First published: Spring 2002
There was once an accomplished young English painter, not yet with an international name, but very much of his time and place. He lived in the fashionable London district of Chelsea; his works – mostly sophisticated abstracts – were exhibited in the even more fashionable Mayfair, and bought and sold, as he put it, ‘by the bucketful; and for comfortable sums.’ As well as painting, Donald Pass also occasionally taught; one of his students at the Liverpool College of Art had been the young John Lennon.
The artist Pass began to work in a figurative style with landscapes and portraits and later committed wholeheartedly to abstraction. He brushed up against many of the great names on the post-war British art scene. At the Royal Academy he met Stanley Spencer who treated him with great kindness and respect; he remembers L.S. Lowry’s humility and recalls, ‘He told me he would exhibit anywhere, alongside anyone, if people wanted to see his pictures’. Augustus John not only praised his work, he also recommended that he paint a portrait of the eminent writer Sir Compton Mackenzie.
This is an article extract; read the full article in Raw Vision #38
