Mrs Lowry & Son

Starring Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave, to a screenplay by Martyn Hesford, produced by Debbie Gray and directed by Adrian Noble, Mrs Lowry & Son is coming to a screen near you! The film captures the relationship between one of Britain's most iconic artists, L.S. Lowry, and his mother Elizabeth, with whom he lived until her death. Spall plays Lowry and Redgrave his mother, and the film follows him in the early part of his career, as he longs for his work to be appreciated in London. His mother, however, hates his art and tries to stop him from pursuing his ambitions. While she constantly tells him what a disappointment he is to her, the film reveals that his love for her is actually the reason he paints. Happy, sad, funny and heartbreaking, the film is powerful, humorous, tragic and uplifting as it explores the impact this mother and son relationship had on the artist, who painted both because of her and in spite of her. Love runs through it all, and Lowry's surprisingly complex character is wonderfully portrayed.

Internationally famous for his depictions of twentieth century industrial life in the north west of England, Lowry was offered five honours over his lifetime, including a knighthood in 1968, but he rejected them all. His recognition did not come until after his mother had died.

The Artist

Lowry said "I am a simple man. I use simple materials: Ivory Black, Vermilion, Prussian Blue, Yellow Ochre, Flake White and no medium." This restricted palette meant that he was in complete control of the colours and tones he could achieve.

Born in 1887, Lawrence Stephen Lowry lived and worked in Manchester all his life. In 1905 he secured a place at the Manchester School of Art and was strongly influenced by his teacher there, Pierre Adolphe Valette (1876-1942), a French Impressionist painter who moved to the UK in 1905. Lowry once said “I cannot over-estimate (his) effect on me.” Later, his job as a rent collector brought him into contact with many people living and working in the shadows of Manchester's factories, which gave him countless subjects on which to draw.

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Winsor & Newton

Throughout his life, Lowry used Winsor & Newton Winton Oil Colour. A highly-pigmented range of paints, they worked well for him and he often used them straight from the tube, using his 'Five Colour Palette' which was:

• Ivory Black - A relatively low tinting strength black with a warm brown undertone, not too overpowering on the canvas and can be used for mixing tones and shades.
• Vermilion - A bright, opaque, primary red with a blue undertone, the opaqueness of this paint gives an earthy nature in mixtures, and is not too bright.
• Prussian Blue - An important historical pigment, this was the first modern colour to be artificially produced in 1704. It is an incredibly strong colour, almost black from the tube, while its transparency makes it a good, clean mixing colour.
• Yellow Ochre - One of the oldest pigments on earth, Yellow Ochre was used by cavemen more than 15,000 years ago. It is natural earth which has been coloured by its contact with iron, and it remains one of the most important colours in an artists' palette. As a tone of yellow which does not contain black, it allows all colour mixtures with it to be relatively clean.
• Flake White - White is obligatory in order to achieve most spectrums in oil painting and without it, impasto tints would not be possible. It is popular because it is fast drying, which helps to speed up the whole painting process, Flake White is of medium tinting strength which avoids producing overly ‘chalky’ mixtures.

Advances in colour technology

After Lowry's death in 1976, many new pigments became available and there were great improvements in their permanence. Vermilion Hue is now more permanent and no longer risks fading on mixing with Flake White. Flake White has been replaced by Flake White Hue which is no longer lead based and so avoids toxicity issues. There are two choices if you want to use Lowry's palette:

Winton Oil Colour

Flake White Hue, Yellow Ochre, Ivory Black, Vermilion Hue and Prussian Blue. Despite the two pigment changes, this is arguably the nearest to Lowry's palette because the pigment strength and consistency are 'Winton' quality.

Artists' Oil Colour

Flake White No.1, Yellow Ochre, Ivory Black, Cadmium Red and Prussian Blue. Many artists prefer to use genuine Flake White, because the texture, drying rate and exact hue are unique. Yellow Ochre, Ivory Black and Prussian Blue are stronger than the Winton equivalents. Cadmium Red is the nearest Artists' Oil Colour to Vermilion which has not been available since the 1980s when the quality had become so poor that Winsor & Newton decided they could no longer use it. Prussian Blue still has some permanence issues because it fades in daylight and recovers in darkness. Indanthrene Blue overcomes this.

