Richard Eurich, RA - A Retrospective Exhibition

What makes one embark on the lifelong struggle that describes the career of a painter – or any artist, whether successful or obscure?

To me, early visual experiences were perhaps the obvious reason. Bradford provided these in full measure; the town itself, the streets with their steep inclines of granite setts groaning with tramcars and huge boilers being taken to the mills by great traction engines (men flinging sacking under the wheels for extra grip). Houses perched on rocks from which they were built. At night, the panoramas across the valleys, streetlights with a tram threading its way from lamp to lamp. The processions led by bands, horses decorated, drawing wagons with tableaux of all kinds - and people in fancy dress - Mischief Night, bonfires and fireworks. A balloon being launched from Peel Park – and Hucks, the first aviator to loop the loop, performing over the town in 1912.

For twenty years I lived in this environment in a large, lively family with music predominant but little interest in the visual arts. My early drawings were not precocious in the way ‘child art’ has flourished since. But those few which have survived show at least close and independent observation. But one subject which fascinated me did not arise from my watchful eye on my surroundings. I refer to the sea which is celebrated in drawings done before I had ever seen it, and when I did see it I felt a response as if to some need. Perhaps I felt it as a symbol of a certain loneliness which I have always desired and the sight of the sea has always brought that constriction of the throat caused by something of indescribable beauty. When I was in my teens I went with a master from Bradford Grammar School and his wife, both good amateur painters, to Sandsend near Whitby for a month. That started me painting in earnest and I produced some fifty seascapes in a short time and soon afterwards began a year’s trial at the School of Art, where I resisted all suggestions that I should earn a living by teaching or doing commercial art. I wanted to paint.

About this time we moved to Ilkley for my mother’s health. I hated leaving Bradford but I soon started painting rocks and quarries and the trees in our garden. I was fortunate in having cousins living in Weymouth and I loved sailing with them. Still more I loved walking alone on Chesil Beach, watching and trying to paint on the spot the great Atlantic breakers and the passing light and shadow. But salt caked my glasses and the panels I painted on, and my paint box, although weighted with stones, would not keep still. So I took to making drawings which have become increasingly a private shorthand and aid to memory. It works in two ways: a quick drawing or scribble of perhaps ships in the Solent, followed by a rapid painting in the studio. On the other hand a slight drawing made perhaps twenty years ago, when turned up in an old sketchbook can be so evocative of the time and place that a full-scale painting can emerge that is truthful but has some added depth that comes from living the past and present together. (This visual memory stood me in good stead when years later I became a War Artist to the Admiralty).

When I went to London to study at the Slade School I took with me a great admiration for Turner whose connection with Wharfedale had been a great discovery – but I was shocked to find that most of the students regarded him with contempt. Exhibitions were full of still lives with guitars and aspidistras and landscapes without weather which meant very little to me. I studied drawing for two years and spent much time in museums not painting at all except ‘out of school’. My first one-man show at the Goupil in 1929 was of drawings. This was put on partly through the interest of Sir Edward Marsh. Luckily, in spite of the Wall Street crash at that time, it sold quite well and led to many exhibitions at the Redfern Gallery. It was there I met Christopher Wood, whose early death the following year was a tragedy. When I looked at the enormous output of his short life, many pictures of the sea and ships, I realized how vital it is to paint what you love, regardless of fashion. That is no self-indulgence. The struggle is great, but as one becomes old, it is a struggle to simplify, not in an impressionistic way, but to find those tensions which can make an apparently empty canvas live.