Monet had water lilies, or a wind-battered pine beside the sun-struck Mediterranean sea in Antibes. Helen Clapcott has the A6, and all you can survey from the 192 bus.
She is proudly a one-town woman.
Bill Clark, the Hale-based, well respected art dealer, says: “If she went to London to paint she could make a fortune.” But Helen doesn’t want to.
She has built a career painting the place where she grew up, known for its railway viaduct, cotton spinning, and hat making – Stockport. Next month the town will stage a 100-piece retrospective of her work at the War Memorial Art Gallery.
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In his book ‘A Northern School Revisited’ Peter Davis says: “Like Lowry, Claptrott uses diminutive, ant-like figures whose psychological and physical distance instils a Fritz Lang type melancholia and alienation.”
He then goes on to compare her with Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico, in that she uses “an eerie almost otherworldly light with long shadows”. Her visions of the town’s changing urban landscape do have the feel of an alien world while at the same time capturing its detail authentically.
Iconic landmarks – like the 27 archways of the 1840 Grade II listed Viaduct and the town hall as well as the M60 motorway, roundabouts, the River Mersey, infamous Pyramids, and modern industrial units – are her world. But she has also captured slow decline – a dog guarding a mountain of tyres in the yard of a semi-derelict mill, the demolition of a power station.
“As a kid I tended to be quite pleased with things I did. I liked playing on my own. Art and games were my favourite subjects at school and they were frowned upon as not being academic subjects and a way to go in the future. I never got bored with it. I tried all sorts of jobs when I left school and I thought ‘this is the one thing I never get bored with’.
“So after three years out of school I had this brilliant idea of going to art school – I went to Liverpool and it was wonderful. I did spend a lot of time being confused – I didn’t have an understanding of drawing.”
Helen studied for four years at Liverpool Art School gaining a diploma – the equivalent now of a Bachelor of Arts degree. She then got a place at the Royal Academy in London.
“I loved the Academy just as much, but didn’t particularly like London. Eventually I thought I can’t do with it down here – I’ll move north.”
A great influence in her life was her late mother, Enid, who imparted the sage advice: “Do whatever you want – but don’t get married”. Her encouragement and belief in her daughter was a foundation stone for her career.
Helen was born in 1952 and the cultural mores of the sixties and early seventies still pointed her down a path to boring jobs, and settling down. After six years in the capital she returned to her family home in Stockport and then bought a house in Macclesfield – at a time when you could still buy a house on one wage.
Asked why Stockport is her continuous subject, she said: “It is a difficult question. I like things around me. I had a lovely family home, I enjoyed the landscape. In the short time of leaving school and getting to Liverpool there was always that view. The Viaduct, mills, and chimneys. It just was very evocative, very beautiful, I thought, I have got to paint that. It was just a need – I had to paint it.
“I sometimes think, If I had been brought up in Runcorn it would be the same. At the Royal Academy what did I paint – the Royal Academy – the Life Room, and the skeletons in the cupboard. I was never one to go conceptual and watch raindrops running down a window and think ‘wow, man, that’s fantastic’.
“My work was very much observation and enjoyment – joy.”
On the changing landscape of Stockport she adds: “I am not critical. I have observed it. Watching a mill come down is a fantastic sight. Seeing the landscape move – watching the motorway come in. Organising the show has been full time. When it is over I am hoping I can creep back into the shadows and just enjoy painting again – very likely Stockport again.
“I have never taken to London. And there isn’t the light. The light that comes across and through The Viaduct is fantastic. I just didn’t respond to London. I responded to something here.”
The exhibition which opens in September, will include early paintings of the back garden at the family home in Stockport, and chimneyscapes of Macclesfield, which Helen discovered when she “put a skylight in the roof and climbed up a ladder a sat at the top and painted”.
She adds, frankly: “I must be crackers.”
Her work in observing Stockport is not over. “Concrete towers, lift towers, have replaced the red brick – I am quite interested in the concrete towers. I only record if I respond to something. A lot has disappeared.
