Energy, Nature, Vibration - Oriel Môn, Anglesey, Wales
Energy, Nature, Vibration - Leonard McComb RA (1930-2018)
Dates: 15 February–3 August 2025
Oriel Môn, Anglesey, Wales
The British master’s first retrospective in 40 years, since his 1983 show at the Serpentine Gallery, launches in Anglesey, the island that inspired his deep connection with nature and some of his greatest works.
Inspired by Van Gogh and Cezanne, the working-class artist Leonard McComb’s timeless observations of people and the natural world have retained a powerful resonance decades after their creation. The artist’s holistic belief that everything is connected by energy and vibration resonates with today's environmentally aware audiences and is the focus of the artist’s posthumous retrospective at Oriel Môn gallery that spans 50 years of work.
The exhibition features Rock and Sea Anglesey, 1983, one of the largest drawings in a public collection, the iconic large scale watercolour works that defined his career in the 70s and 80s, the bronze sculpture, Portrait of a Young Man Standing, 1963-83 that took twenty years to complete, and his late oil paintings that demonstrate his exceptional qualities as a portrait painter.
This ambitious exhibition that includes loans from the Tate, Manchester Art Gallery, and National Portrait Gallery demonstrates how McComb’s dramatic, highly sensitive, and profound work is inextricably linked to a landscape he knew so well.
From tough streets to hallowed halls: the rise of McComb
To escape a poverty-stricken and politically troubled Northern Ireland in the 1930s, the artist’s father, Archie, and mother, Delia Bridgit, chose to migrate to Manchester when McComb was a small child.
The artist spent his youth in the tough neighbourhoods of Moss Side and Wythenshawe in an industrial city already facing decline. While McComb’s secondary education offered little in terms of arts education, his father (a sign writer and amateur painter) gave McComb his first paint brushes whilst the local woods near his new home offered a connection to nature, an early source of inspiration. With five siblings, the early death of his father meant that McComb held the responsibility of supporting the family from a young age.
After completing National Service he enrolled in night school at Manchester School of Art where he met influential artists such as LS Lowry. McComb excelled in this new environment, winning a scholarship to the Slade School of Art in Fine Art in 1956. The next two decades while teaching in Bristol, London, and Oxford saw the artist gain recognition from a London-centric establishment that included relatively few working-class artists. McComb’s work was featured in the R.B Kitaj curated show the ‘Human Clay’ at the Hayward Gallery in 1976 (feat. Bacon, Freud, Hockney, Kossoff), the Venice Biennale in 1980 (feat. Long, Flannigan, Ackling, Fulton, Cragg), followed by a retrospective at the Serpentine, and an Arts Council tour in 1983.
Alongside achieving international success as an independent artist, McComb became an important figure in teaching, co-founding the independent Sunningwell Art School in 1973 (now in its 50th year) to provide affordable arts education, championing the importance of life drawing at Goldsmiths during its conceptual art phase in the 80s, and went on to lead the Royal Academy Schools from 1995-1998.
Nature was the artist’s faith and Anglesey his inspiration
While the artist earned the majority of his success in the capital, it was Anglesey, off the North coast of Wales that profoundly influenced his work. He regularly visited when his mother relocated from a troubled Wythenshawe in the 1970s, providing the artist a place to observe nature away from an unruly Brixton, the location of his home and studio. With a Catholic mother and Protestant father (a very controversial marriage in 1930s Ireland), McComb was no stranger to the hypocrisy of religion and the impression of violence. It was his observations of nature, his diverse studies of Art History, Eastern Philosophy, and the Celtic culture in which he was raised which led him to a holistic view of humanity and the natural world. While McComb’s work is rooted in the traditions of rigorous observational drawing, his philosophy was thoroughly modern. An art that is imbued with a belief that there is no division between humanity and nature which is shared with eco-conscious generations today.
Exhibition Highlights:
Rock and Sea Anglesey, 1983
The largest drawings in a British collection ‘vibrates’ off the walls
Rock and Sea Anglesey, 1983, is the largest work made by the artist at a monumental 10m x 3m. Working for nine days at the cliffs in Benllech Bay, McComb observed the connection of the sea, the cliffs, and the sky to capture this profound meeting point of natural energy. Drawn on eighty four large sheets of paper, on an easel weighed down with limestone rocks, McComb's insistence on observing from life did not limit the scale of his work. Rendered in pencil, brush and ink, and watercolour, thousands upon thousands of lines depict a dramatic corner of Anglesey as one immutable vibrating mass. The work captures everything that McComb stood for: his philosophy about the natural world, observation from life, and a profound attention to detail. Rock and Sea Anglesey won the Hugh Casson Prize for Drawing in 2005 at the Royal Academy Summer Show, some twenty years after its creation.
With Benllech Bay only 15 minutes from the exhibition, this provides a rare opportunity to view the dramatic limestone cliffs through the eyes of McComb.
After destroying all of his work in the early 1970s, McComb reinvented his style with a series of epic watercolours
McComb’s 1970s watercolours vibrate with an abstract energy that is a metaphor for the artist's closely held belief that all living things are connected. These large works redefined the use of a medium that is associated with small sketchy works. Exhibition highlights include the study Woman by a Window, 1980 (2m x 1.6m), which depicts a seated nude staring out of a window in an urban setting. Dismissing any notion of the ‘Romantic Nude’, McComb shows a modern woman in a realistic setting in a reflective mood. The figure, the room, and the view from the window are connected through the many intricate lines of watercolour. This technique was a metaphor for the connection, energy and vibration that artists sought to capture. There is an otherworldly quality to these light and ethereal works which is contrasted with an urban melancholy. The artist viewed life drawing as a meditative practice and used life study as the basis of his practice. The paintings are never romanticised, but rather an attempt to capture the human spirit within nature.
