"Whenever I see you, I want to close my eyes." This is what a mother said to her own son.
For a long time, the mother was like an aggressive, irritable, nervous "manipulator" who used illness and aging as a means to dominate her son, and had no appreciation for his talent for painting. She never gave up any opportunity to hinder her son's painting, suppressing, belittling, controlling:
I'm sick, so you have to listen to me.
Your hobby (finger painting), can you support yourself?
Someone appreciates you? Wake up, the streets are full of liars.
I've never liked your paintings, and your aesthetic makes me sick.
The mother would not have known that after her own death, the son she blamed became one of britain's most popular painters of the 20th century: L. Lawrence Stephen Lowry. S. Lowry) – His work will sell to six figures, fulfilling what he calls a hundred middle-class dreams.
L. S. Lowry（1887-1976）
Sharie Stines, an American therapist who specializes in family relationships, believes that manipulative behavior involves three factors: fear, obligation, and guilt: "When you are manipulated by someone, you are often psychologically hurt and feel guilty. Manipulators often take the form of "bully" and "victim". Bullies make you feel intimidated and may use attacks, threats, and intimidation to control you. But manipulators often also play the role of victims, but the truth is that they are the root cause of the problem. ”
Lowry's life is the life of a victim who fights hard against "manipulation".
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Mother's manipulation of Lowry: real and suffocating
Lori's mother was named Elizabeth. The mother, on the other hand, only wished she had "three beautiful daughters" instead of a "clumsy boy."
She suffers from neuroses and depression, is bedridden, and needs to rely on this stupid son to take care of her. The mother and son lived in Britain's dirty and dilapidated Penderbury district, and every 10 p.m., when their mother fell asleep, Lowry stayed in the attic to paint.
Of course, for Lori's paintings, my mother never had the slightest approval. Last year, there was a biographical film about Lori's relationship with her mother, "Mrs. Lori and Her Son", which showed the most typical and heartfelt scene:
Elizabeth deliberately plucked from the newspaper a satirical comment by an art critic on Lowry's work—you know, the kind of writer who makes a living with a poisonous tongue—and read it to lowry in a mocking tone:
"This painting is poor", "just a smudge", "it looks like it was painted by a child", "it is an insult to the people of Lanka"... It's a live-action version of Night of Bad Reviews:
When the good news came, the son received letters, his paintings were appreciated by the london gallery owner, and there was an opportunity to hold an exhibition, the mother's "excessive narcissism" made her unable to see a little good for Lori.
Elizabeth said: Don't believe the letters, they are all liars.
She exhorted her son to abandon the ridiculous "hobby": What does this hobby bring to you? You should think about me and change your hobbies... I know exactly what an artist looks like. You're not an artist, and you can't be an artist.
Complete disregard for what Lowry sees as "life", not just a "hobby".
So Lori turned to her mother and asked, "So what do you think I am?"
My mother cried and said desperately, This is the question I have been asking myself since you were born.
I don't know who you are, I don't know what you are.
It was as if she herself was a victim.
But the confusion is that they also had warm moments. They talked about food together, about news on the radio, about visiting family doctors every week. They sometimes rely on each other. The mother would praise him for the soup he made, and when she was in a good mood, she would share pleasant memories with Lori like a normal mother.
So, Lori loves his mother and always wants to please her with paintings and success. He searched hard in his life for things that would make his mother happy—but that didn't include his whole life, nor his paintings.
The reason why a dilemma is a dilemma is often because in those painful gaps, there are still some good aspects, which can always be confusing.
The days aren't always bad, and that's the cruelest thing for Lori.
<h1 toutiao-origin="h1" > the repressive life of the outcast Lori</h1>
When Lowry was 22, his father wanted to get close to a friend for business reasons, so the family moved from the tree-lined suburb of Manchester to Pendlebury. It was a factory town, full of chimneys, full of mills, coal mines, textile mills, poor and dirty.
Elizabeth hated the ghost town, she said, "We are middle class, what woman would want to grow old in such a broken and dirty street house?" “
At first, Lori didn't like it either, but after a few years he got used to it and even felt a little like it. "One day I missed a bus and looked around and saw a cotton mill I had never seen before, and I was fascinated by the scene," he said. Everyone thinks industrial life is ugly and scary. I think that's because no one is seriously portraying life. ”
This became a turning point in his artistic career. Lowry began exploring the industrial areas of South Lancashire, where he captured plenty of inspiration.
Lowry is not a full-time artist. In his early 20s, he took a rent-collecting job that would be his main occupation for the next 40 years. This job of being able to walk around the streets gave Lowry the opportunity to enter the homes of the "ordinary people" in the area, talk to them, and gradually understand and appreciate them.
Lowry's style is melancholy and grim, "like a banished world, filled with smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes and dirty water", and the most iconic feature of his urban landscape paintings is that they are filled with small crowds of "stickmen".
