Lowry, and how one knows the nature of a City

LS Lowry is a new favorite painter.

I came across his work while exploring the museum / performance space that is his namesake on an especially redeveloped portion of the former Manchester to Liverpool ship channel.

Lowry was an odd duck, lived with his mom in a shabby mill-town terrace house until she died when he was in his 30s. Then he painted her bedroom to mark her death. He was never married, his friends claimed he was "asexual," and after his own death, a trove of never-seen pornographic painting were found in his attic. Some of these were violent in nature, and some were torn to shreds.

Lowry captured the soul of the Manchester industrial working class through his sad, lonely, and beautiful works. In the traditional British style, they use soft, gray and blue hues - very much reflecting the oft- dreary Northern sky. And the soot-choked city.

His paintings are a unique style, though, and draw the viewer way, way in. A scene in a public square looks, from afar, like a jumble of stick-like figures assembling on a busy day, beneath the red-brick, grime-stained Edwardian facades of the buildings. Upon closer inspection, one sees that everyone in the crowd is, in some way, crippled. One man has a hook for a hand. Another is missing legs. Some look like lepers, others have grotesquely distorted frames.

Lowry did not mask his observations of the grit of this strained underclass with false beauty or peaceful pastoral escapes. His paintings are very much a commentary on the state of the working man, at this particular time, at the twilight of the greatest Industrial Revolution yet known. Every bit as much a commentary as the works of Friedrich Engels, Marx, or Upton Sinclair.

There is such beauty, and such sadness, in his work.

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Today I realized (though I know I'm not the first) that one can infer a great deal about the nature and character of a city through the first questions he is asked upon arriving.

In Melbourne, the question was often "So, what sport(s) do you play?"

In New York, one often hears, "So where do you live?" "How much is your rent?"

In Manchester, on several occasions, the introductory query has been, "What kind of music do you like?"

Manchester is a place of grit - dreary memorials to better days - music - and more than a little bit of magic.