Northern Spirit

I started off on the ground floor where the artwork was from locally based artists. Most of these were paintings, but there were glass, ceramics and silverware. The subject areas were local too, such as the shipyards or the mines. The paintings ranged from 19th century to contemporary. I was very impressed by ‘The Boar Hunt’ that had been carved out of limewood by a local artist Gerrard Robinson, around 1879. The detail in the work was amazing. Unfortunately it was in a glass case and so I couldn’t get a decent photo of it. I was a little less impressed with Nerys Johnson’s San Giovanni Evangelista Street With Flagpole (1996). At least it gave me hope with the progression of my own painting skills.   

The Wallsend yard of Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson Ltd was one of the best known UK shipbuilding yards. They ended shipbuilding in 2005.  Thomas William Pattison captured the building of the tanker ‘La Hacienda’ in 1953.    

I found Ken Currie’s Shot Boy quite a disturbing picture (1996/7). The painting was inspired by a newspaper report of urban violence. A young lad had been shot dead. Currie displays the boy’s spirit hovering between life and death. 

On a more cheerful note, Lloyd Gibson’s Against The Time (1981) totally baffled me. The note for the work said ‘Lloyd Gibson intended the contrasts of images and materials in the construction to set off chains of thoughts and feelings in the viewer.’ Well, if you include confusion and bafflement as thoughts and feelings, then I suppose it succeeded. 

There was an excellent café on the ground floor where I had coffee  whilst admiring a large Landseer on the café wall. It was a good job they didn’t include Landseer’s ‘The Otter Speared’ in the café, since it would definitely have put people off their food. I found that particular painting upstairs. 

International Gallery

I climbed the stairs to the first floor and entered the gallery. This contained a wide variety of paintings from international artists. There was a small painting from LS Lowry, River Scene (1935). It was high up on the wall and quite small and so it was difficult to get a good view of it. It looked like his typical industrial scene, but his trademark matchstick people were surprisingly absent. 

I liked the style of Sir Stanley Spencer’s The Lovers (1934), but apart from ‘...he creates an interlocking pattern of people and things…’ in the associated notes, it left me guessing as to its meaning.   

I’m a sucker for paintings that play with your perceptions and so I quite enjoyed Glenn Brown’s, ‘In the end we all succumb to the pull of the molten core.’ In it he has painted a spinning head with two faces, one young and the other old. I had far more difficulty interpreting Frank Auerback’s ‘EOW’s Head on her Pillow II’ (1965). The oils were so thick on this painting that it felt three dimensional. I stared at it for quite a while, but I just couldn’t see the face. It was only when I looked at my photo later that the features jumped out and I wondered how I’d missed it. 

I liked Gillian Ayres abstract painting, ‘Papua’ (1988) simply because it seemed colourful and cheerful. The note with the painting says that Ayres was asked if her work was related to the natural world around her. Her response in the form of a list was: Crivelli (15th century painter), jelly moulds, Mrs Beeton’s ice cream and cakes, finials and crockets, lichens and seaweeds, shells, Uccello hats and plumed helmets. I suppose you have to take inspiration from wherever you find it.

Chris Killip - Wallsend Shipyards

Chris Killip’s photograph exhibition of the Wallsend shipyards was in a separate gallery. Killip lived and worked on Tyneside until 1991 when he was recruited by Harvard University to teach photography. The exhibition shows that he was fascinated by the way huge ships and industrial cranes provided a backdrop to everyday life in Wallsend and South Shields. A few of his photographs feature ‘Tyne Pride’ which was the biggest ship ever built on the river, but also one of the last. The photographs span the transformation from when the shipyards were busy, to the time of their obvious decline (which was actually only about 2 years). Killip gave a set of exhibition prints to the Laing in honour of the shipyard workers of Tyneside. He passed away in 2020.  

 It was the sheer scale of the industry that comes across in his photographs. I particularly liked the photo of the Tyne Pride filling the view at the end of the street in Wallsend. It was also the incredible engineering involved too. Despite the obvious dangers, none of the workers wore helmets. Apart from the massive engineering, his photos also show the poor housing of that time, although it was probably typical of the industrial north of the mid-70s. Gerald Street, which features in a few of his photos, was demolished in 1977.    

My visit to Newcastle's Laing Art Gallery had turned out far better than I expected. I liked the way they had split the locally based artwork from the more international items. I wasn’t expecting the diversity of media or artists. The Killip exhibition was exceptional and the icing on the cake for me.