Coming from the Mill 1930

In her book The Pattern in the Carpet, Margaret Drabble says – ‘You become intimate with the painting' – she was talking about doing jigsaws. (The book is a history of jigsaws from their earliest incarnation in dissected maps, which were used as teaching tools in the eighteenth century, but woven through this are her memories of her aunt, with whom she spent a lot of time and with whom she did jigsaws.)

I have to say that, through this jigsaw, I have learnt a lot about how Lowry painted - the subtle shadings and seemingly careless brushstrokes that actually convey such a lot. 

A few years ago we went to an exhibition of his work at Tate Britain – Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life. A huge amount of his work had been gathered and it made you appreciate what a great artist he was. I have been looking through the book I bought at the exhibition and reminding myself of the extensive range of work he produced. The exhibition was really to show that, although there were parallels with the French Impressionist and Realists, he was unique in concentrating most of his work on urban life. I have just looked back in Blip to July 2013 when we went to the exhibition and I noted there that he was actually a landscape artist and, as he was depicting urban landscapes, he had to put people in and that he was not being judgemental nor sentimental. I remember being amazed by some huge urban landscapes that he worked on later in life, his aim being to show what the industrial revolution had made of the world.