L. S. LOWRY, BURFORD CHURCH, SIGNED LITHOGRAPH, EDITION OF 850, c.1970s
Created after an oil painting by L. S. Lowry from 1948 of St. John the Baptist Church in Burford, Burford Church is a signed lithograph print from the 1970s. It shows a simple street scene with terraced houses framing the image and the church as the focal point at the end of the street. Lowry populates the scene with a few of his stylised figures wandering towards the church.
Burford Church is one of Lowry’s more simplistic scenes, showing a more or less true to life rendering of a single street. The scene is made up of a very limited colour palette and the buildings are outlined in with black producing a more abstracted style. Lowry often claimed to use just five colours in his paintings, vermillion, ivory black, Prussian blue, yellow ochre and flake white.
There are no shadows cast from Lowry’s highly stylised figures in this print and along with the artist’s use of white paint for the ground and sky, this gives the impression that there is no sunlight in this scene. The artist once said of this, “You never see the sun in my work…because I can’t paint shadows. I kept trying for years.”
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ABOUT L. S. LOWRY
L.S. Lowry is a much-loved British painter known for pictures that capture urban life in industrial north west England, most notably during the 1920s. Born in 1887 in Stretford, Lancashire, Laurence Stephen Lowry later moved to Pendlebury near Manchester where he lived and worked for over 40 years. The area, which he at first detested, was covered in factories and cotton mills that Lowry would soon obsessively depict. His fascination with the industrial landscapes and the people that inhabited them was inspired by a missed train. Standing on the platform at Pendlebury station, Lowry would later write of the view of the Acme Spinning Company’s mill, saying “I watched this scene – which I’d look at many times without seeing – with rapture.” Learn more about L. S. Lowry.
