Ned Owens (James Edward Owens), Manchester Races, 1950.

'Manchester Races'

James Edward (Ned) Owens (1918 - 1990) 

Pencil on tinted paper 

1950

540 x 640

£800 (£500 for drawing and £300 for the frame)

2013.006

Ned Owens ran the Mid Day Studios in Manchester's Mosely Street with his first wife Margot Ingham from 1946 until its closure in 1951. This drawing, a gift from Ned’s second wife Pat, would have been made at that time while he also taught at Manchester School of Art.

Its is an atmospheric picture in which the racegoers seem only to wait for disappointment... in silence.... sharing each others pain. It hangs in our dining room where it serves to depress any over-excited conversation. 

The Mid Day Studios operated a gallery and held exhibitions which Margot and Ned organised. Margot was regarded as something of an art dealer and had a presence in the Manchester art scene of the time. He did the donkey work and she did the schmoozing.

Among the exhibitions they mounted was L.S. Lowry’s first one man show in 1948. 

Lowry went on from this to be represented by Manchester based art dealer Andras Kalman. 

I remember Pat showing me a small Lowry which depicted the interior of the studios cleared for an exhibition, probably a study for a larger better known work.

Latterly she kept these artworks around her at the caravan park in Gatebeck near Kendal where she lived. 

She had been intending to give the painting to Manchester City Art Gallery but I advised her not to, feeling that given her circumstances, she should probably not be so generous to an organisation that had the means to raise funds, which could afford to pay and to sell it to them instead. She duly did this, justifying this ‘selfishness’ by doing so well below market price (my head is in my hands). Still it is great to have friends that want to invest in public institutions. I do respect Pat for that. She was great fun and I am also proud to have survived her terrible driving which was recalled with some affection at her recent funeral.

Ned Owens did not fare well after separating from Margot. He suffered from depression and produced, in the few paintings that survived and which he did not later burn on a bonfire, a bleak testament to his illness. The white painted Bourlet frame in which I keep the drawing was among 6 salvaged from this bonfire by Pat who disapproved of, and was shocked by, Ned's destruction of his own work. 

Owens was brought up in South Tyneside and I also remember Pat showing me a painting called the 'Rag Pickers' based on a memory of his childhood there on one of our visits. It showed two children picking up rags for clothing in the shadow of a colliery. It is one of the most movingly painful pictures I have ever seen. 

Pat claimed that Ned never escaped the psychological impact of the horrific poverty that scarred his childhood and that as a consequence of this experience never developed the confidence to pursue his career as an artist effectively. Pat kept what remained of his work in the second bedroom of the caravan. 

I met her through an art group ‘Talking about Contemporary Art’ (TACA) that I had set up at the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal and which she joined - more of this meeting when I get round to the other drawing she gave me.

After his divorce from Margot he declared (with that bonfire) that his career as an artist was over, meaning that a period of his life, that part spent with Margot and the aspirations he had had to recognition as an artist was over.

Seeking new direction he took a job at what was then the 'Manchester Guardian' in 1958 as an illustrator producing cartoons, illuminations and illustrations for feature articles. If you read the paper during this period you would have seen his work almost daily.  He retired seventeen years later when the Guardian relocated its head office and operations to London in 1975.

Ned developed his drawing style for newsprint using harsher contrast, a more linear drawing style and later Letraset Ben-Day half tones. This material formed the bulk of the folios that Pat had kept. She was anxious to make a disposal of this material that would protect his legacy as both an artist and a journalist. He had been proud of his work at the Guardian and was a committed member of the NUJ.

On her behalf I approached the Guardian Archive then based at Farringdon Road and brokered the arrangements that led to 151 of these drawings being deposited there permanently as a gift - as I recall it was settled over a lunch at the rather weird Crooklands Hotel.

The only other substantial collection of Owens drawings is in the possession of the Chaplin family. 

Owens was invited by publisher Frank Graham to illustrate fellow Guardian journalist Sid Chaplin’s exquisitely sensitive 1971 collection of essays ‘The Smell of Sunday Dinner’ which documented life and conditions in the Durham Coalfields and the industrial North East.

The suite of drawings commissioned for the book in Owens' - for print - style was given by Owens to Chaplin and hung in Chaplin’s House. 

In Owens’ house however, his copy of the book contained a letter from Chaplin apologising for a subsequent book being illustrated by Norman Cornish after Owens had been offered the work on the grounds that Graham felt it would sell better because he was more famous.

Pat said that this had been a hard knock and Chaplin said he regretted it.

Links

Guardian Archive/Ned Owens
Mid Day Studios by LS Lowry
Paintings in Public Collections by Ned Owens