One of the most significant British modern artists, Bob Law, a painter and sculptor, was born in Brentford in 1934. He has been described as the founding father of British Minimalism art.
The only formal art training he received was as a child when his grandmother taught him watercolour painting. When he was fifteen Law was apprenticed to an architectural designer, the experience taught him to do building work and carpentry.
In 1957 Law moved from Brentford to St. Ives, where he taught himself how to paint and was encouraged and influenced by Peter Lanyon and Ben Nicholson. He worked from a cottage at Nancledra outside St. Ives, which was cheap, as there was no water, no electric, no gas, nothing, just a standpipe outside.
In 1960 he returned to London in Eel Pie Island, Twickenham. A year later, Roland Penrose arranged a French government painting scholarship for him, and he went to live for two years in Aix-en-Provence. The paintings of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman were to prove a particular inspiration to him, as was his exploration of both Eastern and Western philosophy, psychology, palaeontology, poetry and alchemy.
On his return to England, he lived on Richmond Hill from 1964 to 1969 doing 'Black Paintings' and writing poetry in lead.
From 1978 he concentrated primarily on sculpture, with which he had experimented briefly in the early 1960s.
He worked, among other occupations, as a shepherd in Hampshire. In 1997, he moved to Penzance.
Here are a few examples of his artworks and his comments, in 1989 to Radio 3RRR in Melbourne.
"I used to go out in the fields and lay down and watch - it's very windy down there - and watch the clouds race across and feel the earth spinning, feel the wind, watch the trees - just looking up in the sky and this is a sort of plan of those experiences I had laying in those remote places. The smoke coming out is a formulation of what I described as energy. I would have loved to have made sculptures from them but it's an impossible configuration. There's no way you could make sculpture of it so l just left them as drawings. You think twenty-four hours a day and you work four hours. It's just got to be good, truthful, strong - I don't like fussy paintings and people that work laboriously. I like strong simple statements."
"The Black Paintings started in 1960 in the cottage in Cornwall. Then they were thick impasto paint put on with a blade, made from powder pigment and linseed oil and lots of other ingredients because I just couldn't afford tube paint.
I gave up the series of Black Paintings and there was also a series of White Paintings on raw canvas with just a line round the edge.
I did about a hundred Black Paintings through the years and I just couldn't do them any more. I got to the end of the line.
A lot of people wanted Black Paintings and there weren't any left so I did this series of black watercolours - which include all the colours - red, yellow, blue, green and purple - layers and layers and layers of thin watercolour built up until you get this blackness with all the depth of colour in it. I did a series of about sixty over a period of eighteen months. More or less the same technique only watercolour instead of acrylic."
13 empty chairs, held in tension by the difference in Christ's and in Judas's.
Bob law said about this bronze sculpture:
"I'd made a few chairs and I was looking through some books one day and I saw Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper. I thought, that's a good subject - everyone tries it so l think I'll have a go at it. I made it without the figures so that the broken chair is Judas' chair and the centre chair with the cross in is Christ's chair - and then the other common disciples' chairs - and I made it in a most simple way, worked out all the proportions of the spaces between the legs and the backs, in wood and then I had it cast in bronze."
He developed the idea of Judas's chair into a highly charged wooden sculpture - a chair broken and stripped, nails protruding from the bottom of the legs, a barren and accusing symbol of the ultimate betrayal.
"In 1964 in Richmond I was writing poetry in lead, which I've always been interested in. They were to do with my experience of the countryside, which I'd just left in Cornwall. The letters are stamped on with letter stamps - that's all really. It was mostly old lead from old roofs, scrap yards."
"It's a shape that's been with me from the very beginnings of my drawings - over a long period of time, it became an obelisk."
Bob Law died in 2004 at the age of 70 and there is a fitting tribute by the Guardian' in a Bob Law Obituary to a great modern artist from Brentford.
All artwork images are copyright of the Estate of Bob Law, courtesy of Richard Saltoun, London.
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