My Town, by David Gentleman
MATTHEW STURGIS
My Town
By David Gentleman
Particular Books £25
For over 60 years, the artist David Gentleman has lived and worked in Gloucester Crescent in Camden Town.
In that time, the area has changed from decidedly run down to predominantly gentrified. But the Crescent still makes its undulating curve – poised between the enduring shabbiness of the Inverness Street market and Camden High Street, and the grandeur of Nash’s Regents Park terraces; almost within sight of Primrose Hill, sometimes within earshot of the Regent’s Canal.
The street’s bowed form seems apposite. Certainly David Gentleman’s art abounds in curves – in sprightly arcs and flexions. In My Town – which celebrates Gentleman’s seven-decadelong artistic engagement with London Town in general and Camden Town in particular, from his student sketches, to his public commissions, to his private visual diary – they are everywhere: light, bold, dancing.
His line sweeps round the graceful contours of old gasometers, cast-iron footbridges, canal footpaths, willow trees, railway arches, tube signs and the hunched backs of pigeon-feeding pensioners. It conjures the dome of St Paul’s, the belly of the Roundhouse, the façade of the Floral Hall, the silhouette of Primrose Hill, the arabesque of Chalcot Crescent, the snail-like whorl of the ramp at the old Horse Hospital in Camden Lock Market and the fanning cross-hatched vaults of the new King’s Cross booking hall. Turning the pleasingly matt pages of this nicely got-up, not over-large volume is a vivifying experience. Curves are fun, unexpected, human, vital and – well – very London.
For all their lightness, though, these gracile arcs are braced by other currents: a clear and ordered sense of design and a meticulous craftsmanship that spans drawing, wood-engraving and lithography. The craftsmanship is most evident in his early, densely-worked woodengravings, done for postage-stamp designs, newspaper advertisements, book covers (such as the memorable New Penguin Shakespeare paperbacks of the early 1970s) and – more enduringly – for the brilliant mural at Charing Cross Underground Station. Blown up to almost life-size scale, the mural shows, in panorama, medieval craftsmen and -women creating the original stone cross carved in memory of Edward I’s ‘ chère
reine’. And, while we are all banished from the Tube (and the phrase ‘Mind the gap’ has taken on new social-distancing connotations), it is a happy thing to be able to look at the frieze, in toto, here.
Gentleman was born not in London but just outside, in rural Hertford. The son of artistic parents (his mother was a weaver, his father a graphic designer who commuted into town each day to design posters for Shell), he trained as an illustrator at the RCA. Francis Bacon had a studio there at the time, where he worked on his ‘screaming popes’ series. Gentleman was more indebted to the teaching, example and friendship of Edward Bawden. Another visiting tutor, John Minton, encouraged him ‘to get out of the college and draw more in the real world outside’.
Despite a commitment to drawing the city around him (evidenced by some lovely early sketches of early-’50s London street corners), Gentleman began his career as a graphic designer. One of his first jobs was to design a ‘Visitor’s London’ poster for London Transport. Others followed. The fascination with London remained a constant thread. It crops up in his commissioned works (the wonderful image of the Princes in the Tower, on the cover of the Penguin New Shakespeare Richard III) and as a private passion.
Seen over the span of time, Gentleman’s work embraces both the architectural and the human aspects of the ever-changing city. It is a vision of places and people, leisure and work. Cranes punctuate the skylines of many of these pictures, from the early studies of post-war recovery to the latest images of rampant development. The sense of London’s constant change – and unchanging essence – is one of the strongest notes that emerge from this delightful book.
Gentleman may lament some of the newest turns – the destruction already wrought by HS2, for instance. And he does not flinch from depicting the social ills and injustices that are part of the modern urban realm. But his pictures have a sort of joy in them. My Town is the record of a great and enduring love:
of careful looking, and feeling, selecting and ordering.
On one of his first childhood excursions to London, he visited Primrose Hill and was surprised to find there were no primroses on it. In his art, though, he has made it – and all London – bloom.