As I arrived at the South Square Centre yesterday morning I was intercepted by Andy, who runs a picture-framing business in the place. He called me into his workshop in order to give me a piece of sad news. Graeme Willson had died recently, aged only 67. The name will not mean a great deal to the majority of my readers, but he has been a person of considerable significance for my own life as an artist. He is a painter well-known in the Yorkshire region, and he has exhibited widely and in some prestigious locations elsewhere. In addition to his conventional pieces on canvas he established a wide reputation as a painter of murals, and in recent years received some important commissions for work in stained glass.
I came into contact with Graeme ten years ago. At that time there was a very lively arts organisation based in the Bradford area, entitled Fabric. In some respects it could be described as a kind of “trade union” for artists, but its remit went well beyond that. In those days (before we plunged into government-driven “austerity”) there was actually public funding for the development of the arts at a local level. Fabric also obtained a large grant from the European Union in order to fund training and personal development.** One constituent of this support programme was the creation of mentorships, designed to enhance the training of local artists, and I was extremely fortunate to be awarded one of these bursaries. Graeme Willson was designated as my mentor, and I worked under his supervision for about a year.
That was an extremely interesting experience. He identified very quickly several areas of significant weakness in my work. I had never seriously addressed the possibilities of abstraction, for example, and I was very cautious in my use of different techniques and materials. Graeme wanted me to loosen up and let rip! In addition, he drew my attention to the importance (as exemplified in his own work) of surface as a significant feature an a work of art.
I dug out today from my files the correspondence between us, and it is interesting to realise that I was probably a rather slow learner. Certainly it is true to say that I am still absorbing the lessons I learned from him. Perhaps it is an entirely fitting tribute to Graeme that my series of works addressing the experience of Italy during the Great War, currently exhibited in Bradford Cathedral, incorporates a serious attempt to my part of attend to the importance and interest of surface.
There are still lessons to be assimilated from Graeme’s tuition. He was a meticulous planner of his work, developing ideas through a long succession of preliminary sketches and experiments before committing himself to a finished version. I have been moving in that direction. Something of his thoughtful and extended approach to preparation found its way into the development of my last piece, and indeed this afternoon I started to collect together some reference material for a new picture, which I realise will require some fairly extensive and careful anticipatory work. It is clear that Graeme will be with me for a long time to come. Certainly I will always be grateful for the brief period in which I had he privilege of working under his guidance.
* Yes: it’s that man Leonard Cohen again.
**How sad to think that our wretched government is now in the throes of negotiating withdrawal from the EU, which did so much for the support of development and infrastructure projects in the more economically deprived areas of the country. Bradford’s major theatre probably would not exist today without the receipt of EU funding.