s armies and the good burghers of Berwick would scan the seas for the approaching enemy. It was built 1577, last rung in 1683, and is the only example of Elizabethan tower like this in Britain.
Lowry would spend hours just wandering around Berwick. ‘My recreation seems to have developed into drifting among all the back streets etc I can come across,’ he said. In honour of my esteemed Lancashire forbearer, I do the same, ending up in a separate part of town called the Greenses with its own little harbour. This was home to the sea fishermen of the Greenses and their families and, until the First World War, was cut off from the rest of Berwick-upon-Tweed by the Elizabethan Walls and formed a separate neighbourhood. The intermingling of locals with Flemish, Portuguese, French and Spanish sailors meant that people from this little enclave, bearded and swarthy, were known as the Greenses Arabs, as the Sunday League football team still is according to the fixture list in the Pilot Inn. I pop in but don’t stay long, just in time for a quick Laphroaig at the bar where three men, silent and sullen, sip their pints and are watching some Swiss Bobsleigh race meeting, presumably on Sky Sports 18, on a giant screen.
When I leave, the lights are coming on in Berwick, and the gulls are wheeling overhead and the sea mist is turning to rain. It would be the time of day when Laurence Stephen Lowry would pack up his easel and head back to the Castle Hotel for a glass of something warming, and maybe an evening with that mysterious person ‘that he had got to know’.
It has taken a long time for that bastion of British art, the Tate, to lose its prejudices again Lowry. Was it that they feared nothing that was so loved by ordinary folk could truly be any good? Is he really no good? Or is that those cripples, strikes, evictions, football matches, factory chimneys and fever vans baffled and disturbed them, speaking of a world far beyond Francis Bacon’s Soho, the French House and the Coach and Horses? The world I like to think of as the Old Weird North.
Though it’s never easy for a Lancastrian to acknowledge Yorkshire broadmindedness and generosity, Yorkshire has had no petty Trans-Pennine prejudices here. Lowrys have always been welcomed into its major galleries to sit alongside its favourite sons and daughters such as Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. They may be miserable buggers but they know a thing or two about art. I’m joking of course. Of course I am.
In this, they’ve been nurtured down the years by an admirable civic attitude to culture. Alan Bennett has written warmly of his early visits to Armley Public Library and Leeds City Art Gallery where he first came across Sickert and the Camden Town Group and of Leeds Central Library’s grand old reference section. Opera North in Leeds and Huddersfield’s support for contemporary and experimental music are subjects we’ll return to, and from adopted tyke P Larkin to Simon Armitage to Helen Mort to Peter Sansom, the county has bloody poets coming out of its ears.
One of them is Ian McMillan. It was he who told me about Sir Alec Clegg, Chief Education Officer of the West Riding County Council from 1945–74. It was a long, distinguished reign in which he helped raise several generations of Yorkshire writers, musicians and painters, teachers, doctors, sportsmen and administrators as well as miners, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers to know and care about the arts and not think it a world ‘not for them’.
Clegg oversaw an education system that completely rejected the notion that urban kids were nothing more than factory fodder. It placed art, craft, music, drama and sport at the heart of the curriculum. He also encouraged an interest in social history, and a belief that their own communities’ past was as relevant and significant as the doing of kings and queens. He wasn’t afraid of the avant-garde and wanted kids introduced to modern art, experimental music, challenging literature. Clegg’s achievements were many but one of the most justly celebrated was the creation of Bretton Hall. This was maybe the centre of alternative and creative thought in the north, a teacher training college with innovative courses in design, music and the visual and performance arts that eventually spawned the world renowned Yorkshire Sculpture Park and whose alumni include John Godber, Colin Welland, Kay Mellor and three of the four League of Gentlemen, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith.
Clegg’s office, its walls festooned with children’s art, was in Wakefield, the administrative capital of the West Riding of Yorkshire. The name would probably fall like a stone into polite southern company. It sounds defiantly northern, like a factory hooter or a Viking curse. Even though it has given its name to Oliver Goldsmith’s genial vicar and a lovely New England town, it still evokes scrums and mills and collars turned up against the wind. And hopefully modern art.
