Critical Review
In Mill Scene, dogs, figures, lampposts and smoke all bend against the inhospitable landscape, evoking a stormy day outside the dark Satanic Mill. The ominous atmosphere of the painting is reinforced by the artist’s gloomy, reduced colour palette. Lowry only used five colours: Ivory Black, Vermillion, Prussian Blue, Yellow Ochre and Flake White. Despite the subject matter and composition, the scene doesn’t necessarily evoke a depressing atmosphere - there is beauty in the bleakness and a sense of vibrancy through the mass of people roaming the industrial city streets. The buildings jump out in brick red from a white smoggy sky, smoke rises from the chimneys, and there is a faded city looming in the background. Lowry famously found his subject after overlooking and even despising the scenes he came to obsessively depict. Outside a mill just like the one in Mill Scene he said, “I watched this scene – which I’d look at many times without seeing – with rapture.”
