Outlook


“ BURNLEY Viaduct", commissioned by Smurfit’s, early 1980s, showing Leo’s Supermarket under construction


20 inches, showing Weavers' Triangle and Slater Terrace chimney. Circa 1980


Art on the Wildside


overlooking some of our most beautiful roll­ ing bills, be told me: “When we look at nature, what strikes us about it is its incred­ ible sense of “one-ness”. Well, that’s what you try to capture on canvas, and if you start concentrating too much on perfecting every detail of a single leaf, you’ll lose it.” I can understand that. David Wild was born in Burnley in 11)31.


most of us, with its square violins, piles of bricks, and women with holes in them. But it can s ta r t to make sense if i t ’s explained properly, and nobody explains it better than Burnley’s most enduring artistic institution, David Wild. In a room littered with canvases, and


School of Art were, in his own words, glossy, romanticised industrial scenes. A trip to Paris changed all that. “I saw a little Vermeer, just six inches by eight, called ‘The Laccmaker’,” he said.


place,” he said: “At that time, the art world in general was leaning towards abstraction, and painting in the English tradition was falling away. But the Slade’s attitude was that abstraction, avant garde, and realism could, and should, co-exist, and I’m pleased to say that in today’s art world, they do. The in-fighting has stopped.” David’s very early works at Burnley


He went to Rosehill Junior and’ Burnley Grammar school, before moving on to Burn­ ley School of Art in 1947. From there, he went on to spend three years at the pres­ tigious Slade school of art, part of the faculty of fine art at London University. “The Slade was a very forward-looking


I WAS admiring a painting' in a London gallery once, when the man next to me said: “What’s it supposed to be?” “I t’s an El Greco,” I said, “don’t you like it?” “I dunno,” he said, “it’s all Greek to me!” I reckon that just about sums up art for


TONY THORPE meets David Wild and finds the area’s top modern artist has no intention of deserting his Burnley roots


approach, and when I got back to Burn­ ley, I persuaded a fellow student, named


"Tha t painting changed my whole


June, to sit for a portrait. We normally turned out a couple of paintings a week at the school of art, but she sat for me foi­ ls weeks while I tried to out-paint Vermeer. All my work became a ‘sc ru t in y of appearances’ - simply painting what I saw as perfectly as possible.” But at the same time, the eclectic Mr Wild


eventually to the bizarre work of people like Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol in the 1960s, said David. “I first saw Pollock’s work at an exhibition in Whitechapel, and since I was teaching part-time at both Rose- grove and Towneley schools at the time, 1 got the students trying his technique of just throwing paint at the canvas.” He smiled wickedly: “We were pretty avant garde at


“but not like Vermeer: Vermeer’s paintings are like cut glass. Cezanne captured the subject realistically, but he added to that by giving the paint itself a quality of its owii. Gaugin was influenced by him, so was Van Gogh, and I think he will come out as the greatest painter there has ever been.” The results of that opinion are there for all to see in David Wild’s own work. It was Cezanne’s experiments that led


Kanebo


was beginning to flirt with abstraction: he believed that colour could have an almost musical quality, and trying to create “sym­ phonies of colour” led him to his greatest influence, and the man lie still regards as the finesL of all painters, Paul Cezanne. “He was a realist painter,” said David,


that the way to GET an audience was to paint ‘VVliat Everybody Already Knows', so lie painted things like the American Hag or an archery target. Andy Warhol [licked up that idea, and started on his Monroe por­ traits and Campbell’s soup cans. Meanwhile, Barnet Newman decided that what was needed was something that would be easily assimilable by the media: one stripe, that’s what he painted - just one stripe.”


painting as he did. “He said it was no good painting in the European tradition, because there was no audience for it," said David, "which was a very realistic and strikingly honest thing to say. He said that if there was no audience, there was no point in painting to SUIT an audience. “Jasper Johns had other ideas: be believed


gest development of all - Mark Rothco’s sin­ gle-colour canvases. Are they as pointless as they first appear? David thinks not - you see, we’ve come full-circle. “Natural one­ ness,” he sai.d, “that’s what Rothco was after, and he said that if he painted just one


All that activity led to possibly the stran­


Rosegrove,” he said. But Pollock, too, had good reason for


Rothco’s work as boring. “Well, I think part of the pleasure we get from paintings is our astonishment at the sheer skill of them: with a single colour or one stripe we’re left feeling that we could do it just as well ourselves.”


single colour, with no detail at all, be would have it. When you look at one of his can­ vases, you do actually feel as though you ari­ staring existence in the face.” Ultimately, though, David regards


sional artist born, raised, and still living in Burnley, who paints in a post-impressionist style. His work has been exhibited in numerous galleries over the years, and some ol his paintings are in their permanent possession.


somewhere lie LIVES, a place of its own, a world within a world. Someone once described “reality” as a “collective hunch", and that’s probably the best definition of it I’ve ever heard. The world of David Wild and people like him is no less "reality” than the more obvious kind - it’s just a hunch held by a smaller number of people, that's all. I make no apologies for being one of them. Q


Art, to him, is not something he does, it's ... / i’-rC.-.M Y - ■/ ' <&• ; A W T - ' :r 4 FROM NATURE • FROM JAPAN IDEAL FOR EVEN THE MOST SENSITIVE SKIN


COSMETICS & SKINCARE PRODUCTS USING ONLY NATURAL ELEMENTS


HARTLEY'S V a n t a g e 12/18 RED LION STREET, BURNLEY. TEL: 21562 SV lf l '7


WE bad an enormous entry for last month’s Out­


look contest set by Brier- field cra ft wholesalers I’emiine Gifts.


each gel a t'1.7 voucher to be spent there, are: Mrs G . W i n d I e y . o f I t St Thomas’s Road, Craw-


Our three winners, who f A I t V ; ? i I WINNERS


sbawbooth; Mrs M. Nut­ ter. of 7 Monmouth Street. Colne: and Mrs A. Ilas- lewood. of ,S Uingfield Grove, Clitlieroe.


David Wild may well be the only profes­


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