Ousey 2015 test

One Needs More Than Paint

Harry Ousey A Centenary Exhibition

‘Some landscapes cannot be expressed in words, only in paint.’ Harry Ousey 1950s

Catalogue produced to accompany the Harry Ousey centenary exhibition held at Salford Museum and Art Gallery in March 2015.

Harry Ousey 1915-1985 Assurance of paint handling and a freedom to simplify and indeed abstract from natural landscape motifs characterise Manchester born Harry Ousey's work.

During the 1950s his distilled naturalism, alighting on structural landmarks like hill profiles, tidal marks in sand or dry stone walls, chimed with abstracting modern Cornish art in general and with the work of Scott, Lanyon, Frost, Hilton or BarnsGraham in particular.

figure. He variously lived in London, where

Centred on the celebrated colony of St.

he studied architecture and served in the

Ives, these artists were natural bedfellows

army, Cornwall, Derbyshire, the Cotswolds

for a Northern artist who, despite his

and France, dying in 1985 aged 70, in

decided origins, became a peripatetic

Marseilles.

2 | One Needs More Than Paint

The late Brian Stewart, the recipient of a

period in concert with both the landscape,

large body of Ousey's work on behalf of

orientated St. Ives ‘school’ and with the

Falmouth Art Gallery, spoke of his

French informalism and Tachism from the

‘masterly’ watercolour skills. Whilst living

later School of Paris. He enjoyed West End

in a short lived enclave at Kinder, High

shows at the Lincoln, Drian and Mercury

Peak after the War, Ousey developed a

galleries during that vital period, which

fluent watercolour style that, while

won plaudits in ‘Arts Review’ from fellow

indebted to friend Terry McGlynn,

painters, the informalist painter reviewer

anticipated the uninhibited gesturalism

Denis Bowen and the Surrealist Conroy

of his later abstract work. This gesturalism

Maddox. Their verdict was that Ousey was

was not formed from an existential void,

‘basically an expressionist’.

however, Ousey always using residual and memorised landscape experiences in his art.

The happy occurance of a solo show at Salford Art Gallery coming 30 years after his death celebrates an early show of local

Armed with this technique, Ousey

Lancashire artists in 1948 at the same

confidently evolved during the 1950-1970

venue.

PETER DAVIES, Author and Art Critic.

Harry Ousey | 3

30. London Lights Up Again 1945, oil on board, 40.5 x 50.5 cm

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16. The Flowers on the Mantleshelf 1947, oil on board, 40.5 x 50.5 cm

Harry Ousey | 5

13. Cornish Cove 1960, oil on board, 40.5 x 50.5 cm

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2. Project One 1965, oil on canvas, 66.0 x 50.5 cm

Harry Ousey | 7

4. Off PZ 1967, oil on canvas, 25.5 x 30.5 cm

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10. Untitled 1974, oil on canvas, 61.0 x 50.5 cm

Harry Ousey | 9

22. Arles 1980, oil on paper, 25.5 x 30.5 cm

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23. Arles 1980, oil on paper, 25.5 x 30.5 cm

Harry Ousey | 11

65960. watercolour, 1964, signed verso, 63.5 x 52.0 cm

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65962. watercolour, 1974, signed, 55.5 x 76.0 cm

Harry Ousey | 13

65961. watercolour, 1978, signed verso, 38.0 x 51.0 cm

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65942. watercolour, 1970, signed verso, 32.0 x 25.0 cm

Harry Ousey | 15

65943. watercolour, 1970, signed verso, 35.0 x 25.0 cm

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65944. gouache & watercolour, 1970, signed verso, 25.5 x 19.0 cm

Harry Ousey | 17

65945. gouache & watercolour, 1970, signed verso, 19.0 x 25.5 cm

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65946. gouache & watercolour, 1970, signed verso, 19.0 x 25.5 cm

Harry Ousey | 19

65947. watercolour, 1976, signed, 7.5 x 19.0 cm

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65948. collage, 1983, signed, 26.0 x 17.5 cm

