Colin Dick: A Regionalist Painter in the English Tradition

Colin Dick

In the late 1950s, when Colin Dick met John Hewitt, the director of Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery, he described himself as the first ‘regionalist’ painter to have his work included in the permanent collection. ‘Regionalist’ is an apt description of Colin Dick’s work as it describes a preoccupation, common to many British artists during the last century, with celebrating the indigenous culture, values and traditions of this country, rather than the internationalist vision of the avant-garde. This British tradition included strands of urban and suburban realism seen in the works of the Camden Town and Euston Road painters, as well as the Neo-Romantics and other artists who drew their inspiration from landscape and rural life. These influences on Colin Dick’s work explain something of both his stylistic development and subject matter. However, there is also a deep paradox at the heart of the ‘Englishness of English Art’ in the first half of the twentieth century (to borrow a Nikolaus Pevsner phrase). English art, as defined by Camden Town and Euston Road realism, was essentially French in its origin and inspiration, stemming from Sickert’s early contact with Impressionism. Likewise Colin Dick’s work has a big stake in the French tradition and it also explains the more radical Fauvist development in his most recent work.

From the Camden Town and Euston Road painters, we can observe the muted palette of Colin Dick’s early paintings of the Thames and London street life. He shares with those artists a similar interest in their popular subject matter covering music halls, theatre, cafes, pubs, the suburbs and dowdy post-war streets and interiors of London. This particular strand of realism was absorbed into the art school culture of the time when Colin Dick began his art education at St Martin’s School of Art in 1946.After one year of study, his education was abruptly interrupted by National Service in the RAF, during which time he vividly recorded his experiences in copious sketchbooks. On returning to St Martin’s he completed his National Diploma in Design and briefly attended the Royal Academy Schools, but his money ran out and he took a job making drawings for Crowthers’ antique dealers. He then worked as a scenic artist while continuing his art education, attending evening classes at Hammersmith School of Art. Both of these job experiences enriched his development as an artist. He married Delia Whiston (who came from Coventry) and they lived in Chiswick and Notting Hill where his painting matured and he began to find his own sense of direction.

Portrait of Delia with Toddler

Portobello Market: West Indians and Gypsies

In his Portrait of Delia with Toddler, Colin Dick celebrates married life, featuring his wife and two year old daughter Sara, in a quintessential 1950s interior. Life at Notting Hill is vividly recalled in Portobello Market: West Indians and Gypsies, which shows the busy street market on Portobello Road with stalls, barrows and carts loaded with boxes of fruit and vegetables. The picture is populated with West Indians, gypsies, children and stall-holders, as well as the animated presence of strutting and airborne pigeons flapping their wings against a turbulent sky. This early painting foreshadows many others in its focus on social minorities and his portrayal of people in an individualised way, full of character, within an engaging urban setting.

In Chiswick and Hammersmith the Thames provided material for a series of evocative river subjects to which he returns constantly in his work. Some feature the dramatic silhouettes of landmarks, such as Hammersmith Bridge, the Cutty Sark and the Royal Festival Hall and Shot Tower at the time of the Festival of Britain. Others focus on the working river with its barges, tugs and cranes set against an industrial background with a foreground of flotsam and jetsam. More leisurely and traditional activities on the river are recorded in pictures like

Swan Upping at Henley on Thames

Crew carrying a Shell: Bazelgettes’s Iron Towers

Swan Upping at Henley on Thames, and sporting events are shown with racing eights darting across the river amid the pageantry of the club colours flying from their flag poles. The painting, Crew carrying a Shell: Bazelgettes’s Iron Towers, shows a racing crew carrying their boat and oars across a road with the Baroque shape of Hammersmith Bridge looming in the background. With a typical eye for detail and character, Colin Dick contrasts these elegant oarsmen with a couple of locals represented by a woman in a floral apron and man in a cloth-cap holding a bicycle.

