PAINTER MAN

In 1997, the elderly painter and teacher NICHOLAS HORSFIELD was a guest on my BBC Radio Merseyside programme, On The Beat. I would talk about the retrospective exhibition of his work at the Walker Art Gallery and, I think for the first time, he would answer questions about teaching John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe. As far as I am aware, he never gave any other interviews about this and for some reason (long forgotten), I never submitted this piece for publication anywhere. Spencer Leigh

From now until the end of September, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool is celebrating the 80th birthday of Nicholas Horsfield with an impressive retrospective of his work. What's the Beatle connection? Well, Nicholas Horsfield taught at Liverpool's Regional College of Art in the 1950s and had Stuart Sutcliffe and John Lennon amongst his pupils. I asked him if he would like to talk about those days. "I've never done it before," he said, "and I'm not sure that anyone would be interested." I assured him that they would be and I spent a very pleasant morning at his home in Crosby. A couple of days later, he had to do an interview for local radio in connection with his exhibition. "I hope you're not going to ask me about the Beatles," he told the interviewer, "Spencer quite tired me out and I'm never going to talk about them again." Here then is the first - and last! - interview about Stuart and John from the art teacher, Nicholas Horsfield.

SL: Do you remember when you first met Stuart Sutcliffe?
NICHOLAS HORSFIELD: I suppose I must have met Stuart in the third year, that is to say the first year of the specialist painting course. He was the most dedicated, and potentially the most able, student of his year. He worked much harder and more productively than anyone else.

SL: I get the impression that he was trying many different styles.
NICHOLAS HORSFIELD: Yes, and that is very right and proper for a lively-minded student. He is keeping his eyes open for anything that stirs his imagination. His private work such as the sketches he made of a rubbish dump in Garston was very fine, but I never saw them until after his death. I was teaching composition and I was only aware of his work in college. I had my criticisms - I felt that his tonality was brittle - but I could never get my point across to him. He got a better understanding from Arthur Ballard and possibly Charlie Burton, who was young and not as fuddy-duddy as me.

SL: What do you mean by 'his tonality was brittle'?
NICHOLAS HORSFIELD: The exact perception of tone across the canvas is the key to the balance and the unity of the whole picture. Stuart did not appreciate how one tone, which may represent part of a form or may be completely abstract, can take on the feeling of space and have a harmonious relationship with another. I felt his work was a little jagged, which, indeed, was his personality.

SL: Did you have many discussions and arguments about schools of painting with him?
NICHOLAS HORSFIELD: Not arguments, but discussions certainly and very amiable. The eruption of American abstract expressionism left me confused but it offered him and other students a lifeline. Every artist becomes middleaged at some time and needs to recognise it, and I was not able to comprehend artists like Jackson Pollock who was coming up. In this respect, Stuart was liberated, by Arthur Ballard. Arthur had found for himself a non-figurative style in which he produced some very exceptional work and he was able to impart his enthusiasm for this to Stuart, who took it up on large scale.

SL: And Stuart was also influenced by his friend, John Lennon, who had been a rebel at Quarry Bank High School and now was a rebel at the Art College.
NICHOLAS HORSFIELD: There are rebellious spirits in any college of art and that is a very good thing. I had to teach Lennon - or, rather, try to teach Lennon - objective life drawing. Life drawing is an essential core discipline in learning to be a painter. It involves observation and analysis, feeling and expression, and this was sheer nonsense to John Lennon, who couldn't care a button. I was never able to get him to concentrate in studying the models and I soon gave up trying. I would leave Lennon to doodle on his own until he chose to walk out. The academic discipline was completely meaningless to a person such as John Lennon and indeed, the understanding of painting in the proper sense was meaningless to him. I remember after a boring art history lecture by me, I went to pack up the projector and found John Lennon stretched out sound asleep with several bottles around him.

SL: Was going to art college any benefit to John Lennon at all?
NICHOLAS HORSFIELD: Yes, the art school gave him a year or two to relax and find himself. He was never under any pressure to achieve art works - and I know that Cynthia Powell did some of his homework. He was there on sufferance, but that year or two did give him the opportunity to develop within himself. His notebooks were quite interesting and instinctive, but in the visual field, he would never have had the depth of expression that he had within music.

SL: Stuart went to Hamburg and developed yet another style.
NICHOLAS HORSFIELD: Yes, he was much influenced by Eduardo Paolozzi, who at the time was making rather schematic prints which appealed to Stuart. This gave him a certain release and a certain order and he achieved some very good results.

SL: Many of his pictures are untitled. Does that mean that he didn't have anything in mind when he was painting them?
NICHOLAS HORSFIELD: No, lots of work are exhibited as untitled. They are not just doodles, they may have a certain figurative element behind them out of which has evolved the movement of paint and colour that gives the work its meaning and character.

SL: And would Stuart Sutcliffe have gone on to great things?
NICHOLAS HORSFIELD: It is impossible to say. Judging him at his time at the college, he was an outstanding student. He would have gone on find himself, to achieve his own style and, I would have thought, establish himself as a fine painter.