Mrs. Lowry

Yesterday to see the art film about Mrs. Lowry at the Epsom Odeon. Art film in both the sense that the film is little more than two people in a room for 90 minutes and in that the son of the heroine went on, after the time when the film was set, to become a famous artist.

Down the passage behind TB, where we came across a fine composition of fungus with fag-end and dandelion, snapped left.

Onto Los Amigos (in East Street) for teas and bacon sandwiches to keep us going during the film. As good as ever, although BH was a bit cross when we left to find that they also did stuff like avocado on toast, which she had not thought to ask for.

The film turned out to be an arty costume drama, as advertised, with Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Spall doing a fine job of carrying the rather thin story line. A portrait of how one can get locked into being a carer for a much loved, but old, ill and difficult parent: a little long for my taste, and I thought they might have beefed up the story line a bit. It also left one with the impression that caring for his mother was the central, the defining period of his life, which I think is rather less than the truth - particularly when one thinks that he went on to live for getting on for another forty years after she died. Furthermore, one does not spring into fame and fortune out of thin air; there had to be more to his life of that time than collecting rents and cooking rather dreary looking meals for his mother. From which point of view, I associate now to J.K. Rowling, who did spring to fame and fortune, more or less out of thin air.

We had a few shots of Spall painting, and I thought that he could have made good use of the artist's maul which I learned about in the margins of reference 5. Which left me wondering whether Lowry himself used such a thing.

I also wondered about D.H. Lawrence and his mother, who, as I recall, was another difficult mother of a creative type obsessed with her status in the world, obsessed with not being working class and having tea with the vicar, an educated chap from down south. I then wandered off to the fact that Lawrence, born more or less at the same time as Lowry, escaped the trenches of the First World War on account of his tuberculosis. A.E. Gill, another creative type of the same generation, escaped because he was doing the Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral. But what was L.S. Lowry's excuse? For once, Wikipedia lets me down.

There were less than ten people in the cinema for the show and the cinema was only screening it once a day, at lunchtime. So perhaps a hundred people altogether. We wondered how many people from our University of Creation turned out for what one might have thought ought to be of interest to some of them, in one of the inevitable lulls between bursts of hurling gobs of coloured Polyfiller at brown cardboard boxes, or whatever else it is that they do there. Or perhaps they leave that sort of thing to the people at the Royal College in Battersea (with our last visit being noticed at reference 4) and concentrate instead on the steadier income to be obtained as website designers.

Our three visits to the 2013 Lowry exhibition at the Tate Britain are logged at references 1, 2 and 3 - it looking that I rather enjoyed the pictures and the crowds at the time. Unfortunately, the biography noticed at reference 2, although read, has been culled, so we will not be able to check the film properly until Epsom Library get around to remaindering another.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/10/lowreed-out.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/09/two-months.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/07/visit-jigsaw.html.

Reference 4: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=detritus+with+rope.

Reference 5: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/09/fake-82.html.