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Anthony Lawrence

About

Anthony Lawrence is a contemporary figurative artist who lived and worked in the UK’s New Forest until his death in November 2022. His family is now managing his magnificent, decades-long archive.

The artist was born in Cambridge in 1951. He attended St Martin’s School of Art, London (1969-70), and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University (1972-75). He exhibited in group and one-man shows throughout his career.

Here is what some of his contemporaries, critics and friends had to say about him:

" Lawrence’s work embodies that very difficult thing in painting – the execution of an idea, and its rendering with the finest skill. Tony showed me first his Dante paintings, a huge body of work in which he was immersed and dedicated to for decades of his painting career. Studies of lips all around his studio, the screaming mouth in the Wretched Souls in Limbo encircled in red impasto rings. Then there were portraits of sitters angled in strange shapes, a hint of the person and the meaning, brooding skies, heavy clouds pregnant with the promise of rain, or stretched across a bluish sky before they are cleaved with a bolt of lightning, and huge palm trees standing proudly in splattered painterly frames against hot clear weather it seemed clear he had watched and drawn.

He takes me to lunch from Tate Britain regularly, to give entertaining updates on portraiture projects, such as his sittings with Sir Ian McKellen, Seamus Heaney, and his sons. These updates and discussing his work’s development as crucial to him as painting; the painting to him as crucial as eating and drinking.

So proud of his large family, who often appear, as indeed does he, his faith, music, dogs, town and country; the blurring between his intense painting life and sprawling personal life exemplifies how for him, art and life are indistinguishable. At a retrospective in his beloved New Forest, work from across his oeuvre was displayed salon-style; self-portraits in his cap or dinner jacket, set against a floral cacophony and a strip of magazine, the Last Supper, the Damned Demoiselles d’Avignon series, still lives of vivid poppies and irises against an inimitable worked up backdrop. The body of work is a journey through self, introspection, art, religion, sex and poetry, but the thread, in Lawrence’s case, is not a theoretical one, but paint and painting itself. The joy he finds in painting is the joy we can find in revisiting these works and finding that under the technical rendering, is the philosophical journey Lawrence treads daily."

Liz Barrett, Head of Communications, Tate Galleries (2014)

"In the works here by Anthony Lawrence, an artist in oils and watercolours who has made Dante his focus for twenty years, the Renaissance pilgrim poet has become himself a painter. The ancient dark Italian wood is made from a painter’s English fears; and Dante’s leopard, lion and wolf are for Lawrence a range of powerful modern women: the obstacles, distractions, supports, obsessions in an artist’s life.

Look at the works individually and you might not think of the poet at all. Taken together, they show a painter’s powerful engagement with the Florentine master of six hundred years ago.

This set of oils on canvas has emerged from Lawrence’s own struggle which, in parallel with the battles of Dante’s own poet hero, has included much interruption, doubt and despair. His only way through his personal Dark Wood and its 4am fears has been to paint himself through them.

Seamus Heaney is the subject of the final work – a portrait of the Irish poet whom Lawrence met, by chance one night in Leeds in 2001, when he was struggling with his Dante themes and wondering if the whole project was not destructive for both himself and for his art.

Appropriately for the Divine Comedy, in which Dante’s guide to hell is the Roman poet Virgil, it was the intervention of the Nobel poetry laureate, Dante’s finest modern translator, who restored in Lawrence the confidence he had begun to lose. Heaney persuaded him to hold on to his course – and sent him his own translations and suggestions to keep him there. This last painting is a form of thanks to Heaney – a gratitude which many visitors to this challenging exhibition are now set to share."

Sir Peter Stothard, Editor of The Times Literary Supplement, 2006

"Centrepiece of the exhibition is A Practical Guide to Aesthetics, an extraordinary 60-foot mural that comprises twelve separate paintings, all interlinked, that took two years to plan and four years to paint. It’s so big that the Broadgate show offers Lawrence his first opportunity to see it as visualised – in one piece, stretching the entire length of a single wall. It’s designed, he says, to liberate him from past work – one step back, two steps forward. ‘I wanted to clear out all the cobwebs so I looked at everything to do with me and my art and pulled together images that were important to me’.

One particularly fascinating section contains almost 70 portraits of friends, people he knows or people who have influenced him. Not only does it include Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock and David Hockney, it also features such diverse characters as Lenin, Desperate Dan, Mickey Mouse, Cleo Laine (a family friend), a Picasso pastiche, two self-portraits plus a portrait of the artist by his son George – not to mention portraits of his wife and five children.

Although he favours a cerebral approach to his work, he’s unconcerned if people don’t read anything into his paintings. ‘The cerebral element is only important to me because there has to be a reason for me to do it, but I wouldn’t dictate to others what they should read out of a painting. There are different levels of appreciating art and all of them are equally valid. It would be very arrogant of me to expect someone to sit down in front of one of my paintings and have to think about what the artist intended. In painting there’s the person who does them and the person who looks at them and I think the person who looks at them is of equal importance because what brings a painting alive is someone looking at it.’"

Simon Clark, Editor of Mensa Magazine, in a September 1992 article