Robert Dawson Retrospective Exhibition 2025 - GOLDMARK - YouTube

We've had a shop here in Uppingham for over 50 years now and one of the great fascinations is who walks in through the door. Over those years it's extraordinary how many wonderful people we've met. I'm always terribly interested in what people do. I suppose it's probably why I chose to be a shopkeeper and so I invariably ask people what sort of line of business they're in. Back in the late 90s we had occasional visits, probably twice a year, from Robert Dawson who came with his wife Peggy and I remember the first time saying to him what do you do and he said to me well he had been a lead saxophonist in a big band and his wife Peggy had been a singer and then he'd become a teacher and he was now retired and he was very big but very quiet and gentle human being and he bought lovely pieces of art probably twice a year and I guess he must have come oh maybe five six times over the course of a few years. Then two years elapsed, eventually Peggy came in on her own and she said to me that Robert had died and this was the first time that she'd ventured forth and come in and she also told me that whenever they were just a mile or two from the shop she used to say to him please tell him you're an artist and do you know he never did. She invited me to go to her house in West Bridgford in Nottingham and I could not believe what I saw. The place was jam-packed with hundreds and hundreds of works of art, huge number of books on art. We decided to put on an exhibition and I took Rigby Graham who I was working with at the time. This was the catalogue for the first exhibition which was written by Rigby Graham. It turned out that Dawson had always wanted to be an artist. He had won a scholarship to an art school when he was in his late teens but his mother wouldn't let him go. He'd been a sickly child and she was nervous that he would be along the bus so that wasn't going to be a career for him. However it didn't stop him making art and right through all the other things that he did he just continued to make art. He had a great love affair with Anglesey and he went there where he met Sir Cuffin Williams and seen his work and was very fond of him and indeed we made a film about Dawson which an edited version of which you're going to see in a minute and then subsequently we asked the art historian David Whiting to write us a book on Robert Dawson. One of the really interesting things about Dawson was that he basically painted without a market and he had no interest in the markets. So all through his life, although he painted for years and years and years, all through his life his art was, although he was untrained, his art was informed by the art of others that he looked very carefully at and also by the books that he read. But it did mean that he could follow his own path and he wasn't in any way worried about trying to please a dealer or an audience or whatever. Peggy told me that on a few occasions he was approached and asked whether he would provide art for an exhibition and his response was always the same, I haven't got any. It was interesting when we started selling Dawson paintings and we put a few of the big oils on the walls. It was really interesting that some of our customers, who I know to have very substantial collections of really important and very expensive art, bought Dawson to add to their collections despite the fact that they'd never heard of him. And in a way that really gave me the clue that we were right to work with the estate in the way that we did. I hope you can come and see the exhibition or view it online and I hope you enjoy the little film that follows. Many thanks. The early dun-coloured sun decants like weak tea through my window. Outside all is love like a Madonna's smile. Reality dissolving, slow images resolving on our own bed of pain. All of us, our hopes and fears are born again. He wanted to be a painter, a poet and a musician and I think he achieved all those. And it's a lovely cottage and we love going there and it's a lovely drive up. And when Llewellyn was here, Bob used to sometimes walk up to get the cattle out the way so we could get through. It's quite a tricky drive, all these sharp bends and rocks sticking out. And here we are, Greig. How about that? We used to stay at Mervanby Kitchen's cottage which was lovely and Bob did a lot of painting around there at Dal Guest Lie and all around that area at Cadder Idris. But Bob always painted no matter where he was. He just couldn't stop. It's something he did non-stop. There was always a pad in the car. He kept a pad in the car that he used and sketch all day long and when we got home at night while I was getting a meal he would be making them into watercolours. He just did it non-stop. He could not stop. He was a natural painter. He was a born painter. There was nothing which he had been taught. Bob did win a scholarship to the Stoke-on-Trent College of Art but as he was a sickly child, his mother thought he might be sick on the bus even though he was about 17 at the time so he didn't go. He said, to quote his own words, if he had gone he would probably have wound up working in one of the pottery factories painting roses on chamber pots. So he thought perhaps he had done the best thing. The main thing about his work was that he really did love the world around him. He loved the sky and he loved the sea and he loved the cottages and he loved the slate fences and that was dominant. That is totally different to what goes on today because in the past the subject very much dominated the picture and Bob was a man who loved the subject and he put it down with tremendous humility and I don't think he was ever really very pleased with what he painted. I have a feeling he painted it. He had to get it off his mind but he didn't say that's jolly good, I like that. He wasn't that sort of person. When he was a boy his father was a postman and used to take him out on his van and he used to love the scenery and he used to go out all weathers and the scenery in Staffordshire was very very grand and very dramatic. It was wonderful. He loved it. Godlike and slow I move among my paints. The shapes with which I lately strove mock me from the canvas. A serenity to match the mood of nature's theme evades my colour. Such unholiness of form, violent perplexity of hue bespeak of barrenness within. The soul too you see has its October days. His pictures are sensuous. They're romantic. He loves dark skies and shots of bright light and things. They're very much part of him I think. Certainly the handling of the paint I'm sure. He being a generous person he did use rich paint. He loved the quality of rich paint. It's a very interesting thing I think about the quality of paint. You can usually tell the character of an artist by his paint. The colour was always good. I don't think you could ever fail his colour. When you went to a room and there was a painting by Bob the first thing you