Harry Ousey | 21

65949. collage, 1983, signed, 17.0 x 27.5 cm

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65950. watercolour, 1983, signed, 19.0 x 26.0 cm

Harry Ousey | 23

65951. watercolour, 1983, signed, 20.0 x 26.0 cm

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65952. watercolour, 1983, signed, 24.5 x 15.0 cm

Harry Ousey | 25

65953. watercolour, 1983, signed, 27.5 x 15.0 cm

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65954. watercolour, 1983, signed, 24.5 x 17.0 cm

Harry Ousey | 27

65955. watercolour, 1983, signed, 28.0 x 18.0 cm

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65956. watercolour, 1981, signed, 22.0 x 33.0 cm

Harry Ousey | 29

65957. watercolour, 1978, signed, 26.5 x 39.0 cm

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65959. watercolour, 1978, signed verso, 51.0 x 38.0 cm

Harry Ousey | 31

65941. watercolour, 1967, 25.5 x 19.0 cm

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65958. watercolour, 1978, signed, 22.0 x 34.0 cm

Chronology 1915

1920-1929 1929 1933 1933-1936 1936-1939 June 1939

1942

1942-1945

1946 1946-1947 1947 1950 1951-1960

1960-1968

21st November, born at Lincoln Street, Longsight, Manchester Parents: Frederick and May Ousey (nĂŠe Sarjent) Christened Frederick Henry Ousey.

Elementary Education at schools in Manchester.

Worked in cotton warehouse in Manchester.

Father died of tuberculosis.

Went to London to train to be an architect.

Territorial Army, Ardwick, Manchester.

Enlisted in the Royal Artillery and was posted to Woolwich Barracks where he spent the whole of the wartime period.

7th February, married Eleanor Maden (Susie) of Rawstenstall, Lancashire, an accounts clerk with Manchester Municipal Education Department at The Longsight Baptist Chapel, Manchester.

Lived at 114, Wellmeadow Road, Catford, London.

Home damaged in bombing raid.

Demobbed from army.

Lived with relatives in Nursery Road, Heaton Norris, Stockport.

Moved to cottage at Hill Farm, Kinder, Hayfield, Derbyshire.

First visit to St. Ives, Cornwall looking for place to live and work.

Periods at Sunnyside Cottage, Perranuthnoe, near Marazion, interspersed with regular visits to family in Hertfordshire and Manchester.

There were periods in Mousehole, Lamorna and Mount Hawke Cornwall and Devon.

Following his first solo exhibition in London he moved to Hertfordshire and then Primrose Hill, London.

1968-971 1971-1974

Moved to Trevorrian House, Breage, Helston.

Opened Ousey Fine Arts Gallery in Painswick, Gloucestershire.

January 1976 Moved to France.

1976-1978 Visited many places in the South of France living mostly in his VW Caravanette. Several months were spent in Grimaud and St. Tropez.

1978-1979 Sestri Levanti, Italy.

1979-1984 Institut Franco Scandinave, Aix-en-Provence and Marseilles.

1985 23rd May, died in Foundation Hospital Saint Joseph, Marseilles.

1985 Wife, Susie, returned to England to live in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire.

1997 26th January, Susie died peacefully at Watford General Hospital.

Works Held in Private Collections The Falmouth Art Gallery, Falmouth, Cornwall The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester The Central Art Gallery, Ashton under Lyne, Lancashire The Buxton Museum and Art Gallery, Buxton, Derbyshire The New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester The Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Macedonia Gallery Oldham, Lancashire Paintings in Hospitals, London and York The Devonshire Collection at Chatsworth House

Archive Material The St. Ives Archives Trust, St. Ives, Cornwall The Victoria & Albert Museum, London Tate Britain, London

What I desire in my paintings is structure and through that structure,

poetry – the kind of poetry that is instinctive with abstract visual form. . . .

It is the image, the thing in itself which is for me important. The abstraction is the reality.

Harry Ousey

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