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Lot Essay
The Bridge (1931) with its highway of textured white paint and its lacklustre adults, fingers dangling, ready for nothing that life might throw at them. The lively, interested children (and the dog) save the image from becoming maudlin or depressive, and the beauty of the white wall of background paint, like fog, prevents this seeming barrier from looking like closure or a dead-end. The quality of the paint once again conveys Lowry's pictures into an exalted realm.
A.L.
'Lowry's real colour is - and always has been - white ... Lowry tells of a story of how in 1924 he covered a board with six applications of flake-white, let it dry, sealed it up, and left it for six or seven years. Then he repeated this process on a second board, unsealed the first and compared the two. (It was, he says, the only part of his artistic activities in which his father showed any interest.) The newly-painted board was, of course, a pure dead white: whereas the first, he noticed, had turned a subtle creamy pale-grey. The weathering, the maturing of a paint-surface has remained of the utmost importance to him: likewise the art of adding to white paint barely perceptible tints of colour and different shades of grey, just enough to break an even white surface into subtly varying textures.'
(E. Mullins, L.S. Lowry R.A. Retrospective Exhibition, London, 1966, p. 7).
A.L.
'Lowry's real colour is - and always has been - white ... Lowry tells of a story of how in 1924 he covered a board with six applications of flake-white, let it dry, sealed it up, and left it for six or seven years. Then he repeated this process on a second board, unsealed the first and compared the two. (It was, he says, the only part of his artistic activities in which his father showed any interest.) The newly-painted board was, of course, a pure dead white: whereas the first, he noticed, had turned a subtle creamy pale-grey. The weathering, the maturing of a paint-surface has remained of the utmost importance to him: likewise the art of adding to white paint barely perceptible tints of colour and different shades of grey, just enough to break an even white surface into subtly varying textures.'
(E. Mullins, L.S. Lowry R.A. Retrospective Exhibition, London, 1966, p. 7).