Colin and Delia Dick left London to settle in Coventry where he took up an appointment teaching art at Woodlands School, a new comprehensive school for boys. The attraction of Coventry was partly Delia’s family connections, but also the appeal of a city undergoing planning and redevelopment in a radical modernist manner. This forward-looking vision found its expression in the new cathedral and the cultural events that accompanied its consecration in 1962. Colin Dick recognized in Coventry the same progressive spirit he had encountered at the Festival of Britain. In the light of this, his creative engagement with the city became intense and paradoxical in so far that he vividly recorded this period of radical change with the eye of a conservator. This comes out in an important body of watercolours and drawings recording the demolition and rebuilding of Coventry as well a number of paintings related to Coventry Canal Basin. These were all purchased at the time for the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum.

Colin Dick’s watercolours now appear to be more about Coventry’s past than its transition or future. Old photographs record how Coventry looked before the war and its immediate aftermath, but Colin Dick’s work digs much deeper into the architectural heritage of the city, and above all, conveys how things felt during this period. The city was littered with bomb sites and vacant plots, and with the redevelopment came further demolition on a vast scale, clearing slums and making possible a new urban plan with a city centre surrounded by an elevated ring road known as the flyover. Old streets like Spon Street were cut in half by the ring road, but a preservation order was put upon it and its medieval buildings were later restored to their half-timbered origin. There are several drawings by Colin Dick which record some of the buildings in a state of dereliction before they were pulled down or reassembled

The March of the Flyover

Spon Street in the late 50s

elsewhere in the street. Most of the remaining buildings were kept in situ, but were later stripped down to their timber frames, filled with wattle and daub, and all traces of post-medieval accretions removed.Restored Spon Street now has a half-timbered unity, which is instructive and picturesque, but it sadly ignores the residue of time which once gave these buildings life, character and continuity. It is this organic process of piecemeal change and transformation which gave individuality and character to so much of the city centre, and it is Colin Dick’s watercolours and drawings which vividly remind us of the untidy, but unique nature of how shop frontages were before the decline of the independent retailer and advent of modernisation with its plate glass windows, corporate logos and standardisation of style.

Much Park Street

A number of streets with a variety of buildings dating from medieval to Victorian times were destroyed near the cathedral, including Much Park Street, Little Park Street and Jordan Well. Colin Dick’s picture, Much Park Street, shows the cantilevered structure of one medieval building which was dismantled and reconstructed in Spon Street. There are three pictures of Little Park Street, including a panoramic view of its nineteenth century buildings which were later demolished, and two pictures which take a more intimate view into the courts behind these frontages. One shows a narrow, cobbled alleyway ofdilapidated brick buildings

Much Park Street Court

Farrier’s Yard

with topshops. In the foreground a cloth-capped man fills a kettle from the only water tap serving the residents. The other features an open court with a woman appearing at her door facing a communal mangle set under a small pitched roof, like a wishing well. She and the mangle are surrounded by plants arranged on shelves, hanging in baskets and planted in pots, tubs, boxes and buckets. Another view behind Much Park Street shows a horse and cart in a farrier’s yard behind Lee Francis Motor Engines, reminding us of the way that individual enterprise, small family businesses, independent retailers and traditional craftsmen once existed cheek by jowl alongside larger industrial units.

These drawings reveal a lost way of life, and speak of the picturesque squalor in which some people lived in this fascinating inner city society. What this important collection of drawings does is not just map the flux and change of a particular period, but remind us of the richness and distinction of that environment, as well asthe loss of a community that gave so much texture and colour to our city centre. The irony is that now it is the modern that looks shabby and the old has taken on a post-modern stylishness. This collection of drawings also underlines themes which are consistent across Colin Dick’s oeuvre – the celebration of character and individuality, as well as a concern for that which is threatened.

