A Winter Warmer

Born in 1926, Tom McGuinness was to become one of the "Bevan Boys" during the Second World War, working in the coal mines as a vital part of the war effort, keeping both industry and communities across the UK functioning.  

Along with his contemporary, Norman Cornish, Tom McGuinness was a "graduate" of the Spennymoor Settlement, a mid-century arts centre designed to provide and encourage a greater understanding and involvement of the arts within the County Durham mining community. Tom McGuinness also studied at Darlington School of Art and became, through self education, immensely knowledgeable about art history and the works of other artists throughout the centuries. 

Tom's style was very much his own; distinctive, engaging and innovative, his work is instantly recognisable and captivating, often depicting the reality of life working the coal seams; the oppression and the claustraphobia as well as life above the pit; the life he lived and in which he painted for over six decades.

Tom died in 2006 aged seventy nine, leaving a unique artistic legacy, one we believe will continue to increase in importance and merit as the years flow on. 

Born and brought up in Cumbria, Helen left the county at the age of 18 to study Geography at Manchester University.  After years living in and exploring various parts of the UK she has now returned, living and working in Ireby, west Cumbria.  The land sandwiched between the Solway and the 'Back 'o' Skiddaw' is one she knows intimately and has been hugely influential in her work.

Helen's landscapes are highly evocative, full of atmosphere and alive with movement.  They are usually unpeopled, depicting those wild, remote places which she loves to explore.  Helen has spent many hours walking, sailing, cycling and cross country skiing in all weathers.  She has climbed all 284 Scottish Munros (mountains over 3000 feet) and has sailed extensively off the west coast of Scotland, all the while observing and experiencing the best and worst of British weather, which she is not afraid to express in her work.

Her language of mark making is distinctive and self taught. Initially, she works in rapid, sweeping, almost frantic movements, using her hands to apply the chalk pastel and acrylic ink. A basic image emerges very quickly, but the pace then slows and her technique becomes more considered, until the piece is compositionally and tonally balanced. The resulting work has been exhibited widely in the UK. 

Stefan Orlowski is arguably one of the most talented exponents of classical meets contemporary painting at work in the UK today.

Born in 1985, Stefan was to initially study for his BA in Fine Art at the University of Aberystwyth before attaining his Masters in Fine Art at the highly regarded Wimbledon College of Art in 2012. It was just after graduation from Aberystwyth that Stefan, in 2008, was to win the Young Artist Award at the prestigious national Lynn Painter Stainers prize.

With numerous exhibitions to his name, including showings at Abbot Hall - Kendal, Kings Place - London, Brantwood - Coniston and in both 2021 and 2022 with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, Mall Galleries – London, Stefan continues to build a national reputation as a highly talented artist producing engaging and often thought-provoking works born of classical tradition yet firmly planted in the twenty-first century.

Stefan works largely from life; figurative paintings the result of a significant amount of in-person sittings, an understanding of the person and not just the aesthetic, with a relationship forged over months of sittings, meetings and thus creation. Where such painstaking in-person paintings are not possible, such as landscape works, the studio painting is born of countless hours of drawings and smaller preparatory plein air studies produced as observer of and participant within the landscape to be depicted, in whole or in part. Impressions are forged at different vantage points, in different conditions and with different emotions in order to bind together and inform the creation of the whole.

We are immensely proud to be working with Stefan, a true master of the contemporary interpretation of classic form.

William Selby was born in Yorkshire in 1933. Despite working, like his father, in the mines, together with a spell as an engineer, William’s first love was his art.

Self taught, William’s work has undergone changes during his career, with his 1970s/80s work largely figural and depicting every day life, with his later and current work in the true colourist traditions, and mainly focused on still life composition.

Now recognised as an important figure in the British art world, William has been elected to Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Royal Watercolour Society, New English Art Club and the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour. His work is held in many prestigious public and private collections world-wide. 

Charles Oakley was born in Manchester in 1925.  Charles’s formative years were spent in Urmston, Manchester near the Manchester Ship Canal. A bright boy, Charles won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School, where he was taught art by Charles Tunnicliff, who instilled a love of art and possibly encouraged the young Charles Oakley, who even then must have been talented. However, Charles was 14 years old when WW2 was declared. He must have seen barrage balloons over Manchester because these appear in a number of his paintings.

Serving in the armed forces in India until 1947, on his is return, Charles was accepted into the Slade School of Fine Art, excelling and subsequently winning the Sir Richard Taylor and Melvill Nettleship prize and later earning the prestigious Wilson Steer Medal in his final year.

