Exhibitions - Previous Exhibitions - Rigby Graham [1931]

Born in Stretford, Lancashire in 1932, but lived most of his childhood in Seven-Oaks. Much of his childhood was spent in war-time; he faced a reality of life far too early along with many children born of his generation. His work carries a submerged violence, at variance with an angry, hapless despair that anything should be destroyed.

In 1943 his family moved to Leicester, where he has lived and worked ever since. He speaks highly of his education, but noted that school was highly disciplined, whilst art college was encouraging of self-expression and the emergence of emotions and creativity, he found this difficult to reconcile with each other and in his work retains both self-control and the turbulence of emotionality. This artist paradox transforms his work, the tightness of line holding in exuberance of brilliant colour, an idiosyncrasy which is a striking feature. One of his art teachers remarked “look at Graham, no technique at all, but everything to say!”

Graham sees landscape painting as peculiarly English, lending itself to the linear quality of art at which English painters excel, and because the English climate is kind to the colours of its landscape, there is an effort in English landscape painters to reproduce the effects of light. He had a preoccupation with islands, bare rocks and landscape barren of people.

He sees himself as an observer, a recorder, and he records in words too, writing titled on his paintings, signing his name, noting the date and occasionally adding words of explanation. He searches for total involvement. His observation of the subject is total too, he ignores nothing, does not select and reject, but delights in the sometimes boring ordinariness, even vulgarity of the scene: litter, street signs, telephone-wires and pylons. Everything is present because it points to humanity and its gross yet endearing relationship with the landscape which it builds and destroys.