LAURENCE STEPHEN LOWRY, R.A. (1887-1976)

Michael Holroyd comments on Lowry's seascapes, 'The supposed emptiness of these works is misleading. They are not empty, they are full. Full of an activated space and the physical entities of water, earth and atmosphere, always in shift; a space that like time is not in the end fixed by human constraints but occupies its own rhythms and patterns to which man must accommodate himself. Even the most apparently monotonous of his surfaces are on closer inspection ceaselessly in movement; boundaries and edges that separate the elements are ambiguous and blurred ... Within the totality of Lowry's work the seascapes stand as a final coda. Viewed as statements of the human condition, they offer no comprehensive affirmation but are part of a sustained response to the mysteries and profundities of existence, and ultimately they remain as enigmatic and as unknowable as the man responsible for their creation' (M. Holroyd, Lowry A Visionary Artist, Salford, 2000, p. 245).