Room 2: Borderlands

I’ve come to feel that there is something genuinely unique about this transcendent and transgressive location: a border area where habitation meets the uninhabitable…where land disappears into sky on many days of the year; where the last lawn is separated from the moor by a dividing line of privet hedge; where roads peter out into cart-tracks and bridleways…
Magnetic Fields: Simon Armitage on the pull of Marsden. The Guardian newspaper 2022

Richard could be drawn away from Yorkshire’s beauty spots to another kind of subject of rocky outcrops, edges and escarpments that intrude themselves into the hilly Pennine towns and cities. These elements become an essential ingredient in the mix of mills, viaducts, streets and chimneys. Neither pure landscape nor true townscape, he found these places deeply romantic. Writing about Northern Town to Christies in 1985, he confided: I have done several small paintings of Bradford as I remember and dream about it. They have no typography. All those towns, Bradford, Huddersfield and Halifax are, or were superb. In fact Wyndham Lewis called Halifax the Toledo of the North. I am at a loss as to painters thinking the North unpaintable…