Biography
Born in 1936 at Clayton le Moors near Accrington, Lancashire, Robert (Bob) Eaton attended Hyndburn Park Secondary School in Accrington, but his ability in art was only first recognised at Stokenchurch in Buckinghamshire. An opportunity for pupils from Towns and Cities in the North West to spend a term at a school in Southern England was offered by the County Council in the early 1950s. The art teacher there recognised his ability. He was excused all other lessons and spent the entire term drawing and painting under this man’s tutelage; it was following this Bob attended Art College in Accrington from 1954 and 1956.
Following National Service Bob married Mary in 1959 and was to set out on a career as an art teacher; firstly at his old school, Hyndburn Park and between 1966 and 1985 as Hollins Secondary Modern school in the same town, rising to head of Art.
Throughout this period Bob was balancing his teaching profession, raising a family of three children and creating his own work. Every spare moment was spent in either the East Lancashire hills and moorland or in the back streets of Accrington and surrounding industrial towns, sketching quickly in all weathers. He would often annotate these as the basis for his finished works. Inadvertently they created an historical record of a time of great change.
In 1974 he exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition and the following year at the Exhibition of British Artists at the Louvre in Paris.
In 1980 the Howarth Art Gallery in Accrington staged a large solo show of Bob’s work. It was a successful venture, commercially, but it became a pivotal moment in his artistic life as he began to turn his back totally on the commercial side of art. From then on he sold or even gave the occasional painting to people he liked, but other than that he became more prodigious in his output, more obsessed with the process and more obstinate in his refusal to part with his paintings.
In the mid 1980s, Bob took the opportunity for early retirement and spent the next 35 years developing his craft. During this period he would converse with other artists, receiving advice and help from the likes of John Ward, Ken Howard and Kyffin Williams. He would experiment with different styles and mediums but always fell back on his own ability to sketch in the field. That was the one consistent theme of his work.
Robert Eaton died in 2023, aged eight seven, leaving a wealth of art born of decades of effort and obsession.