“I think Lowry kept something in cultural memory of this land of ours – of our heritage, and I think the dying embers of the industrial revolution – the little bits – the foundations – a bit of wall – still remind us of what was there only 20 years ago. Young people are moving in and it’s a different town. Would I paint the town now, or as it is growing to be? To me it is turning into a digital town. I think if we build more tower blocks to cover these wonderful bits of architecture – albeit the town hall does look like a wedding cake – The Viaduct is monumental. To cover up those things I think it is a shame.”
She says she paints a town “intent on erasing all evidence of its industrial heritage and replacing it with sprawling carparks, service areas, and an anonymous commuter drive-thru.” But adds: “I would describe my work as absolutely accurate and all about Stockport.”
Her art is born by going out with a sketch book and recording what she sees. “They are a combination of a series of drawings – not a particular viewpoint where I am looking at a vista, more a kind of narrative, almost topographical – the dog was there, the road was there.”
But why does she paint Stockport?
“It’s a visual feast,” she says. “A red sandstone valley, the sun bouncing over the Cheshire plain. Where two rivers (The Goyt and The Tame) meet and the Mersey begins. A skyline of chimneys, towers, and mills, stalked by demolition squads. There is the iconic viaduct bridging the valley, the motorway snaking east and west through the middle of the town, and the power station that took a year to demolish.”
“It is the narrative of a scene I focus on. The roads winding in and out, the square boxes on the hillside, the bus station under construction, cranes and diggers dancing in the rubble, workers carrying planks of wood.” Helen has also painted the home of Stockport County, Edgeley Park.
The critic, Andrew Lambirth, said of her work: “If Lowry first opened our eyes to the beauties of the industrial scene, Clapcott is chronicling its last chapter, the decay and fall of a great cityscape.” Alex Reuben, owner of the Manchester city centre art gallery, Contemporary Six, said: “Helen is perhaps the most important living artist in the north.”
The exhibition, ‘A Portrait of Stockport’, will open on Septemberc28 and run until January 25. Over 100 of Helen’s works will be displayed, including flagship pieces The Power Station, The Last Carnival and Brinksway 1979, Before The Motorway.
Helen has a significant profile in the North and the celebration of her works is set to be a key event in the gallery’s calendar. She has had major exhibitions at Salford Museum and Art Gallery, Scolar Fine Art and the Osborne Samuel Gallery in London’s Mayfair.
The main sponsor of ‘A Portrait of Stockport’ is local business and leading North West law firm, SAS Daniels, which has offices in Stockport, Chester, Macclesfield and Congleton.
The exhibition will feature a 20 minute video on Helen and her work made by Tony Halton Films. Accompanying the exhibition is the first major monograph on the artist, ‘In the Light of Buildings’, authored by Andrew Lambirth and published by Lund Humphries.
Helen said ‘It’s 50 years since I sat by the side of the Viaduct painting the mills, 40 years since the Power Station was untangled and demolished and 30 years since the motorway was completed. Stockport, my home town with its ever-changing topography is as inspiring today as it was when I first set out with a sketchbook.”
Councillor Frankie Singleton, Cabinet Member for Communities, Culture and Sport at Stockport Council, said: “Helen is one of the most exciting artists in the North West today and it’s very fitting that her paintings of Stockport will be on display at the War Memorial Art Gallery for local people to enjoy.”
Art dealer Bill Clark said: “I’ve been dealing in Helen and Clapcott work for the last 20 years and she is one of the most important living northern artists. She is unlike any other northern artist as she has dedicated nearly 45 years of her life to painting one subject. Since the early 1980s she has documented the changing face of Stockport in a series of subtle haunting paintings . She works in the incredibly difficult medium of egg tempera and each of her small meticulously painted scenes takes many months to complete. Her paintings don’t look like anyone else’s.
“Her beautiful paintings are records of a bygone era. Whenever a mill or a workhouse was being demolished in Stockport or a road was being built, Helen would be on site producing a series of drawings to record the event. These would later be used to produce her wonderfully detailed tempera works.”
The earliest work in the exhibition is from 1977 and the latest from 2022. Although some of the 100 paintings have been gathered on loan from private owners, Helen sees the show as her “gift” to the town.
And, finally, she may be ready to embrace London. There are plans for her to have 40 paintings exhibited in the capital which will be for sale.
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