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Timothy Spall

One of Britain's best-loved and most talented character actors, Timothy Spall OBE received wide acclaim for his role as J.M.W Turner in Mike Leigh's Mr Turner (2014), for which he won seven international awards, including the Cannes Film Festival Best Actor Award. Timothy trained at the National Youth Theatre and RADA and began his acting career in the theatre, with seasons at Birmingham Rep and the RSC. Recently, he returned to the stage in the highly praised The Caretaker at The Old Vic. His diverse film work roles include Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter film series, The King's Speech, The Damned United, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Pierrepoint, All Or Nothing, Lucky Break, Topsy Turvy, Secrets and Lies. TV credits include: Fungus the Bogeyman, The Enfield Haunting, Blandings, The Syndicate, The Fattest Man In Britain, Oliver Twist, The Street, Bodily Harm, Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Perfect Strangers, Shooting the Past, Our Mutual Friend and his own documentary Timothy Spall: Somewhere at Sea.

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The Timothy Spall interview on Mrs Lowry & Son

Did you know much about Lowry before you were asked to play him?

'I was vaguely aware of him, through merchandise more than from anything else. I had no idea about his personal life. I always liked him and always had the feeling that there was more to him than the horrible matchstick man thing. I had an inkling there was more. He's one of those artists, a bit like Dickens, who everybody assumes they know. You know: “Oh Dickens, yes of course” – but they've never read him, and “Oh yes, Lowry” – as if they know, but they've never even looked at the paintings, which is good because it means that these people are part of our national identity, but when you investigate, there's so much more to them.'

Did you hesitate when you were offered the part?

'Not at all. Well, I had that one thought – that people might think 'Oh no here he goes again, playing another artist. But there are people who've played more than one policeman, doctor or aristocrat in their lives, and he fascinated me. There aren't many people in the world – artists being one of them – where you can try to relate their personalities to what they've produced. They're often very, very surprising. In both cases, in Turner and Lowry – their personalities and their lives are completely surprising.'

You said a couple of times in the film “I'm a simple man who paints.” But Lowry is not really simple, is he?

'No, not at all, his biographer [Shelley Rohde (1933-2007)] said he was 'the most complex simple man she'd ever met.' He threw up a few smoke screens about himself; he liked to be enigmatic – mysterious, and cheeky, pixie-ish.'

In the film, children follow him and he plays with them. Was that true?

'I believe so, he did love children, and they loved him. He had a sense of humour and I think to a certain degree, he remained an ingénue, there was something very innocent, naïve and childlike about him. I think there was a stunted quality there because of his relationship with mother. She liked to think that she could have been a concert pianist, and he was trained to be in thrall to her every wish from an early age. He was trained to follow her around with a chair in case she swooned, because she always suffered with her health. In a sense on one level, that seems to be a kind of abuse, but it became second nature to him. He had a very sweet nature, I think he remained an innocent, but he was not stupid, he was clever, bright, astute.'

How much research did you do for the role?

'It started out by me going up there, to the Lowry Gallery in Salford, unannounced, on my own, and standing there for about five or six hours, just staring at the paintings, really looking at them. I was knocked out by them. Really knocked out by their diversity and the journey that I had no idea that he took. It was an instant revelation about how different they were in style. I hate the term 'stick' paintings. They're not stick men at all.

'I watched the little film [made in 1957] of him every day, twice a day when I was filming, watching it all the time to get his mannerisms. The film shows him walking. You don't actually see him speaking, but you hear him speak. I didn't have a voice coach, sometimes I do for films if it's particularly hard accent, but I've done a Lancashire accent before. Accents to me are also informed by what people are, and by their physicality. Lowry has a slightly loping, rather odd walk, almost like Pluto, long strides. I tried to make myself taller and have a bigger nose! Somebody said 'You've grown a foot and your nose has got longer!' But what I was astounded by was how he started out, trained himself. He was a pretty good draughtsman. He struggled to get there, but I'm fascinated by how he really conquered it, and some of his early portraits are really revealing. He was taught by Valette so some of his early work is Impressionistic, while his early portraits and self-portraits are painted in that 1930s style. They're beautiful, such as his self-portrait with his cap, which he didn't enjoy doing because he didn't like looking at himself. I'm also astonished by the technicality of his work – his great paintings are composites. They're not actually literal, but are made up in his mind's eye, not real places. He had an assimilated process of imbibing what he saw, then going back to his studio and painting, having looked after his mother, and receiving the pushing back from her constantly about what he's doing. I think this creative invention and this imbibing of his environment comes out in his work through his emotions. They're not just depictions, they're not just to show 'ooh look how grim and ghastly this place is' they are self-portraits, revealing him – and I think the buildings are that even more than the people. The buildings in his paintings are riddled with him and what he's feeling; they're a bizarre mixture of the industrial, but they're also exalted.

