Stretford born artist Laurence Stephen (LS) Lowry has become more synonymous with Salford than his native area of Manchester due in no small part to the theatre and arts building which shares his name. Housed within The Lowry at Salford Quays is a permanent exhibition: LS Lowry: The Art & The Artist. Covering Lowry’s entire career, the paintings within enable viewers to chart the development of the artist from early works such as paintings which rely on muted, dark colours, through to pencil drawings, the famous depictions of Salford and its surroundings with the vast swathes of white paint and almost stick-like figures dwarfed by gigantic mills, up to his later paintings of seascapes, devoid of any industrialisation and reliant on the blending of whites and blues.
The exhibition is currently hosting a very rare painting by Lowry which can be viewed until 5pm on the 27th May ahead of its auction at Sotheby’s on June 18th. A Cricket Match, from 1938, depicts a group of children playing a game of cricket on wasteland behind their homes, while adults stand to the side and talk. The painting has only been displayed in public twice before: first in 1939 as part of an exhibition of Lowry’s work in London and then again in 1996 at Sotheby’s as part of a pre-auction exhibition. Upon viewing A Cricket Match it is apparent that it is very much what people expect a ‘Lowry painting’ to be: his uses white paint for the sky in the background, the wasteland ground the children play on and this contrasts cleverly with the use of darker colours in the foreground for the broken fencing onto the wasteland, the clothing of the children and adults, as well as the colours of the houses, outhouses, and chimney smoke rising up into the barren, white sky. The crooked shapes of the people in the painting are offset against the stark straightness of the structures within the background of the painting.
A Cricket Match is a very striking work, at once very fresh and modern and yet it perfectly captures a specific moment in time from over eighty years ago. The wasteland the children play on may now be the site of a high-rise apartment building, office block, car park, or supermarket. The adults will be long gone, some of the children may live on, many years older now, with their memories of playing the match depicted by Lowry. His very restrained colour palette, vermilion, ivory black, Prussian blue, yellow ochre and flake white (as claimed by the artist himself) brings this and his other works in the exhibition to life in a very vivid manner. Lowry’s paintings are never dull even when he creates vast expanses of white – his representations of people and places stand out even more as a result.
The special showing of A Cricket Match coincides with the ICC Cricket World Cup in June and July coming to the Lowry’s neighbouring cricket ground at Old Trafford hosting matches, as well as a feature film opening in the summer called Mrs Lowry & Son, a biopic of Lowry and his mother. Lowry is played by Timothy Spall, marking another performance by the actor as a painter following his performance as JMW Turner in Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner. Catch A Cricket Match while you can, it will certainly be a talking point during the summer!
Reviewer - Andrew Marsden
on - 25/6/19
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