L. S. Lowry - Quotations

Quotations

On the industrial landscape:

• "We went to Pendlebury in 1909 from a residential side of Manchester, and we didn't like it. My father wanted to go to get near a friend for business reasons. We lived next door, and for a long time my mother never got to like it, and at first I disliked it, and then after about a year or so I got used to it, and then I got absorbed in it, then I got infatuated with it. Then I began to wonder if anyone had ever done it. Seriously, not one or two, but seriously; and it seemed to me by that time that it was a very fine industrial subject matter. And I couldn't see anybody at that time who had done it - and nobody had done it, it seemed."
• "Most of my land and townscape is composite. Made up; part real and part imaginary bits and pieces of my home locality. I don't even know I'm putting them in. They just crop up on their own, like things do in dreams."

On his style:

• "I wanted to paint myself into what absorbed me Natural figures would have broken the spell of it, so I made my figures half unreal. Some critics have said that I turned my figures into puppets, as if my aim were to hint at the hard economic nescessities that drove them. To say the truth, I was not thinking very much about the people. I did not care for them in the way a social reformer does. They are part of a private beauty that haunted me. I loved them and the houses in the same way: as part of a vision.
• "I am a simple man, and I use simple materials: ivory black, vermilion, prussian blue, yellow ochre, flake white and no medium. That's all I've ever used in my paintings. I like oils I like a medium you can work into over a period of time."

On painting his 'Seascapes':

• "It's the battle of life - the turbulence of the sea I have been fond of the sea all my life, 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 stay and came on and on and on and on That would be the end of it all."

On art:

• "You don't need brains to be a painter, just feelings."
• "I am not an artist. I am a man who paints."
• "This art is a terrible business."