Leonard McComb: Major retrospective of visionary artist comes to Wales

The first major retrospective in 40 years of Leonard McComb RA, a visionary artist whose work connects nature, energy, and human experience, takes place from now until August at Oriel Môn, Anglesey.

Featuring masterpieces from the National Portrait Gallery, Tate, and Manchester Art Gallery, this exhibition spans 50 years of McComb’s career, from monumental drawings and striking watercolours to his renowned bronze sculpture, Portrait of a Young Man Standing.

To escape a poverty-stricken and politically troubled Northern Ireland in the 1930’s, the artist’s father Archie, and mother Delia Bridgit, chose to migrate to Manchester when McComb was a small child.

The artist spent his youth in the tough neighbourhoods of Moss Side and Wythenshawe in an industrial city already facing decline.

While McComb’s secondary education offered little in terms of arts education, his father (a sign writer and amateur painter) gave McComb his first paint brushes whilst the local woods near his new home offered a connection to nature, an early source of inspiration.

Lowry

After completing National Service, he enrolled in night school at Manchester School of Art where he met influential artists such as LS Lowry.  McComb excelled in this new environment, winning a scholarship to the Slade School of Art in 1956.

The next two decades while teaching in Bristol, London, and Oxford saw the artist gain recognition from a London-centric establishment that included relatively few working-class artists.

While the artist earned the majority of his success in the capital, it was Anglesey, off the North coast of Wales that profoundly influenced his work.  He regularly visited when his mother relocated from Wythenshawe in the 1970s, providing the artist a place to observe nature away from an unruly Brixton, the location of his home and studio.

While McComb’s work is rooted in the traditions of rigorous observational drawing, his philosophy was thoroughly modern.  An art that is imbued with a belief that there is no division between humanity and nature which is shared with eco generations today.

Anglesey

McComb’s deep connection to Anglesey, a place of inspiration for his art, is evident in works like Rock and Sea Anglesey, 1983, the largest work made by the artist at a monumental 10m x 3m.

Working for nine days at the cliffs in Benllech Bay, McComb observed the connection of the sea, the cliffs, and the sky to capture this profound meeting point of natural energy.

Drawn on eighty-four large sheets of paper, on an easel weighed down with limestone rocks, McComb’s insistence on observing from life did not limit the scale of his work.

The work captures everything that McComb stood for: his philosophy about the natural world, observation from life, and a profound attention to detail.  Rock and Sea Anglesey won the Hugh Casson Prize for Drawing in 2005 at the Royal Academy Summer Show, some twenty years after its creation.

After destroying all of his work in the early 1970’s, McComb reinvented his style with a series of epic watercolours.

Exhibition highlights include the study of Woman by a Window, 1980 (2m x 1.6m), which depicts a seated nude staring out of a window in an urban setting.  Dismissing any notion of the ‘Romantic Nude’, McComb shows a modern woman in a realistic setting in a reflective mood.  The paintings are never romanticised, but rather an attempt to capture the human spirit within nature.

Garden Trees South London, 1980 (24.2 x 119.5cm) shows a cross-section of tree trunks against a wall in the artist’s Brixton garden.   Three smaller works, Rocks at Amlwch (90 x 112cm), Rocks at Anglesey (141 x 115cm), and Cherry Blossom (89 x 110cm), show similar intensity on a smaller scale.

McComb was also an accomplished sculptor and his most renowned sculpture, Portrait of a Young Man Standing, 1963-1983, which is featured in this exhibition, is a life-sized bronze cast of a man with an open hand and clenched fist.  McComb, who was deeply concerned by the conflicts of the decade such as the Cold War and Vietnam War, conceived of the sculpture as a positive image of humanity.

The figure’s open hand and clenched fist are symbolic of humans’ ability for both “powerful and gentle actions, both physical and intellectual.  The work (part of the Manchester Art Gallery collection) took twenty years to complete, with the final version being cast in polished bronze in 1983, the first cast which is covered in gold leaf is featured in the Tate Collection.

Focus

Throughout McComb’s life, he rarely undertook portrait commissions, choosing to paint friends, family, colleagues, students, and sometimes people he met on the street.  Like his observations of the natural world, McComb wanted to catch the energy he found in the people he observed.

From the late 90s-00s McComb focussed on a series of portraits which represent the peak of the artist’s maturity.  McComb’s portrait of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing, 1999 (National Portrait Gallery Collection), an activist and campaigner against nuclear arms, and opponent of apartheid was perhaps McComb connecting with a kindred spirit.

McComb’s portrait of Phillipa Cooper, 2002, the daughter of some of his closest friends, shows a teenage girl against a pattern derived from a Persian carpet that the artist had in his studio.  This joyfully spirited work locates this young woman, who the artist had witnessed growing up, in this beautifully decorative imagery of nature.  The work reinforces the notion that humankind and nature are one whilst paying tribute and capturing the personality of a child he considered family.

Perhaps the artist’s greatest portrait is that of his mother.  Executed with extraordinary sensitivity, the work is the result of a lifetime of observation and expresses the unique bond between mother and child.  In the portrait Delia Bridgit, in the latter years of her life, sits calmly holding a cup of tea in Anglesey, pausing for thought.

McComb’s acute observation of his mother’s face is depicted with similar lines and marks that can be found in Rock and Sea.  In some small way, this extraordinary portrait of his mother contains an essence of the island, a place of great inspiration for the artist and where Delia Bridgit, after a hard life, found her home and peace.

“All my work is the result of feelings for the beauty of nature’s shapes and energies.  Drawing is a searching selection to discover the unique asymmetrical shape and internal energies of nature’s forms in space.  In this respect, everything I draw, paint, sculpt is a portrait be it a snowdrop, a mountain, a human head” – Leonard McComb RA.

View Energy, Nature, Vibration by Leonard McComb until 3 August at Oriel Môn – open Tuesday to Sunday, 10.00am to 5.00pm with free admission.

For further information, visit www.orielmon.org