Barbara Hepworth, probably the greatest female British artist of the twentieth century, was born and raised in Wakefield where her dad was a civil engineer. She went to the girls’ high school in the town and t
hen Leeds School of Art where she met friend (and cordial rival) Henry Moore, alongside whom she would forge a new modernist style of sculpture. After the Royal College of Art, the 21-year-old Hepworth travelled to Florence to work and study. She had no wealthy patron, no trust funds, no rich family (though she did possess an accent that the Queen would have thought ‘cut glass’). What she had was a West Riding Travel Scholarship. This was in 1924 when Britain was a great deal poorer and more ravaged than it is today, and yet somehow more civilised.
I’m reading up on Dame Barbara, as she became (none of Lowry’s egalitarian misgivings here), on the train from Manchester to Wakefield. I’ve certainly got enough time. There’s much debate, heated and knotty, about the pros and cons of the controversial HS2 rail ‘improvements’ to north and central England. Discretion being the better part of valour, I’ve no intention of wading into this, but it does seem bizarre that you can reach Wakefield from the centre of London in a little over two hours, but it takes an hour and 20 – with a change in Leeds – to make the hop across the Pennines from Manchester. This mostly on trains that are Soviet era exercises in misery and dilapidation. Fortunately, for the last 15 minutes of the journey, I bunk into the snug, caramel warmth of the first class section of the East Coast Mainline. Sadly, this isn’t going to be long enough for the penne arrabbiata, Thai green chicken curry or 150ml bottle of Merlot. I do try, however, to enjoy the short trip through the Yorkshire heartlands but with every swish and thrum of the rain on the glass I think, I’m going to be walking round Wakefield in this later.
My destination this evening is the Wakefield Artwalk, a bimonthly nocturnal ramble intended to show off the city’s growing status as a creative hub for the visual arts. That’s evident from The Hepworth Gallery, the glittering brutalist trapezoidal structure on the banks of the Calder that has divided the town about its beauty but not its significance. When the Sage in Gateshead opened, they were queuing round the block at midnight to get in, cocking a lively snook (whatever that is) at the suspicions of London critics that it’s all woad and philistinism up here. Similarly, the Hepworth packed in 100,000 visitors in its first month, and half a million within six. One quote I saw trumpeted that ‘about to take its place on the country’s map of significant art destinations is the Yorkshire town of Wakefield’. Admittedly that was the company who built the Hepworth, but I think their pride is entirely justified. Brutalism divides people, and there will always be some who prefer colonades and velvet ropes behind which hang pastels of bowls of fruit and fat babies, but whatever your stance, The Hepworth is a bold statement of a town who are serious about the business, in every sense, of art.
Part of this is Artwalk – a peripatetic mobile museum, if you will, and an idea brought back from the Pacific Northwest by local artist Richard William Wheater. He lived in Seattle for a while, and then set up a Wakefield version of their ‘First Thursday’ monthly walks in 2008 while working at Westgate Studios. Wakefield’s happens on the last Wednesday of every other month and the blurb trills winningly ‘You don’t need to enjoy art to enjoy Wakefield Artwalk. If you like meeting new people, have an inquisitive mind and want to experience an alternative night out by yourself or with friends, give it a try. It’s informal, friendly and a good opportunity to meet the city’s creative community.’ That’s all true of course, but seems unnecessarily coy about the actual art which is great. That’s at the core of it, and to be applauded, even if it also comes in handy to meet new friends, pull, and eat cake; possibly simultaneously.
I fear Wakefield may never appeal to well-heeled art tourists in the way that Florence or Venice does. Old DHSS buildings in Yorkshire will never have the same sublime cachet as the Uffizi or the Doge’s Palace. But you can’t get in the Uffizi after teatime usually, and the whole point of the Artwalk is that it is there for people who can’t fill their afternoons sauntering around galleries – i.e. most of us. The walk celebrates Wakefield’s supportive attitude to the arts by basically flinging open the studios, shops, cafés, building societies, old council buildings of the town, filling them with painting, sculpture, lithographs, etchings, gouache, etc., etc., and encouraging you to mooch. There’s no route, no itinerary and no specific walk. But there is a map and lots of advice, particularly if you’re lucky enough to get spotted by some of the Artwalk team, as I was, and taken to the Art House for a glass of wine, a piece of drizzle cake and a bit of a warm. The Art House is at the heart of what Wakefield are trying to do for their burgeoning art community. There are 14 studios which will have risen to more than 40 by summer 2015. The artists have 24-hour access to the building should they be struck by inspiration after last orders. The artists are all different, working in different media, with different things to say. The very first one I walk into is full of intense etchings of imagined cityscapes, the next home to a smiling potter with clay up to her elbows and something wobbling on the wheel.