"We are all lonely, the crowd is the loneliest. They all have their own private secrets and have their own hobbies. They can't connect with each other. Lowry said.
Lowry is the only son in the family. His father, Robert, was a reclusive and introverted man, and Lowry described him as a "cold fish." Her father died in 1932, leaving her in debt, and a bedridden Elizabeth, suffering from depression and neuroses.
During his time caring for his mother, he sometimes painted grotesque self-portraits with bloodshot eyes, like the soul of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch in his painting The Scream.
It was a time that Lowry called "depressed and lonely." Lowry had always considered himself a disappointing person because that's how his mother, Elizabeth, saw him.
When Elizabeth died in 1939, he was so depressed that he even considered committing suicide. He said: "I don't have a family, only my studio. If it weren't for painting, I wouldn't have survived. It helped me forget that I was alone. ”
Later that year, Lowry held his first major solo exhibition in London and has since become a household name in Britain. His work is now worth several million pounds and was awarded the Order of the British Empire and knighthood in 1968.
But Lowry turned down those honors. He said, "The mother is dead, and these don't make sense."
Lori could no longer show her the most powerful facts of her life that could overthrow her mother and prove herself. Lowry's life became more empty.
Lori died of pneumonia in 1976 at the age of 88. He left behind an inheritance of £300,000 and a large number of paintings that were not made public during his lifetime.
It's a shocking set of works with very different styles: a series of sexually explicit, provocative, almost sadistic "marionettes" with pointed chests and high and tight collars that look like they have been squeezed into an invisible narrow tube.
Art critic Richard Dorment argues that the works "reveal sexual anxiety that Lowry has never hinted at in his work over the past 60 years," and others have commented that it shows Lowry's relationships with women, including Elizabeth, his control-freak mother, and his overall view of the world.
Others say the paintings may reflect the artist's constructing for himself a cautious exterior, a wall of emotion control, a form of self-preservation he uses to counter the relentless criticism and rejection from his mother.
Lowry may be expressing his dark side, or he may be using paintings to show his sexual views, but these are speculations, and a person's personality can have many sides. "Lori is like an onion, and every time you peel off a layer, you feel like there's another person inside."
<h1 toutiao-origin="h1" > I am a painter, nothing more, nothing else</h1>
A cold father, a control-freak mother. Lowry was unmarried and childless, hadn't talked to girlfriends, had no phones, and didn't have cars. When he was a student, his classmates suspected him of being "asexual" because they had never seen him have waves of love.
But Lowry has a clear, simple definition of himself:
"I'm not an artist. I am a painter, painting what I see, painting what I feel, nothing more, nothing else. “
"I am a simple person, I only use five colors: scarlet, ivory black, Prussian blue, ochre yellow and lead white, no medium (such as flaxseed oil)."
"Painting doesn't need a mind, it just feels".
Untouched by the Impressionist techniques of the time, Lowry developed a more self-characteristic, realistic approach to art that captured the deep sorrow and suffering that lancashire residents endured every day with a direct, honest and authentic eye.
"I just put the industrial scene on the canvas because no one has ever done it." Later generations believed that this sentence was a guide to reading Lowry. It sounded modest, but at the time, it took a lot of courage to do so.
This means acknowledging the "ugliness" of the mainstream aesthetic, finding beauty in what his mother called a "deformed life," and discovering the pain of life.
He painted these people truthfully and found beauty in them, but it did not mean that he had any compassion "with the world in mind". Lowry once said that the stickman in his paintings was his "semi-illusory intention."
"To be honest, I don't really care about the people. I don't care about them as much as the social reformers. They are part of the personal beauty that haunts me. I love them in the same way: as part of an illusion. ”
His artist friend Sheila Fell described him as a "great humanitarian": to be a humanist, one must first love humanity, and to be a great humanist one must be slightly separated from humanity."
He wanted to paint what his mother liked. Just to hear the last sentence: Lowry, you're doing a good job, I'm glad. But unfortunately, Lowry never got out of the relationship's predicament all his life. Many commentators argue that this "toxic" mother-child relationship made him a success. Some people say that this is just a complete "manipulation", "first of all, it is not Ma Bao, and secondly, it is not a mother's love like a mountain." ”
The truth is unknown and cannot be analyzed. These paintings are Lowry's most courageous answer.
Lori felt he had to paint because he couldn't heal the world, but only when he was painting could he temporarily forget the grief of losing his mother.
As Byrett wrote in Tower of Babel:
"What kind of life is it to hold on to one day and another day to go on?"' A lot of people's lives. ’”
"No one is free, all of us are captured by the picture." Lowry said.
Jianghu side ✑ writer drunkard ✑ editor
"Pneumonia protection" | Smile depression | Passive waste | boundary
Bullying | Sensitive | Plastic Friendship | Mother
Comfort | Sudden death | Male gaze | Stay up late