Wendy Levy Art Gallery

Liam Spencer in Didsbury

Homesickness is a strange affliction. It is often less about people - the friends and family we imagine we will miss – and more about land: a certain colour of rock, the sound of birds in indigenous trees, the light of a morning street in our home town, the particular smell of rain on the tarmac - these things that create our interior landscape and speak of home, home, home, in that most enduring, cellular sense.

As a Sydney girl, I grew up by the iridescent harbour and knew my days bathed in the high light of its reflection. When I moved to the low grey of Melbourne (and now Manchester) it was the intoxicating cobalt and buoyant arc of boats on the Sydney harbour as viewed from Lavender Bay in a painting by iconic Sydney artist Brett Whitely that seemed to represent to me everything I felt about my home town (sexy, irrepressible, basking in the glory of her own splendour) and left me weeping in the gallery. I imagine few artists are able to forge such a connection with place – the ability to sum up in paint the collective experience of a location and resonate with its’ inhabitants, like a postcard forever pinned to the wall of their hearts: wish you were here.

The last time Liam Spencer exhibited at Wendy Levy Contemporary Art in Didsbury people camped on the street outside from the night before the opening. High-brow art types mind you, not teens star struck for some self modelled rock star/painter type, because Liam Spencer is anything but the self mythologising ego artist. No, they were sleeping in bags on the street to make that red dot of sale their own and have forever that piece of home, the internal postcard if you will, of this landscape, captured by his remarkable grasp of light and colour.

Bridging The Gap

“The New Lowry!” people throw labels about too easily it seems: “Geographically I can understand why (the comparison), but figuratively I can’t think of a painter less like me” says Liam. “But yes, his persona is so powerful as an artist of this area that the comparison is an obvious one to make.” It was in fact the Lowry Centre where a wider audience came to know his work. He was the first painter invited for a solo exhibition when the Lowry opened in 2000. “Urban Panoramas” saw his name as a painter of the northwestern experience and someone to seriously collect cemented. “The demand for his work is phenomenal,” says Wendy Levy, who has been exhibiting Liam’s paintings since 1999. “He bridges the gap between modern and traditional art and because of his subject matter, people can relate to his work.”

Like the exuberant Whitely painting that floored me on that grizzly day in Melbourne, it is the sense of light that most affects me when seeing Liam’s work. He captures the light particular to wherever his eye is turned, and most specifically, seems to harness the essence of this part of the world, so inextricably linked with the way geography informs the life. The muted greys and lavenders of a drizzly twilight outside his studio window, "like living with a lid on" I heard the Manchester sky once described. And yet, the palette can be full of the rich tones of ochre, gold and electric blue, glossy black reflecting the just-been-soaked city streets at night. This is not depression art.

The Quest for Light

Technically, the pervasive quest for light is achieved through a respect and love for the medium: “I try to exploit the natural luminosity of oil paints. This requires a thinner layer, sometimes painters overlook this and trowel it on, but I like to see the light shining through the paint” he says. I wonder if Liam were born in Paris would he be painting that city too, or is it something particular to Manchester and surrounds that inspire him? (After all, this is the man who staged an entire exhibition around paintings of the Mancunian Way.)

“I think wherever I found myself that is what I would paint. I realised early on that I needed to make art about things I knew well, to acknowledge that subject matter can be right under your nose.”

It is this quality, the ability to see the poignancy in the ordinary that makes him a great painter of place, and if years from now I find myself back in the glare of Sydney harbour, I will surely feel that familiar melancholy, a homesickness for Manchester, when I come across the paintings of Liam Spencer.

Words by Nicole Grimsdale