Activity is everywhere and mostly the artists are there too, paint-flecked and happy to chat about the technique and craft which have always been a mystery to me, by common consent one of the worst artists these islands have ever produced. (I used to think this was unique to me but pinned to the wall above my desk is a drawing of an owl done by my Dad during a game of Pictionary one Christmas. Freakish and distressing, the head of a suicidal Pilsbury dough boy stuck on a grotesque sausage of a body, it suggests that real artistic incompetence may be genetic.)
We walk down cobbled streets slick with drizzle, past the tempting lights of the Bollywood Lounge curry house and the Boccaccio pizzeria – both packed – and down to Westgate Studios, which shares a name with the town’s ultra-modern ‘interchange’ railway system. A stolidly Victorian structure in the middle of town, it hides a warren of artists’ studios. I like the blurry TV snapshots of Viv Owen and I love the one-woman outfit of Timid Elk, whose studio door is daubed with niche art jokes (‘Joseph Beuys Felt Me Up!’) and who makes standard lamps out of recycled rail tickets, which I like so much I buy one.
On the next corner is Unity House. Since Bretton Hall stopped using it a dozen years ago, this old landmark building on the corner of the main drag had fallen into disuse and disrepair. But thanks to Wakefield’s vibrant underdog civic groundswell (I want to say ‘plucky’ but I don’t want to patronise), and the efforts of local indie rock heroes The Cribs, a trio of brothers with accents as flat as the Calder valley and the haircuts of medieval serfs, life is being breathed back into a Grade II listed building where from the music hall era onwards Wakefield folk have supped and snogged and been entertained. Tonight a kind of guerrilla event is taking place, an evening of short experimental films corralled from around the world by two impossibly young women and projected onto an immense sheet draped on one wall. There’s an impromptu bar in the corner where I buy the organisers a drink (crates of wine and beer are bought in from the cash and carry) and the whole thing has the thrilling samizdat feel of some secret underground free jazz club in late sixties Prague.
Appropriate then that our next port of call, through puddles and cheerless streets, bleared by sodium streetlights, should be Fell House. Fell House is the sort of place where you’d queue up to be humiliated when you signed on the dole in the early eighties. Wigan’s was called Brocol House and was a classic of the genre. It looked, as this does, like a place where the Stasi would take you for interrogation if you were a troublesome intellectual in the Leipzig of the same era – an ugly, squat, concrete block; strip-lit, pre-stressed and chilling. It was in its previous life, in fact, something in between. Something both as seedily British as DCI Gene Hunt in Life on Mars and as totalitarian as Honecker’s East Germany; namely the headquarters of the West Yorkshire obscene publications squad. It was, as one of my guides says as we enter the grim basement, ‘the sort of place you expect to find a table, an overturned chair and a full ashtray.’ Yes, and perhaps the odd bloodstain. But in a brilliant move that both subverts and echoes the building’s original function, during the walk it becomes a modern
art venue. Upstairs, there’s woodcuts and pastels and rosy-cheeked artisans, pieces full of craft and care and love. Down here, there’s a lot of yellow police tape and bare metal, the kind of art that you can get mixed up with the security fittings.
I know this because I nearly blunder into one room and thus almost destroy the mesmeric installation piece it contains. ‘In Time’, by an artist-in-residence called Jaimini Patel, consists of hundreds of carpet tacks placed in geometric grids and rows across the floor of a bare cell-like space. I manage to grab the door jamb and stop myself before I bowl in kicking the nails everywhere. This is just the sort of thing some people think is the correct critical response to conceptual art, but not me. I get as much from the thoughts and ideas that pieces like this seed and trigger in my head as I ever will staring at one of Corot’s landscapes. What they are is different, and difference not convention is the great engine that drives our culture on, otherwise the ‘The Hay Wain’ would never have crossed that sluggish stream and moved on to ‘Guernica’.
I don’t claim to arrive at a comprehensive analysis. But it provokes thoughts about the painstaking nature of work and devotion to a task and the fundamental absurdity of art. Furthermore, it just looks great; strange, cold, serene. It lingers in the mind as I leave the gloomy bowels of Fell House and take in more of Wakefield’s night of art. The Bradford & Bingley has some thought-provoking watercolours and collages, and the artist, a quite posh and forceful lady in her fifties, gives me a brisk sales pitch. I explain though that I’ve already bought a standard lamp made from old rail tickets and that I have to get it back on the train.
The Pie At Night Page 16