Boat Rally, Bishop Street, Coventry

This comes out in Colin Dick’s paintings of Coventry Canal Basin where the city council’s redevelopment plans in the 1950s would have severed its connections with the region’s wider canal network. These plans prompted the Inland Waterways Association to campaign against this proposal by holding their National Rally in the basin, where they erected a marquee exhibiting material supporting its preservation. This campaign was endorsed and celebrated in Colin Dick’s painting, Boat Rally, Bishop Street, Coventry. It illustrates the campaign, showing the canal basin in the background festooned with bunting and two figures in the foreground raising money, brandishing leaflets, and holding a jug painted in the traditional folk style. In the background two figures carrying a canoe recall the crew in the Hammersmith painting, and on the other side of the road Colin Dick’s eye for ethnic detail is revealed in the lady wearing a sari, wheeling a push chair.This campaign, which involved the newly formed Coventry Canal Society and support of the Lord Mayor, Pearl Hyde, was a resounding success.

Rose and Joe Skinner; The Last of the Midlands Narrow Boat Folk

Another significant painting produced later was Rose and Joe Skinner; The Last of the Midlands Narrow Boat Folk.This shows the proud couple on their boat decorated in the traditional style. Joe Skinner and his wife transported coal for over thirty years across the Midlands, principally on the Coventry/Oxford canal. The coal freight narrowboats were pulled by mules led by Joe and the boat was steered by Rose. Later, Colin Dick and Joe Skinner’s nephew, Jack, played a part in saving the Oxford Canal Basin from a similar fate. Colin’s painting of The Oxford Canal Basin shows the other end of the Coventry/Oxford canal, and compared to the inner-city canal basin in Coventry, this is very much a rural view of narrowboats moored in the boatyard, dominated by the Italianate campanile of the church of St Barnabas.

The Oxford Canal Basin

Itinerants, like Rose and Joe Skinner, have captured the imagination of British artists for centuries. Gypsies appear in the work of Gainsborough, Moreland and Turner, and in the twentieth century, circus performers and fairground folk have joined their ranks, providing material for artists like Augustus John, Laura Knight and Alfred Munnings. Colin Dick’s work covers the same subject matter, and in addition he adds strolling players, such as the mummers and Morris dancers, as well as various pageants, folk customs, festivals, carnivals and idiosyncratic social gatherings. During his childhood his imagination was captured by the gypsies who appeared at his mother’s door in their ‘Edwardian cast-off finery’, and since then gypsies, their camps and horse fairs, have provided a substantial genre within his work.

Gypsy Fair at Stow

Horse Sale at Thickthorne, Kenilworth

Like Augustus John, he has learned some Romany and maintained long friendships with many gypsy families. In addition to gypsies, Colin Dick also records circus and fairground folk, regularly drawing and painting the travelling circuses and fairs on Hearsall Common in Coventry, as well as town fairs like the Warwick Mop held in the market square where the annual ox roasting takes place. His sketch books and portfolios copiously record local events, such as the Earlsdon Festival, the Godiva Festival and Pageant, the annual pancake race in Rugby, the Warwick Festival and Leamington Peace Festival.

The Molly Dance

The Leamington Peace Festival

The Warwick Festival attracts dance troupes and folk musicians from all over the country and Colin captures the spirit of the event in such watercolours as The Molly Dance. This particular dance, performed by a Fenland troupe, reveals something of the dark side of folk art in celebrating the lynching and hanging of a band of murderers. The Leamington Peace Festival has a carnival atmosphere in most of Colin’s watercolours, but occasionally he is moved to remind us of the disasters of war and the serious purpose behind the Peace Festival. Wherever people gather Colin Dick finds subject matter for his art. In recent years he has been recording, attending and participating in poetry readings and live music at the Tin Angel bar, situated appropriately in one of the restored medieval houses he recorded in Spon Street, Coventry.

