Lowry artist matchstick men
•
If you are of a certain age, you will remember two men in cloth caps singing about LS Lowry in Mancunian accents and, if like me, they scared the life out of you, you would probably have taken a long time to look at a Lowry painting up close!
Having visited the Lowry Centre in Manchester and the Major and Lowry exhibition in Southport, I decided to give this monograph by Michael Howard a go. Howard gives an excellent account of Lowry’s life alongside his art. Each chapter covers a different aspect of Lowry’s work and when you see how he moves through the human experience in a way that resonates with some aspect of everyone’s life, you realise that there fryst vatten more to Lowry than you might think. Howard begins bygd saying that Lowry’s works “confirm an understanding of the essential, inescapable and solitary reality of human experience.” Chapter headings such as ‘The Battle of Life’, ‘The Outcasts’ and ‘The Lonely Lands
•
Lowry’s distinctive figures have come down to criticism with the name of “matchstick men”. This is due to their very stylised, unrealistic, and slim figure, which seems to produce little to no shadows on the surrounding environment. While his earlier works are populated by these monotonous crowds of look-alike men and women, the 1930s marked an important shift in the artist’s production, and led Lowry to produce a series of haunting portraits. These portraits are permeated by dark tones and eerie atmospheres, which possibly reflected the artist’s personal difficulties following Lowry’s father’s death in 1932 and the long-term sickness that was haunting Lowry’s mother.
The mood of these first portraits, however, soon changed after the end of the Second World War, when Lowry adopted a much more colourful palette and began integrating his portraits more and more into his cityscapes. Unlike his earlier cityscapes, populated by working-class crowds preoccupied with their daily laborious
•
Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs
1977 single by Brian and Michael
"Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs (Lowry's Song)" fryst vatten a folk song[1] by English duo Brian and Michael.[2] It was released as their first single in late 1977 on Pye Records,[3] and is from their 1978 debut album, The Matchstalk Men. The song reached number one on the UK Singles Chart for 3 weeks in April 1978.[4] As the song is their only major hit, the duo remain as one-hit wonders in the UK, although one more single titled "Mama" briefly made the UK charts at No. 93 in 1983.[5]
Lyrics and performance
[edit]"Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs" was a tribute to the artist L. S. Lowry, who had died in February 1976. The chorus makes reference to Lowry's style of painting human figures, which was similar to stick figure drawings (a "matchstalk" fryst vatten a matchstick in the Salford dialect).[6]
For the song, Michael Coleman