Laurence Stephen Lowry, Royal Academician, is an eccentric, in as much as his paintings do not fit into any conventional grouping. He set out to record the spiky grime-covered churches, the desolate wastes and the teeming life of industrial Manchester — what he calls the Industrial Scene'. In this he has been outstandingly successful and his work hangs in galleries all over Britain, including the Tate Gallery in London.

L. S. Lowry, R.A.. with a recent painting of industrial types done against a pure white background
 

He is eighty — at least that's what he says. He looks much younger. Glancing casually at his work you might set him down as a self-taught primitive. Nothing of the sort — he spent the best part of fifteen years at schools of art in Manchester, taking the full academic curriculum but never passing any examinations.

His favourite subjects were the ones art students usually like least — plaster casts from the antique. Look at his work carefully and you will recognise the sense of tone and the perspective of the trained student. Apart from these it is difficult to trace any influences on his painting.

Lowry says, 'There was a teacher called A. Valette — Frenchman he was — an Impressionist — he took an interest in me and encouraged me. But I liked the Pre-Raphaelites best, Rossetti and — ' he glances towards a framed original of a Biblical subject '—Ford Maddox Brown. There's a lot of wonderful drawing in that'.

'Were either of your parents interested in your painting?'

Lowry answers, 'No—no. They didn't understand it. Sympathetic you know, but they weren't interested. Before 1939, if I sold one a year the family nearly had hysterics. I remember the first painting I ever sold — it was to a friend of my father's, a chartered accountant. He gave me £5 for it. Me father wouldn't believe it.'

Lowry is modest, unassuming and shrewd. He looks more like a retired engineer or an industrial chemist than an artist. He lives alone in a small house in Mottram, a few miles outside of Manchester. The house is made of stone blocks, bottle-green from the chemically-impregnated rain and pointed with bright lime-green moss. There are fields at the back, in which clumps of stunted black trees struggle for existence. It is a bleak and lonely house and he doesn't like it. He could move of course, but he hates change.

The artist on the steps of ‘The Elms’ - the sombre stone house in which he does most of his painting.

You can see this characteristic in his paintings. Timeless, like the clocks in his late-Victorian municipal towers, his paintings stopped in the 1920's. The men wear flat caps and mufflers or battered bowlers and big boots, the women wear shapeless felt hats sometimes trimmed with flowers. All his people look as though they work in the mills and don't get enough to eat. Sad, introspective people, bowed down under their personal troubles. This is the Industrial Scene as he saw it forty or fifty years ago and this is how he prefers to see it today, in fact, it hasn't changed all that much. 'Lowryscapes' with their nests of chimneys and municipal clock-towers and their grim black-spired churches, are still silhouetted against the grey-white skies.

The artist in his studio holds a recent painting of a cricket-match. And top left: a new painting of a tanker entering harbour.

'Do you make preliminary sketches on the spot ?'

'Not very often. I do most of my paintings out of my head. Too much like work to do paintings outside and I don't like work. Never did. I get a plain canvas and wonder what I'm going to put on it. Make it up as I go along.'

'When did you actually start painting? Did you draw a lot when you were a child?'

'Only the usual things that children draw you know. I used to draw little ships when I was about eight. Didn't start painting until I went to art-school. I think I did my first painting around 1906, it's in the Art Gallery at Salford.'

'Would you have painted if you hadn't gone to art-school?'

'Now that's an interesting question. I've never been asked that before. I don't think I would have done — only got interested when I went to art school.'

A scene that recalls many of Lowry’s pictures. Boys at play in Salford, Manchester

He buys his canvases ready-prepared but he paints over them in white before working on them. 'It turns a nice creamy colour in time' he says, but he quite likes painting on a wooden board, which he prepares, without sizing, with two coats of titanium white.

Most of his work is done with square-cut and filbert-shaped hog hair brushes and he does the finishing with a fine sable. He works very slowly and often spends months over a painting.

Two of his recent pictures. 'Tanker Entering Harbour' and 'The Lost Child'.

His studio, which was probably the dining-room is not very well lit and contains an old-fashioned glass-fronted bookcase, a side-board littered with a heap of unsorted press-cuttings, an easel and stacks of paintings. An Epstein head, in bronze, stands carelessly on the dusty mantelpiece near a couple of half-squeezed tubes of paint. The original study for one of Rossetti's paintings — a woman's head — hangs on the wall. He often paints here at night, into the early hours, to the music of Italian opera, played on his gramophone.

Lowry will accept criticism from any of his friends — stockbrokers, people in the cotton business, children.

'The Cricket Match’ Lowry had trees in the background but a little girl suggested he should take them out 'because you can’t paint trees Mr Lowry

He points to his painting of a cricket match (above). 'I had trees in the background there and this little girl — she's only eleven — said "Oh Mr. Lowry, please take those dreadful trees out, you know you can't paint trees". I took them out and put in buildings. She was right, you know.'

He once tried to paint the Transporter Bridge at Runcorn. Couldn't get it right. Then he saw a drawing by a child of nine who had hit it off to a 'T'. 'No use attempting to do it after that' says Lowry 'children can see things very clearly and simply. They often lose their gift when they start getting trained'.

He thinks that the raw material for a painting lies around you, wherever you are.

To a student who wanted to go to London, he is reported to have said: 'You'll do no better in London than in Wolverhampton. I can't think what you want to go to London for, you won't find any better lamp posts there than you will in Wolverhampton. It's all a lot of nonsense, London doesn't make a painter any good just because he goes there!

'It's a human weakness to imagine that the grass is greener and the subjects more plentiful on the other side of the fence, but the truth is that there are just as many subjects on your own doorstep'.

Waiting for Lowry to paint it. The Municipal buildings at Hyde, near Lowry’s village, with the Saturday market in progress.


A ‘Lowryscape’ in Salford. Lowry would probably have peopled the foreground with a scurrying crowd

Lowry's philosophy, applied to the amateur painter, would seem to suggest that you can go abroad and paint, by all means, for a change of scene and subject, but don't forget that there are trees in your own local park.

Lowry is interested in leisure painters and numbers several of his friends among them.

'I often go to their exhibitions' he says, 'and some of the things I see there are very good — very good indeed.

'They should keep on and on' he says. 'Might do better that way than if they were trained. They should do what they want and do it how they want.' Which is very much what Gaugin said to his pupils.