Despite the Englishness of his art, Colin Dick has a broad view of British society and from the outset he has celebrated the cultural contribution of our immigrant communities. National Service first plunged him into the ethnic melting pot that comprised our British forces after the War, and it brought him together with Jamaicans and Poles whose portraits he drew. Portobello Market; West Indians and Gypsies and Boat Rally, Bishop Street were among the

Jamaican Airmen

The Demon Ravisher God of Sri Lanka

earliest paintings showingour ethnic communities. His teaching career in Leamington Spa brought him into contact with Asian pupils who helped him learn some Punjabi, and his friendship with the Sikh language lecturer, Dr Chan Sandhu, deepened his knowledge of aspects of Asian culture and folk art in particular. Like the linguistic connections he discovered between Romany and Punjabi, Colin Dick shows as much awareness of our cultural similarities as our differences. His watercolour, The Demon Ravisher God of Sri Lanka has the observation scrawled at the bottom, ‘An archaic forerunner of Guy F? burned at the Sanatan Dharm Hindhu Temple, Foleshill.’ This appreciation of other cultures is firmly rooted in the classical nature of his art education at St Martin’s where Italian and French art was nurtured, and mandatory trips to the British Museum opened him up to a whole world of art – not just the Elgin Marbles.

The Englishness of his art is paradoxically grounded in the French tradition and France became a considerable influence on his work during the 80s. He discovered and painted Boulogne-sur-Mer, and watercolours of the port, as well as English and French landscapes were exhibited there at the Musée Municipale and the Galerie Sabine. Some of this work was exhibited in Dax sur les Laudes in south west France and he has also exhibited in the Galerie Traditions at Bourg-la-Reine in Paris. In Leamington Spa he became interested in Napoleon III’s exile there in 1838–39. This prompted him to research the ‘British ambiances he frequented’ as well as his summer capital in Biarritz on the Basque coast. The outcome of this work was an exhibition entitled, Louis Napoleonin Leamington Spa and Other Places of Exile, at the Salle d’Ossuna in Biarritz.France has also provided him with a wide remit

The Carnaval at Dunkirk

to explore folk tradition and some of his most haunting and striking images feature the Carnaval at Dunkirk.Here the city is plunged into a state of licentious behaviour as citizens from discrete quarters of the city celebrate the exploits of Jean Bart, a pirate hero who relieved the blockaded port by capturing two Dutch grain ships during the seventeenth century. Led by a drum major in a red Napoleonic uniform, the townsfolk parade in grotesque makeup, men dress as women, and the mayor of the town pelts the crowd with pickled herrings. These remarkable drawings are the product of direct observation, memory, imagination and secondary sources, such as newspaper photographs and rapid sketches made from the television screen.

Perhaps the most significant French influence on Colin Dick is the stylistic change that has occurred in his work in recent years. His painting has a more Fauvist aspect with the use of vibrant colour and gestural brushwork. This can be seen at its best in the scenes from the

The Coventry Mummers

mummers’ plays where his flat vibrant colours are in keeping with the raucous nature of the subject matter. As in the Commedia del’ Arte, these mummers’ plays have set characters which include Sir George, the wise woman, the doctor and the doctor’s fool, accompanied by other characters such as Father Christmas. The above scene shows the slaying of Sir George, with the doctor inflating his chest using a pair of bellows, accompanied by the fool and Father Christmas. In these works Colin Dick demonstrates an extraordinary immediacy and energy, pushing forward the limits of a painterly style that has served him well over many years. What we see is a fusion of Fauvism and folk art, with a dash of James Ensor’s festive expressionism. Colin Dick is still finding new subjects that fit his oeuvre, new ways of recording it and, like many notable artists of the past, is demonstrating in his advancing years that he is not shy of innovation.

The following paintings are reproduced here with kind permission of the Herbert Gallery, Coventry: Much Park Street, Much Park Street Court, Farrier’s Yard, Boat Rally, Bishop Street, Coventry; 1957 and Rose and Joe Skinner, The Last of the Midlands Narrow Boat Folk, 1967.