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The big picture: Two different views of the city
Conrad Astley6/ 1/2006
A city centre art gallery is showing work by two artists whose work expresses the spirit of Salford and Manchester. Conrad Astley took a look.
TWO very different views of modern Manchester are offered in a
new exhibition.
Carol Heathcote and Christine Lawley were both born in Salford and
use their work to pay tribute to the neighbouring cities.
But their work, displayed at the Blyth Gallery next week, is
created in very different ways and focuses on different aspects of
the urban landscape.
Carol Heathcote uses a mixture of techniques ranging from
photography and computer-aided graphic design to textiles, creating
art which captures the vibrancy of the two cities. She often uses
digital drawing to create ideas, before getting prints of these
images and incorporating paints and even fabric, and rescanning the
piece to produce a unique canvas.
The artist adds fleeting glimpses of intense colour to build up
atmosphere and introduce a feeling of spont- aneity to her pieces,
as seen in the main picture (above).
This is contrasted with work by Christine Lawley, who uses mellow
watercolours to create more intimate paintings - such as St Ann's
Passage (right) - capturing what she believes are neglected
architectural gems - decrepit buildings which have still been
untouched by the developers.
She also produces larger works intended to express the scale of
some of the cities' landscape buildings.
Christine attended the Manchester School of Art in the 60s, but it
was her Saturday painting classes with renowned Salford artist
Harold Riley that first inspired her.
Riley, who was close friends with LS Lowry and who has now painted
Popes, American presidents and royalty, encouraged her to draw
scenes from her birthplace.
She has since painted commissions for private collectors, had work
collected for a calendar, and now works as a part-time art teacher
herself.
The artists' work appears in the Urban Expression
exhibition, running at the Blyth Gallery on Brazil Street, in
Manchester city centre, from Tuesday (January 10) until February
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