This Bio is the result of many interviews and questions from Peter Dobson about my life and work. The intention had been to rorm four 'Information Panels' to hang on the Hornsey Exhibition walls alongside the paintings.
However, the final arrangements of pictures made this inappropriate and the content of the panels somehow became my bio. Only later did I realise this. My bio consists largely of what Peter's dedication and skill was thankfully able to bring to light.
BIOGRAPHY
Colin Ward
I was born over 93 years ago at Leigh-on-Sea and loved the environment: daily fishing boats gliding silently along the creek past beautiful Leigh Harbour and the cockle sheds of Old Leigh. I loved the vistas of wide open sky and marshland alongside the old L.M.S. railway line to London. In those days an expanse of marsh stretched beyond Leigh to the slopes of green fields and grass leading to Hadleigh Castle where in 1828 John Constable had marvelled at and painted the same scene. In early childhood I did drawings of fishing boats and marshland and with my Kodak box camera took pictures of sunsets and trees (in black and white of course).
In the house with Mother and me lived an artist who I remembered repainting a sunset in one of his pictures which hung on the wall. He helped me to paint an apple and taught me to play chess but early on, unfortunately, he left the house (and his wife) and I was told he had sailed away on one of the great Thames barges. I missed him but continued painting and later did some watercolours of old shops across the road from my mother’s café in Leigh.
My school years had no impact on my interest in and love of painting, but early immature feelings for classical music were electrified by the unorthodox and lengthy bashing-out on a piano by our school music teacher, Arthur Hutchings, of the opening of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished Symphony’.
In 1940, leaving home due to the threat of German invasion, we stayed in St. Albans, which I found agreeable. Later, after six months at Wadham College Oxford, I entered the army and arrived off France on D-Day 1944, as a soldier landing on Gold Beach in the Normandy Invasion and was involved in many of the subsequent battles, finally meeting up with the Russians in Germany near Hamburg when peace was declared.
After demobilisation in 1947 and nearly a year living and working in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) I wanted to return to painting. I bought oil paints from a decorators shop and experimented on boards. Later, with a girlfriend, we each did a flower picture and mine is in this exhibition. At that time, working in the City of London I lived at Swan Wharf above a grocer’s shop in Upper Thames Street and from there painted ‘London Bridge’.
Still very fond of classical music, I heard of and joined Morley College, where I studied music and orchestration, the latter with Peter Racine Fricker. Soon, my love of the visual arts led me to Peter de Francia’s painting class. Peter became a huge influence on me over the years, not just because of his wonderful paintings and graphic work but also for his outlook on life which tied in with mine. I joined his London University extra-mural ‘History of Art’ course and worked hard on my essays. Peter later wrote that they were “…some of the best critical essays I have read.”
Peter’s time at Morley coming to an end, he suggested I join his friend David Bomberg’s group at the Borough Polytechnic. Not having heard of Bomberg then, and planning to leave my job in the City, I did not do so. Just before he left Morley, Peter invited me to visit him while he was painting his large ‘Bombing of Sakiet’ in a spacious room allocated to him by the College. This picture was exhibited at Tate Modern and later with much else of his work at Tate Britain.
After Morley, I found a lively art department at the Working Men’s College. A visiting Royal Academy tutor offered me personal tuition, but I felt the exercises he initially set me threatened to stifle my ‘direct’ feeling about painting. I did not want to lose my enthusiastic and perhaps crude approach, never intending to make a career of painting. For me it was enough to use oil paint mixed with white spirit.
Keith Grant at the College suggested I enter for the Lowes-Dickinson Art Prize, which I won. This travel prize took me, guided by a friend of my mother, to experience art in Belgium and Italy. Later on in life I was able to visit galleries and studios in eastern as well as western Europe. Special memories include the Frans Hals alms-house in Holland, the grandeur of Piero della Francesca’s works in Tuscany and the Signorelli frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral, seemingly more ‘human’ than Michelangelo’s. I also remember on a winter’s day of deep snow, a caretaker handing me a huge key with which to open the door to Burghclere Chapel to reveal the frescoes by Stanley Spencer. I also recall finding the beautiful but little known Creswell Crags in Lincolnshire used by Stubbs as a setting for so many of his paintings.
Meanwhile, in London, between periods of work, I took evening classes at St. Martin’s and the Central School of Arts and Crafts where there was little real tuition but the classes were pleasant. I also joined drawing groups including David Hutter’s, where I was the only non-professional artist.
After my retirement from teaching and meeting my future partner Ricardo Sajor, I made many visits to California, staying with Ric and his family and friends and with his encouragement began painting again but alas, feeling unwell in January 1996, returned to London and was diagnosed with temporal arteritis. In hospital I suffered a minor stroke which seemed to bring to an end any ability or wish to paint.
In earlier days there had been exhibitions of my work, including one-man shows at the Whitechapel Library and Hornsey Arts Centre organised by the painter Cornelius McCarthy, then based in Haringey. I also exhibited in the City of London and lastly, in 1972 as one of ‘Six London Artists’, in a travelling Arts Council exhibition.
Since my stroke, I’ve continued to keep up with the work of other artists, including those brought to light on my travels. In the Yucatan Peninsula and Mexico City I saw Aztec and Mayan painting and sculpture as well as the best of modern Mexican art. Travel has also been a pleasure, such as visiting the Kroller Muller Gallery in Holland, almost hidden by trees and in Malta seeing again at Valletta Cathedral, Caravaggio’s ‘Beheading of St John the Baptist’. More recently at the Estorick Gallery in London I experienced for the first time the wonderful paintings of Fausto Pirandello.
Peter de Francia died in 2012 but later on Ric and I joined a painting class at Morley College and were astonished to find that our tutor, Denzil Forrester, had been a student of Peter’s at the Royal College of Art. My time at Morley has resulted in some extra painting and drawing and work on certain uncompleted pictures. 2016 has given me the opportunity to show some of this as well as other things.
Now, so many years after my life at Leigh-on-Sea, Ric and I have lately discovered the Old Town of Hastings, only 50 miles or so (as the seagull flies) from Leigh. From shores of mud and cockles to a coast of chalk cliffs, rough beaches and sturdy fishing sheds, I feel ready to paint again!