Man with a Lonely Eye

Laurence Stephen Lowry is a 64-year-old English painter who has spent the past 35 years discovering the city of Manchester (pop. 700,700). It is only in recent years that the English have discovered Lowry.

Artist Lowry grew up in & around Manchester, but he was 28 before it occurred to him to paint it. He was a landscape man and portraitist, with strong academic tastes. Then one day he missed a train in a grimy Manchester suburb, and his life's work hit him in the eye. Says Lowry: "It was a wet afternoon, and I climbed up to the street feeling very disgruntled. I looked across . . . and saw an industrial scene. I detested it. That set me off."

Lowry abandoned his academic style. Using an almost childishly simple technique, he carefully outlined the silhouettes of the grubby buildings, brightened the industrial wastelands with little islands of color, reduced the crowds of slouching pedestrians to a series of forlorn smudges.

But Lowry's hatred of his subject soon gave way to fascination. His bleak mill fronts, belching factory chimneys, sooty church steeples and tenements with their threadbare inhabitants took on an otherworldly look for him. "To say the truth, I was not thinking very much about the people. I did not care for them the way a reformer does. They were part of a private beauty that haunted me."

Lowry painted his city scapes for two decades before a gallery owner spotted some in a London frame shop in 1938, offered him a one-man show. Since then, Lowry has had five successful London exhibitions, earned himself a reputation as England's foremost regional painter. Last week Britons were reading a new book about him by Author-Critic Maurice Collis. Entitled The Discovery of L.S. Lowry, it reproduced a selection of his Manchester paintings and told Britons something of his life.

A bachelor and a social recluse, Lowry lives 14 miles outside Manchester, makes solitary pilgrimages to town every day by bus. He rambles, waiting for a scene to catch his eye, then takes a bus back home in time for tea. After tea, he starts to paint. Says Lowry in 35-year retrospect: "My whole happiness and unhappiness were that my view was like nobody else's. Had it been like, I should not have been lonely; but had I not been lonely, I should not have seen what I did."

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