Marrying Ann, a Cumbrian who Charles had met on a walking holiday in The Lakes, Charles Oakley became Art master at Eden School in Carlisle. His next career move was to Ferguson Fabrics in Carlisle as Assistant Head Designer. While working full-time, he continued to paint in his spare time leading to his first one-man show at the Crane Kalman gallery in Manchester in 1957.

The Crane Kalman exhibition at last offered Charles an opportunity to show his works, which featured industrial northern landscapes and life studies. L.S. Lowry, who opened Charles’s exhibition, purchased one of the nudes which he subsequently donated to Salford Art Gallery. The exhibition caused quite a stir, a shocked and disapproving councillor requested that the police closed the exhibition, leading to a feature in the Daily Mail. The publicity provoked much interest resulting in a sell-out exhibition. The offending painting showed the nude, with two teacups by the bed, one with lipstick stains on the rim.

In 1962, Charles Oakley accepted a position at Belfast College of Art, where he and his family spent 12 years, experiencing the start of the ‘Troubles’. Holidays were spent in Donegal, where Oakley enjoyed spending time by the sea, pottering in his beloved ‘Bass Boat’. He spent time painting numerous seascapes and beaches where the rotting hulls of wooden boats were gradually revealed through the shifting sand. He painted landscapes, featuring derelict houses and peatbogs.

In 1974 Charles moved back to England to teach at Newcastle Polytechnic in the Fine Art Department, commuting from Cumbria daily during the final five years before he took early retirement to focus on his painting. Trips to Holland with fine art students had provided a chance to see old Dutch masters, which he greatly admired for their attention to detail, their perspective and the story they told. Moving on from the familiar landscapes and derelict buildings, he started a new phase in his work incorporating references to the works of various old masters including Vermeer and Bakhuizen. He often used deep glazed boxes in which he placed miniature easels and objects with paintings that showed interiors with tiled floors, doorways leading to rooms beyond with walls on which hung painstakingly copied mini-replicas of 17^th - 20^th century paintings. These paintings often held a hidden story within, which only an art historian might decipher.

Charles continued to paint until he felt that his eyesight was not good enough to enable him to do the very fine and accurate brush strokes that his art required.    

Charles died aged 82 in 2008 in his adopted county of Cumbria. During his life Charles had numerous solo exhibitions at many prestigious galleries, with works held by many public institutions, including Salford Art Gallery, Tullie Carlisle, Ulster Museum, Brighton Art Gallery and The University of Northumbria, amongst many others. A posthumous exhibition was held at The Fine Art Society in London in 2015.

When scouring the UK looking for modern British (20th century) works for the gallery, we often come across wonderful artworks which are unattributed or by less well-known names than we usually deal in, but which have strong appeal and ooze that "50s and 60s" style which revolutionised British art. We've decided rather than letting these works pass by, we'll acquire them and bring them to the gallery and provide others with the opportunity of owning some wonderful work but benefiting from a more modest budget.  

Born in Porto in 1901, whilst in 1919 studying at the Fine Arts School of Porto (Escola Superior de Belas Artes do Porto), Henrique travelled to commence his further art studies in Paris, where Cormon and Bérard were among his teachers. 

In the years which followed, Henrique Medina lived in London for over ten years, subsequently travelling to Rome where he was commissioned to paint Mussolini's portrait. He travelled to São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Madrid and then arriving back in Paris, building his artistic reputation year on year. Henrique eventually moved to southern California where his talents in portraiture became much in demand. He lived in Hollywood for six years and painted many famous actresses' portraits as commissions. Indeed, such were his known talents that the painting of Dorian Gray in the MGM film The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) was commissioned and produced.

Medina had a very successful career until his death in 1988, with many prestigious institutions holding his work. There exists a museum housing over fifty of his paintings, located in Braga, Portugal.

Alasdair Gray was born in Glasgow in 1934 into a working-class family, his father a factory worker and his mother working in a clothing warehouse. After years of moving around the country due to the evacuation efforts in the Second World War, Gray’s family settled down in Riddrie, where he attended Whitehill Secondary School and won prizes for art and English- an early indicator of his artistic interests. These were furthered by his fondness for the works of Edgar Allen Poe, which became a great influence on his works later in life.

When he turned 18 he enrolled in the Glasgow School of Art, graduating with a degree in Design and Mural Painting, then working as a freelance artist, specialising in murals and gaining recognition for their intricacies and his eye for detail. Outside of murals, perhaps his most well-known body of work is from his time as Glasgow’s ‘artist recorder’, creating hundreds of drawings of notable people, places, and the general public. Over the decades, his work would be shown in such notable galleries as The Tate, Scottish National Galleries, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Hunterian Museum.