'His parents did encourage him to paint, but I don't think his mother ever intended him to end up painting what he did. I think she had a view of what an artist is, and it certainly wasn't what he was doing. She probably imagined that he'd be a kind of court painter. Ironically, it was the fact that they were brought down in the world slightly that created the artist he is, because he hated it as much as she did when they had to move to Pendlebury, but after a while, he not only accepted it, but he started to love it, and to see something in it that nobody had seen before. That's what I'm talking about, the grimness and the beauty that also comes directly through his situation. He's this isolated character, a rent collector, following his father in working for the same firm and not getting any higher, but this also gave him a peripatetic journey around the area. So he was part of Pendlebury, but also slightly separate from the community, and of a slightly different class. He was detached, you hear him often say 'I'm a very lonely person,' but he doesn't say it self-pityingly; he likes it. That's very important to him, he's a loner. There's a painting with a huge, great big black chimney in the centre, on its own; that has a slightly disturbing beauty about it. The chimneys of the area; they're him.'

Did you have to train to paint like Lowry?

'Well I didn't train, I did a lot for Turner [Mr Turner, 2014] and I hadn't painted for a long time after that, but when I started filming, not before, I painted all the time, constantly, I painted some copies, then I did some Lowry-esque paintings and then some more, constantly, constantly.'

You paint anyway, don't you?

'I go in fits and starts, and then I carried on, and now there are fifteen paintings of mine in the Lowry Gallery as part of the Mrs Lowry & Son exhibition. So I've got this bizarre show by default, which I'm deeply delighted about, but slightly embarrassed by.'

What are the biggest differences and similarities between Turner and Lowry?

'What they share is that they both went out, looked at the world, sketched, and then went back to their studios and painted. They didn't paint en plein air. What they took and assimilated was what they had observed mixed with what they felt emotionally about what they had seen and what they wanted to say, so their art is not directly objective. They are both working class, very strong characters. Turner was hugely successful right from the beginning, an earthy character in comparison to the amazing romantic style he had – which shows that he too painted what he felt about something rather than what he saw. Also, Turner was trained by Joshua Reynolds. Turner could paint like anybody really, he was a born artist, whereas I think Lowry had to really, really work at it.'

Many still criticise Lowry's art, while most people tend to accept Turner as a genius. Having studied and played them both, what do you think?

'I think they're both geniuses, I really do. People criticise Lowry, they think he's a Sunday painter, they probably underestimate his skill, or they think he's a happy amateur who got lucky, but I don't think that's true at all, I think that does him a massive disservice, because if he was a French artist or Italian or Polish or something, we wouldn't be saying this. It's because he's been popularised in the UK. He's committed the sin of looking like his work is really simple, and of being popularised. People criticised Dickens that he was just a penny dreadful, but the man was a complete genius, all because he committed the sin of becoming hugely popular. People forget that Lowry didn't get any recognition until he was fifty – after his mother died, which he said was wonderful but by then it didn't really mean much to him.'

Do you have a favourite scene?

'No, because this film shows such a particular journey, and he was so frustrated by it. He nearly destroyed all his paintings at one point. That self-portrait, which didn't start as a self-portrait, the man with very red eyes; I think we see a man at the end of his tether. I think it's an expression of his acceptance; this woman he really loved [his mother], but it was such a drain on him; he was coming back from work and having to deal with someone he loved who was ill. The cantankerousness of her criticising him constantly would only have gone up in volume as she became more ill. It was only after she died that he got the London exhibition that changed everything. But he was also a stubborn man, he inherited that from her. He knew he was distressing her, but he couldn't stop it, and I think that tension is in the painting. That emotional pull, that pain is in the chiaroscuro of his paintings, the juxtaposition of the industrial buildings with the people.'

Did it take a long time for you and Vanessa Redgrave to bond and get into the roles together?

'No we were thrown straight into it! We had a few days' rehearsal, then straight in. We were both interested in making it happen right there and then, some things changed a little bit, but it became very much about discovering ...'

Are there any other artists you would like to play?

'Yes I'd really like to play Blake! I'd love to – I find him fascinating. He's regarded as a hugely important influence, a poet and philosopher.'

Watch this space.

Mrs Lowry & Son will be releasing nationwide from 30th August 2019