‘An artist can’t produce great art unless he has a philosophy. A man can’t say something unless he has something to say. He can see things that a camera cannot see. A camera is a very wonderful piece of mechanism but an artist has his emotions, he has his feeling and he puts those feelings into any work he is doing. If he feels strongly for his subject he will do it better’
People fascinated LS Lowry, who regularly, in his characteristic style, depicted their everyday movements with a sense of lyricism. Despite occupying a tiny proportion of the canvas, to Lowry, it is the people who give the painting meaning. He is quoted as saying: ‘a street is not a street without people... it is as dead as mutton'. (Lowry, taped interview with Gerald Cotton and Frank Mullineux, see Judith Sandling and Michael Leber, L.S. Lowry, The Man and his Art, Salford Art Gallery & Museums, Salford, 1993, p. 17).
There is a real sense of the presence of the observer in this work. The positioning of the artist, which as well as being slightly raised looks out from beyond the fence, contributes to this effect. As Maurice Collis notes, this form of compositional device is prevalent within Lowry’s ouevre: ‘it is a common thing to find a barrier in the foreground of his pictures – railings, posts or the like – as if he were looking on from behind a barrier which he could not pass’ (M. Collis, The Discovery of L.S. Lowry, London, 1951, p. 22). Indeed, Lowry’s own existence was that of a silent spectator. The artist never married nor had children, and many commentators over the years have suggested that a solitary existence affected the pictures he painted. Lowry himself said that ‘had I not been lonely, none of my work would have happened. I should not have … seen the way I saw things.’
Framed by the buildings at the sides of the composition and the factories, houses and church in the mid-ground these figures are quite literally boxed in and contained by their surroundings. Their restless movement in defiance of their oppressive environment. In reducing the figures to simple forms in Lowry’s characteristic style, the artist also removes their individuality and anonymises these figures, providing a blank canvas upon which the observer is invited to place their own understanding of human emotion and connection. Almost eighty years on, the fact that audiences can still empathise and relate to the universal nature of these relationships and the beauty in these simple moments, demonstrates why LS Lowry is one of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth century.
‘I see lots of people everywhere, myself, one lot going one way and the other lot going the opposite way, as a rule.’