Born in 1931, Sheila Fell grew up in Aspatria, a typical West Cumbrian mining village. Whilst gaining a place at the Carlisle College of Art at 17, within two years she had obtained  a place at St. Martin’s School of Art, London. Here, she befriended Frank Auerbach, amongst other contemporaries, and went on to teach at the Chelsea School of Art.

Sheila Fell held her first exhibition in 1955, courtesy of Beaux Arts, London. It was from this that she met L S Lowry, who purchased a number of paintings from this exhibition, and many more in the years that followed. This was to be a friendship that lasted until Lowry’s death in 1976. Indeed, he assisted her financially to the tune of £3 per week for two of her early London years.

Acclaimed by critics, collectors and her peers, she began exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1965, being elected an Associate  Member of the Royal Academy in 1969, and a fully blown Member of the Royal Academy in 1974.

Sheila Fell died in 1979, aged just 48. It is likely that she only painted some six to seven hundred paintings during her life, but what arguably makes them so powerful is her almost unique ability to convey the emotion inherent in a landscape; not just the landscape itself, but the impact it has on you. As Lowry suggested, Sheila Fell was arguably the greatest landscape painter of her age.

Many of Sheila’s paintings are held in major public and private collections throughout the UK, including the Tate Gallery, Walker Art Gallery and in the Government Art Collection.

REPRESENTATIVES OF THE ESTATE OF THE LATE NORMAN CORNISH
One of the most celebrated of the mining painters of the last century and this, Norman Cornish was born in 1919 in Spennymoor, County Durham.

As with most of his generation, he began work in the pits at an early age, but was driven to paint at a similarly early age, and was accepted into the Settlement at the age of 15, later to become known as The Pitman's Academy.

Exhibiting with his peers at the Laing Gallery, Norman Cornish held his first exhibition in 1959 at the Stone Gallery, Newcastle, one of, if not the leading contemporary art gallery in the North. There he exhibited with LS Lowry and Sheila Fell, and in 1963 was the subject of a TV documentary by a young Melvyn Bragg about both Norman and Sheila.

In 1966 Norman Cornish left the work of a pitman and became a full time artist. Continuing to live in and amongst the mining community continued to provide him with a seemingly endless source of material from which to create his paintings. His work is a wonderful record of the life of a northern mining community, at work and at leisure, and one that is highly sought after across the UK and internationally. Norman sadly died on 1st August 2014, aged 94.

Castlegate House Gallery is proud to represent the estate of Norman Cornish, working with his family, and has a number of Norman Cornish paintings for sale depicting scenes from his time living and working in the colliery town of Spennymoor. If you would like more information, please call 01900 822149.

John Bellany was born in Port Seton, a coastal town in East Lothian, Scotland. Born into a fishing family, both his father and paternal grandfather captained fishing boats.

Regarded as one of the most notable British artists of the 20th century, he was viewed as an outstanding student at Edinburgh College of Art from 1960 to 65, during this time gaining the Andrew Grant Scholarship in 1962, taking him to Paris. He went on to win the Burstain Award to attend the Royal College of Art in London in 1965, where he studied under Carel Weight and Peter de Francia.

In 1968 he became Lecturer in Painting at Brighton College of Art and 1969 – 1973 he was Lecturer in Painting at Winchester College of Art.

He moved to London where he was the visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art. It was during this period that he separated from his first wife that his reputation for being a heavy drinker began. From 1978 until 1984, Bellany was Lecturer in Painting at Goldsmith College of Art. He remarried in 1978, but his second wife spent long periods of time in hospital suffering with schizophrenia which contributed to his increased bouts of heavy drinking, a “curse” that was to persist throughout his life.

In 1986 Bellany was given the first solo show ever at the National Portrait Gallery, and a solo show at the National Portrait Gallery, Scotland in 1986. In 1988 he survived a pioneering liver transplant. His surgeon Sir Roy Calne said he was the only patient he had known that had gone back to work the day after surgery.

John Bellany died in 2013, he was found in his studio clutching his paintbrush.

Works by John can be found in The Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, National Galleries of Scotland, to name but a small few.

Among Bellany’s honours are a Major Arts Council Award (1981), Athena International Art Award (1985), Royal Academy’s Wollaston Award (1987).
He was made a Royal Academician in 1991 and awarded the CBE.