Alan Lowndes’ trajectory from the son of a railway clerk to an artist assured of a place in the history of twentieth-century British art was far from orthodox.
In 1972 he recalled,
‘I used to draw on fish and chip wrapping papers in the chip shop, at an early age, to cheer myself up and while away the time. At home we children used to draw a lot as ‘Our Dad’ (as we say in Stockport) used to draw for us…Somewhere about the age of 8 or 9 I decided very privately to myself that I wanted to become an artist.’
After leaving school at the age of fourteen, Lowndes was apprenticed to a local painting and decorating business. He attended a Decorators’ Class at Stockport Technical College and continued his training as a draughtsman in a map-making unit during World War Two. Service in Italy allowed for first-hand experience of works by artists including Fra Angelico (1395-1455) and Giotto (d.1337) which provided long lasting inspiration.
After demobilisation, Lowndes worked as a decorator and textile designer, whilst attending evening classes at Stockport Art School. By 1950 he had decided to become a professional artist and received his first solo exhibition that year, in Manchester. Having had his work displayed alongside that of Lucian Freud and John Craxton, he declared, ‘From then on, as they say, I never looked back. It was not much use looking back anyway and I hadn’t the time’.
In 1959 Lowndes moved to St Ives in Cornwall, where he remained for eleven years. He exhibited regularly in London for the rest of his career and to acclaim in New York in 1964. A move to near Dursley, Gloucestershire in 1970 was followed two years later by a retrospective exhibition at Stockport Art Gallery, in the artist’s childhood town.
Lowndes’ work has been compared to that of L.S. Lowry (1887-1976) and to Christopher Wood (1901-30). However, the art critic Terence Mullaly explained his originality, writing in 1972,
‘Lowndes has been called the only genuine working-class painter, he has been dubbed naif and called nostalgic…he is nobody’s fool…Lowndes looks at the world directly. He has no use for conventions, either academic or of the avant garde. What he does have is a considerable feeling for oil paint. At the same time, and most important, he is a witty observer. Above all, Alan Lowndes makes the ordinary seem terribly important. Neither sympathy nor sentiment, conscious comment nor self-conscious attitudes colour his observation of a world which he makes us feel is worthwhile simply because it exists.’
