Why are you looking at a book by Lowry And his work?
I stumbled on it under a pile of stuff in my room. I was cleaning up a bit then found the book and stopped tidying
You got side tracked?
Well the pictures stopped what I was doing
Did you read any of the text in the book?
Yes after a while I did
You felt the need to know more, more than the pictures could tell you?
Yes which is interesting, its the power of language I guess, I mean the written word, with pictures it can be more ambiguous
Do you feel that with the pictures Lowry is repeating himself?
Yes I do, I think that after a while you begin to see re-occurring things
Is this his subject?
Yes I think so
Has he treated his subject in a particular way?
Yes, certain colours, its as if he is like a child who has been given a box full of felt tip pens who always picks up the same colours every time they go to draw
Are his pictures realistic?
do you mean, does the subject matter look real?
Yes?
Well the buildings and the streets and the country side look quite realistic, I mean he has played quite a bit of attention , I mean they look like the outside of things, the surface of things, but the people, the people are the inside, so you can feel that the realism involves the capturing of the inner and outer of the subject matter
I see so in a way, its as if Lowry has painted a set in a play, he has created a background that is a kind of reality as best he could paint it and then let the characters of his play populate it. Its as if he Has drawn out the inner characters of real people and placed them like dolls in his painted scenes.
So its like acts in a play, where you have the same characters but change the sets, the background?
Yes I think that if Lowry had been introduced to animation he might well have got right into it
But do you think that Lowry was a painter?
You mean do I think that he was concerned with the medium itself?
Yes
Yes I do, I think that in some of the work you can see a real ordering of the colour ,the interplay between different shades, or tones, or whatever the painters terminology is, I mean its present, obviously the compositional element is strong in a lot of his pictures. He also allows the paint to be paint
You think that he enjoys the sensual aspect of painting?
I think that's one of the key elements that makes up a painter, yes
Some people might say that his work is naive?
I think that Lowry was an accomplished draughtsman, I mean from some of the work you can see that he can see. I mean he wasn't just looking, he was putting it altogether in some kind of conscious way. I think that it was a conscious effort to paint in the way that he did. I think that the exaggeration and simplification of the people in his paintings was a conscious effort to try and capture the inner feelings of his subjects characters. I think this could be one aspect that creates a tension in the paintings. One in which he is trying to paint the backgrounds as best he can like sets in which he can stage his doll like characters so that he can paint out there lives in his own manufactured world
