Canvas chronicler who captured a vibrant era
Tyne Dry Dock, South Shields
The region’s industry meant drama and beauty to Richard Hobson.
DAVID WHETSTONE reports on a new two-part exhibition of his work.
FEW artists captured the towering majesty of the North East shipyards like Richard Hobson, as you will see in a new two-part exhibition of his work in Newcastle. His watercolour paintings of Tyne Dock, South Shields, convey the energy, the movement and the thought that invariably flickers into mind when you see a great ship – how the heck did flesh-and-blood men build that?
The Gallagher & Turner Gallery, St Mary’s Place, has collaborated with the Laing Art Gallery to put on this latest exhibition of Richard Hobson paintings and monotypes charting the region’s changing industrial landscape.
They are a vibrant link with the past – a reminder that the Tyne and the Wear were once liquid production lines, turning out ships that would voyage to all parts of the world.
Richard Hobson died of cancer in 2004, aged 59, but his paintings have lost none of their power and many ears will prick up at the news that some of these latest to go on display are for sale.
“He is an artist of the region – his work has an intensity and vibrancy that captures the North East perfectly,” says Gallagher & Turner gallery manager Andrew Etherington.
“Tyneside shipyards, industrial landscapes of local towns and cities and the beauty of Northumberland were all regular subjects.”
It was the rural beauty of the North East that drew him back to the region after three years in London working in interior and furniture design.
“I began to miss Northumberland very much and I decided to return,” he said in December 1970.
Then living in Benton, Newcastle, he explained: “I love the country. Each weekend I walk miles in the Cheviots or on the moors.
“Then in the week I go back and paint. I do a pencil sketch first and then fill in with ink and watercolours. I paint in all weathers – the worst conditions seem to produce the best work.”
Two years after that interview, his first exhibition opened at the Shipley Art Gallery featuring paintings of the Coquet Valley, the Cheviots and Blanchland.
After Closure, Tyne Dock Engineering, South Shields
The artist, born in Derby in 1945, came to the North East with his family as a baby and later studied at Newcastle College of Art.
As well as being a keen painter he always expressed an interest in conservation and after studying at Gateshead College he worked for 31 years as conservator at the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle.
For three days of each week he was helping to preserve the work of others; for the remainder of the week he was concentrating on his own paintings.
During his lifetime he exhibited continuously – at galleries in the North East and at the Royal Academy, London, and the Royal Scottish Society of Watercolour Painters in Edinburgh.
The two-part Newcastle exhibition focuses on the paintings Richard did in the shipyards after winning the trust and friendship of managers and employees.
Three years ago, Pat Hobson said of her late husband: “He invested a lot in people and places and had friends from all walks of life. He loved life and he lived it.”
She said he had had the ability to see beauty in even the ugly and mundane, even to the extent of refusing to ‘airbrush’ a discharge pipe from his portrayal of a beach.
He would get upset if Pat referred to one of his paintings as a social document, accurately portraying something which might one day be lost.
She recalled: “He did not want to capture a record. He didn’t know then that the shipyards were going to go. He was drawn to them because they were subjects that spoke to him artistically.
“But they now are social documents in a way.”
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