Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3237021 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 255 pages

Customer Reviews

A beautiful book about a great artist
Perhaps the most famous 'outsider artist' L. S. Lowry is honored in this book. The reproductions of his throngs, smokestacks, and seascapes are many and beautiful, and the text is full of Lowry's witty quotes. A bit pricey, due to the independant press and high quality, but this is the only source I know of with this much of Lowry's work, and all in color. Please buy me one.

The beauty of stoic immobility `
I owe my acquaintance with the work of Lowry to the Jerusalem artist Rifkah Goldberg who is a great admirer of his work. This volume contains beautiful color reproductions of Lowry's work, and its seems to me a highly perceptive description and interpretation of the artist's work by Michael Howard.
When I first saw the matchstick like figures of some Lowry's cityscenes I was instantly charmed by it. At the same time it seemed to me to present a childlike primitive even Grandma Moses - like way of seeing things.
But later through looking a lot at the work of Rifkah Goldberg ,whose figures have the same kind of stoic immobility that Lowry's do, I began to sense a kind of strange beauty in the work.. It is the Manchester world of many machine- made or machine- like figures each somehow set off by itself completely alone and isolated , barely able to move and certainly unable to communicate.
In one 'family picture' in this work there is a father and two sons . Howard points out that Lowry did not have a wife and children of his own. And that the family presented in the picture is a totally dysfunctional one with each of the people wholly isolated.
Lowry painted the sea and smokestacks of the city and the sticklike figures of a matchbox world. Still it feels upon the looking and re- looking at it as if it is a singular way of seeing things, the brilliant gift of a lone and lonely individual to enhance however difficultly Mankind's picture of the world.