Andrew Lambirth on how the cult of youth can lead to the neglect of distinguished older artists
One of the least endearing traits of our age is youth worship. I can understand that advertisers might need to target a large and gullible audience suddenly and unaccountably blessed with disposable income (or should that be credit?), but to attribute wisdom or originality to youth is a rash act indeed. The attention paid to young artists in recent decades has grown increasingly disproportionate, for no good reason apart from the follow-my-leader media circus which keeps their antics before an increasingly bored and bewildered (if not downright cynical) public. Meanwhile, the invariably more substantial achievements of mature artists are ignored because they are not considered ‘newsworthy’. Thus is the serious and rewarding disparaged, and the immature and meretricious lauded to the telegraph poles, if not quite the rooftops.
This is doubly disturbing because it is rare for a young artist to have much to say, or the ability to say it interestingly. Experience counts for far more, both in terms of content and the acquired skills with which to communicate it, as anyone with direct knowledge of the art world will readily admit. There are scores of mid-career artists out there, working away with very little encouragement or reward, some of whom were once the Bright Young Things of their generation. Fashion takes up and then it discards, and the blight of post-war British art has been the obsessive hunt for the next youthful star, while the richness and diversity of our artistic achievement across all age groups goes largely unrecognised.
However, beside the fascination for youth lies an ingrained public enjoyment of the Grand Old Man. A reverence for age is altogether more understandable: speaking personally, the friendship of older artists has taught me an immeasurable amount about both art and life, and I am deeply grateful for it. John Craxton, who has just died at the age of 87, was a supreme example of an artist full of knowledge and experience, capable of imparting his enthusiasms in the most wonderfully vivid and life-enhancing conversation. I greatly mourn his loss. Craxton’s art is well known and justly celebrated, but amazingly there are artists of his generation still at work whose careers remain a closely guarded secret to all but the specialist. One such is Roland Collins.
Roland Collins was born in 1918 in Kensal Rise, before moving with his parents to a block of mansion flats in Maida Vale at the age of 11. His great love there was the canal, and he made many drawings of it, aware from very early on that he wanted to be an artist. (At the tender age of eight he won a competition organised by the Evening News to colour in a poster.) At Kilburn Grammar School, where he helped to paint the scenery for the annual Shakespeare play, he was encouraged by the art master, Robert Whitmore, and consequently went to study for two years at St Martin’s School of Art. Aged 18, education was at an end and he must find work, which he duly did, his first job being studio assistant for an advertising agency called the London Press Exchange. He prepared layouts and designs for advertising, and worked freelance as a lettering artist. (Collins was responsible for the letter-heading for London University’s first notepaper.)
Meanwhile, he had begun what was to be the main work of his life: a long series of gouache paintings, mainly of buildings, which link directly to the Romantic topographic tradition so strong in English art. Collins particularly admired the work of three of his older contemporaries, all of them born in 1903 — Edward Bawden, John Piper and Eric Ravilious. They set a high standard to follow, but Collins has been no mere imitator of their stylistic idiosyncrasies. He is his own man, his work given to a mixture of bold delineations and fine detailing, atmospheric washes of colour alternating with crisp pattern-making. He has a particular feeling for all horse-drawn conveyances (for 20 years he rode in Hyde Park), and especially carts, for fishing boats and sea defences, canals, the Thames and for Dieppe.
Although he is a passionate Londoner, for many years a denizen of Fitzrovia, who endured a five-year Cornish exile before settling in south London, his second home (spiritually) is in France. ‘You could say I first went to Dieppe in the early 1950s in search of Sickert’, admits Collins. He and his wife Connie return there regularly, though these days he finds the town rather too smartened up, with far fewer potential subjects for him to paint. He has nevertheless published a book of his photographs, Dieppe — le visage d’une ville de province (1995), one of the earliest of which is of a farrier, taken in the 1950s.
Utterly professional, Roland Collins prides himself on turning his hand to many techniques. He has worked successfully as a designer and illustrator (he designed the sleeve for the first British LP record in 1945), a printmaker (he made a superb suite of lithographs to illustrate Noel Carrington’s book Colour and Pattern in the Home in 1954), a muralist (Greek restaurants a speciality), a photographer and a writer (he wrote the text for a children’s book, The Flying Poodle, in 1951, and illustrated another poodle book, the novel Fifi and Antoine by Charlotte Haldane in 1956), but above all he has been a painter.
He has produced a distinguished body of work which documents a fast-vanishing world. As he says, ‘So many of the things I was interested in and attracted by no longer existed after the war.’ He explains how he is drawn to the past: ‘I think it reflects my search for rural origins. My grandfather on my father’s side came from Cottenham, north of Cambridge, and was described as a farmer. They produced a very well-known blue cheese and lived in Cheese House on the green.’ If his work has a nostalgic air, it is partly because his style was firmly established in a realistic idiom through the 1930s, 40s and 50s. He has never been tempted by abstraction, preferring always to stay in close touch with what he sees. His habit is to go out walking, with his canvas painting bag over his shoulder. ‘Finding a subject that suits me — that’s the tricky bit.’ If he succeeds, he will settle down to paint it en plein air. A pause for lunch in a nearby pub and then back to work. He’ll be happy if he completes a painting in two sessions, but sometimes he’ll wander all day in search of a motif and not find one. But the enjoyment he derives from looking at buildings never pales.
In 1937 he showed a painting for the first time in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, and has continued to exhibit regularly since, though an innate modesty has kept him from the limelight. As a consequence, his delightful and unaffected paintings are less well known than they might be, and a talent which has been continuously in use for more than 70 years has gone largely uncelebrated. It is high time for a Roland Collins retrospective: an exhibition that could demonstrate the breadth and depth of his interests, and introduce to an unsuspecting public a very distinct, articulate and highly enjoyable artistic voice.
Roland Collins will exhibit with Michael Parkin Fine Art at the Works on Paper Fair at the Science Museum from 3 to 7 February 2010, or can be contacted on 020 7735 0298.
Comments