Mrs Lori and Her Son: The Mother-Son Relationship of the British "National Painter"

Ren Ming/Wen

Timothy Spoo, who won the "Cannes Film Emperor" for his successful role as the British painter Turner in "Mr. Turner", played the painter again in 2019, this time becoming the British "national painter" T.S. Lowry. By expressing the painter's relationship with his mother, Timothy interprets an image of an "English gentleman" who is completely different from Turner's.

T.S. Lowry (1887-1976) was called the "National Painter" because he was one of the Most Popular Contemporary Painters of the British, and because he was the first British painter to obsessively depict the northern landscape of the Industrial Period and leave a lonely and desolate historical image on canvas. His tiny figures, set against the backdrop of factory chimneys and monotonous buildings, densely packed but hurriedly walking on pale streets, are called "stickmen" by the viewer.

Lowry, who is known for painting "stickmen", was a rent collector for a real estate company in Manchester. He started the profession for 42 years from the age of 23 until he retired at the age of 65. In 1932, at the age of 45, Lowry's father died. The movie "Mrs. Lori and Her Son" tells the story of the period after his father's death, when Lowry was responsible for taking care of his mother and paying off his father's debts.

Mrs. Lowry and Her Son. Infographic

Lowry's parents came from middle-class backgrounds, but were plagued by financial problems all their lives, and because they could not make ends meet, they moved their family from Victoria Park, a middle-class community in Manchester, to the workers' quarters of coal mining town in 1909, which became the source of Mrs. Lowry's depression throughout her life. The film shows her constantly complaining in front of her son about the pain of living in the workers' neighborhood; she doesn't associate with anyone around her, hating her husband's failures to reduce her social status; the wife of the Labour MP next door is dressed in exquisite clothes to bring comfort to the human soul, opening the curtains every day to admire her dress, which has become one of the few pleasures of Mrs. Lowry's life; and the two eventually begin to have some kind of relationship. Mrs Lowry and mrs Labour MP represent a "sense of identity" not uncommon among the British middle class, who look down on the "coarseness" of the working class and strive for "elegance" with conservative cultural tastes. Mrs. Lowry disapproves of her son's paintings, believing that he is a complete waste of time and that his paintings are undesirable. The harsh and ruthless blow she shows in the film to her son makes people look angry and sad, and it is inevitable that they will be puzzled by Lori's disapproval and unresistance. The film's end credits state that Lowry's paintings were later recognized and widely respected by galleries, and in 1968, when the British government was ready to award Lowry the title of "Sir", he refused because "after his mother's death, all this did not make sense", which made people feel the depth of his love for his mother.

Why or where does such deep love come from? After watching the film, I couldn't help but want to find this answer. It is clear that Mrs. Lowry is both mean and selfish, and vanessa Redgrave, an 82-year-old Veteran of the United Kingdom, plays Mrs Lowry's snobbish, mean and selfish. She was full of anger when she "remotely controlled" her son upstairs, and when her son came, she would pretend to be weak and pitiful; she said that she had no digestion and no appetite, but she could eat three sausages alone for dinner and only leave one for Lori. It can be said that just to watch Vanessa's wonderful performance, this movie is worth watching.

Good at finding beauty from the surrounding things, Lori needs to fight with his mother's snobbish and conservative middle-class aesthetics all his life; however, perhaps it is precisely because of being an artist, Lori has a sensitivity and sympathy for his mother's loss that ordinary people do not have, throughout his life, he hopes to use his paintings to let his mother see reality, see the unique beauty contained in the surrounding world, and hope that his paintings can bring glory to his mother, which is what he said in the film that he painted these paintings, "all to express the love for his mother, to paint for his mother." cause.

This is probably both true and not the whole truth. Lowry is not a man with no ambitions or self-pursuit of art, he once said, "My ambition is to put the industrial landscape into the map of art, because no one has seriously done this before." He studied painting at night school for 20 years, believing that only after such a long period of hard training could his "stickman" look as it should be. In fact, in addition to the "industrial scene", Lowry's portraits are also very good. The figures in his portraits have a detached but captivating look, as if they are living in this suffering world and transcending it. Seeing the spirit of excellence in the hard life of a commoner is the charm of Lowry's portraits, which are said to have lore's own shadow. Another reason Lowry refused the knighthood in 1968 was that "I have been very opposed to social identity segregation in any form all my life." It seems to be the ultimate rebellion against the social status that the mother seeks.

Everything is captured by a painting, forever... This is Lowry's ideal as a painter. He did.

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