would not say is what lovely colour. His colour was right. I think it was a certain simplicity about Wales. The Welsh cottage was not something which showed off. He never showed off and I think he liked things which were absolutely basic and natural and all the little lanes he painted and roads and stone walls and things they were all created naturally not for effect. He loved the grandeur of it I suppose. He loved the colours. He painted in quite a limited palette at times. He loved them. He just loved the the scenery. It wasn't unlike Staffordshire really. I keep a little sketchbook in the car and it was full of figures and boys on bicycles and ladies with shopping bags and anything that happened to go by. He did like drawing figures but they didn't seem to fit in with his landscapes. Bob liked painting cows because they did things with their bodies. Funny things. They twist their bodies. If you watch cows you'll see they're doing weird things. He didn't like sheep because they were just bundles of fur. It always reminded me of one of the Holbein's portraits of one of the Tudor kings. He had that sort of bit and that kind of a face. Physically he was a huge man. He could have been a prop forward in a rugby team. Big and tall and lovely. I first met Bob when I joined the Leslie Douglas Orchestra. We were going to Germany but first we did a BBC audition and Bob always seemed to be there near me. If somebody took my coat it was Bob. When you go to Germany, if you take the fare of somebody else and you've got a car, that covers the expense of the car. So Bob was going to take the tenor player with him but the tenor player let him down. So he asked me if I would like to go with him. So I travelled to Germany in Bob's old Volkswagen. We just worked in the same band and we found we could talk to each other. We were two lonely people really that hadn't found anybody before that we could talk to and share things. So that's how we met. Then we thought it would be nice if we got married. So we went to Frankfurt and the British Consul married us. So that's how it all started. Practically every artist I've ever known, proper artist, were interested in music and played some instruments. This very big man, he was a big man and the saxophone, his rather sort of humorous vision. His improvisation was great. He was connected to the original theme. It was an embellishment of the theme and it never wandered too far away. You could always hear the theme behind it. The improviser was fresh, interesting, adventurous. Bob has been one of the best lead altos on the dance band scene, the big band scene and that is the highest compliment in a sense. You can play any saxophone players to be a good player and lead a section. Bob gave up music because of the sort of music was being played. Well I don't know what they called it then, the sort of things the Beatles and all that. He said it was like playing Morse code. He was lead alto in a sax section. He liked to play music. He didn't like to play pop stuff, that wasn't his thing. But he always wanted to be a teacher and then I heard that somewhere on the radio that they were recruiting older people as teachers. So I told him about it and so he applied and he was taken on. Peggy was making the dinner and I went to his studio. I mustn't call it a garret but it was crammed full of paintings, hundreds of paintings and it was a place where he could just be himself, let himself go. It didn't matter, it didn't have to be tidy. Paintings were strewn around on the tabletops. He had boxes, boxes and boxes of pictures, drawings. His brushes were all around, a smell of turpentine. Paintings stacked up against the wall. It was just a lovely hideaway and he used to go there every night after school, straight up there and then Peggy would call him down for his dinner when it was ready. When you give up teaching, invariably artists blossom when they give up teaching. I've known artists in Wales who have done that. They've been teaching six days, five days a week and they've stopped them painting. As soon as they retired their work has improved immensely. Pastel colours were creeping in and the dark blackness was disappearing and I think this was probably because he'd been able to retire and he didn't have the stresses and strains of teaching which was a great strain especially on a sensitive artist. If anybody wanted to exhibit his work he'd say I haven't got anything but he had. He'd got hundreds of beautiful paintings. He just didn't like, I suppose, exposing himself to people like that. He was just being an artist, I suppose, being a sensitive man. He's a lost person to go around saying what a good artist I am and he never aimed high. His aim was to paint good pictures. He wasn't ambitious in any way except ambitious to paint better and he's one of those people who today, I'm afraid, are rather rare, these painter lovers of the world around them because the students in art schools, they're not taught to love anything. They're not taught to draw and the only way to show your love of something is to put it down. If you can't draw it must be very frustrating. It means really basically you don't love anything and they're not encouraged to look around use their eyes and love things. Today it all has to come from inside the head, new ideas and things like that. Bob was perfectly content just to paint the world around him. He really did love the world. It was a sort of religion I think and it's wonderful to me that he loved Wales so much because we have had the benefit of his pictures. He loved skies. If he saw a lovely sky he'd say nice one God, thank you God and throw his arms in the air and dance. He was a big man but he danced. It was lovely to watch. He had many ways of doing pictures. They could be delicate. He did a lot of work with tissue paper and collage. He would do watercolours. He did pen and ink drawing and he did big bold paintings with oils and a palette knife. He varied a lot. It was just I suppose the mood he, how he saw the thing he wanted to do. As I say it's like taking a course on something. You hear the tune and you think how you can interpret it and that's how he did his painting. You're just too marvellous, too marvellous for words like glorious, glamorous and that old standby amorous. It's all too wonderful. I'll never find the words that say enough, tell enough. I mean they're just not swell enough. You're much too much and just too very, very to ever be in Webster's dictionary and so I'm borrowing a love song from the birds to tell them that you're marvellous, too marvellous for words. In case all the power and the painful warning leave me again, I must paint quickly. Much I have to do now the trick is mine. All those years to clear off all those broken images and dirty colour I was using to show the world how beautiful I thought it was. Maudlin, eager, drunk as I was on you, loved you better than a mother. I see you now for real and full my brush can register at last.