Berwick Thought for the Week: Discover fresh hope in the hardness of our embattled world

Artists like Lowry help us to look at the world in a different way. His busy stick-like figures are a telling commentary on our distracted driven society.

Working as a rent collector for many years in Salford, he based many of his pictures on observations of the ordinary folk he encountered day by day.

Surprisingly, the recent exhibition shows a quite different side to Lowry’s character. The paintings displayed reveal a contemplative, almost spiritual response to the sea and the waves.

It is said that on holiday in Berwick and elsewhere, he would spend hours gazing at the sea before beginning to paint.

This fascination with the sea runs throughout Lowry’s life from his first family holidays on the North West coast as a child to later in life when he regularly visited the North East coast. When his mother died in 1939, it was the sea that inspired a new direction in his work.

At this time he told the director of the Tate Gallery that he was bored almost to death. He said he could hardly even look at anything. He began to paint the sea, nothing but the sea, no shore and nobody sailing on it. It was, he said, an expression of his loneliness.

However, as you look at the pictures you discover a deeper meaning than this – there is a true sense of quiet and a profundity in the vast expanse of ocean that speaks of something beyond the normal experience of life.

Lowry once said, ‘Its all there. It’s all in the sea. The Battle of Life is there. And Fate. And the inevitability of it all. And the purpose’.

If you visit the seaside in the next week or two do reflect on Lowry’s words, say a prayer and discover fresh hope in the hardness of our embattled world.

Someone once wrote ‘superficiality is the curse of our age’. Down the years, I’ve had different careers and known several churches and local communities. Now retired, I often find myself reflecting on life through the eyes of faith. That is the impetus for the things I write.