Garden Trees South London, 1980
(242cm x 119.5cm)
Garden Trees South London, 1980 (242 x 119.5cm) shows a cross-section of tree trunks against a wall in the artist’s Brixton garden. McComb’s delicate use of line makes the wall and trees in the painting almost inseparable, standing as a metaphor for the ever presence of natural energy in the most urban of settings.
Three smaller works, Rocks at Rocks at Amlwch date (90 x 112cm), Rocks at Anglesey (141 x 115cm), and Cherry Blossom (89 x 110cm), show similar intensity on a smaller scale. It’s too difficult to view these works as simple still lives or observations of nature as the highly sensitive treatment, where background and foreground is united, make them teeter on the edge of abstraction. It perhaps explains the artist’s most well-known quote:
‘All art is an abstraction of Nature and of past art’ - Leonard McComb
The power of light:
sculptures that capture energy and light in singular gestures
In Sunlight on Sea Waves, 1983, the artist reduces the glistening of the sea’s surface into five undulating forms. The work is small but powerful, these highly polished bronze waves expressing energy through refracted light. Unlike Rock and Sea Anglesey which could demand hours of viewing, Sunlight on Sea Waves is like a flash, a moment of energy that is imprinted on your mind. Four Lobes and Two Forms, 1983 are hugely familiar without being a depiction of a specific natural form. These works are like the distillation of a seed; they represent growth and their tight, polished surface evokes the tension of the skin of an apple. Three Trees, 1983, is one of the artist’s largest sculptures, previously unexhibited. These highly stylised undulating forms have a natural twist and turn as if the artist were attempting to visualise the growth of a tree. By simply orientating three identical casts and placing them in close proximity, the artist creates a conversation of light and energy between the forms. One trunk reflects another, which reflects another, which reflects another.
In Sunlight on Sea Waves, 1983,
Three Trees, 1983
From nature to war, McComb presents a positive image of humanity.
The artist’s most renowned sculpture, Portrait of a Young Man Standing, 1963-1983, is a life-sized bronze cast of a man with an open hand and clenched fist. McComb, who was deeply concerned by the conflicts of the decade such as the Cold War and Vietnam War, conceived of the sculpture as a positive image of humanity. The figure's open hand and clenched fist are symbolic of humans' ability for both “powerful and gentle action, both physical and intellectual”. Based on a life study of a model during his teaching days in Bristol, the work resonates with both Egyptian and Ancient Greek sculpture. The work (part of the Manchester Art Gallery collection) took twenty years to complete, with the final version being cast in polished bronze in 1983, and is featured in the exhibition. The first cast which is covered in gold leaf is featured in the Tate Collection.
Portrait of a Young Man Standing, 1963-1983
More of a ‘people’ painter, than a ‘portrait’ painter
Throughout McComb’s life, he rarely undertook portrait commissions, choosing to paint friends, family, colleagues, students, and sometimes people he met on the street. Like his observations of the natural world, McComb wanted to catch the energy he found in the people he observed. For McComb, the portrait was not a status symbol, but the opportunity to connect with and capture the inner life of those around him, the energy he found within.
Portrait of Louise, 1980, pencil on paper, has similar qualities to Rock and Sea - constructed from thousands of lines and having an almost haunting quality. His portrait of his friend Carel Weight, 1990 (National Portrait Gallery Collection), vibrates with a similar quality, where the personality and expressions of the sitter are presented through oscillating lines that dance across the surface of the work.
Doris Lessing, 1999 (National Portrait Gallery Collection)
From the late 90s-2000s McComb focussed on a series of portraits which represent the peak of the artist’s maturity. McComb’s portrait of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing, 1999 (National Portrait Gallery Collection), an activist and campaigner against nuclear arms, and opponent of apartheid was perhaps McComb connecting with a kindred spirit. McComb’s portrait of Phillipa Cooper, 2002, the daughter of some of his closest friends, shows a teenage girl against a pattern derived from a Persian carpet that the artist had in his studio. This joyfully spirited work locates this young woman, who the artist had witnessed growing up, in this beautifully decorative imagery of nature. The work reinforces the notion that humankind and nature are one whilst paying tribute and capturing the personality of a child he considered family.
Portrait of Phillipa Cooper, 2002
Perhaps the artist’s greatest portrait is that of his mother. Executed with extraordinary sensitivity, the work is the result of a lifetime of observation and expresses the unique bond between mother and child. In the portrait Delia Bridgit, in the latter years of her life, sits calmly holding a cup of tea in Anglesey, pausing for thought. McComb’s acute observation of his mother's face is depicted with similar lines and marks that can be found in Rock and Sea. In some small way, this extraordinary portrait of his mother contains an essence of the island, a place of great inspiration for the artist and where Delia Bridgit, after a hard life, found her home and peace.
Portrait of the artist's mother, oil on canvas 1993
“All my work is the result of feelings for the beauty of nature’s shapes and energies. Drawing is a searching selection to discover the unique asymmetrical shape and internal energies of nature's forms in space. In this respect, everything I draw, paint, sculpt is a portrait be it a snowdrop, a mountain, a human head” - Leonard McComb RA.
For more information about the artist
For information about the exhibition, recent publications and press: