Richard Vicary; printmaker & painter (Independent)
Hyfler/Rosner
Printmaker and painter
04 November 2006
The Independent
Simon Fenwick
The artist Richard Vicary's preferred medium was
lithography, an art form invented in Munich in 1798 when
Aloys Senefelder discovered how to print from the flat
surface of stone (lithography means "drawing on stone").
Exploiting the fact that water and grease repel one another,
it was the first entirely new development in printing since
the 15th century, although the printing surface is now more
often a metal plate such as aluminium or zinc.
The process has been adapted considerably during the course
of its history until, in the 20th century, lithography
replaced most other processes for printing on paper.
Traditionally in art lithography was used primarily for the
landscapes which were Vicary's most characteristic subject
matter. Printing on a lithographic press is particularly
complicated - and Vicary had a great zest for mechanical
devices, the more improbable the better. He also wrote two
books: The Thames and Hudson Manual of Lithography (1976)
and The Thames and Hudson Advanced Manual of Lithography
(1977).
Vicary's art was strongly influenced by the Neo-Romantic
painters and printmakers of the wartime and immediate
post-war years, when artists such as Graham Sutherland, Ceri
Richards, John Piper, John Craxton and John Minton were at
the height of their reputations. His own artistic preference
was for landscapes that showed evidence of man's activity,
such as quarries and industry. He never depicted his motifs
in a topographical manner but he noted the "air of
unreality" within his work: perspectives are foreshortened,
images are out of all proportion to reality and in
improbable conjunction to one another, colours are strong
and bold and "unnatural". Despite living 80 miles from the
sea, he was attracted by working ships.
Vicary was born in Sutton in Surrey in 1918. His father was
a Methodist minister and a member of the Pen Club who wrote
pot-boilers under the name Simon Jesty. (His 1935 novel
River Niger had an introduction by T.E. Lawrence.) His
rather fiery mother was a suffragette. An elder brother was
killed in action during the Second World War.
Richard Vicary attended the Judd School in Tonbridge in Kent
until his father, no doubt thinking his son needed a safe
career, found him a position in a bank. This proved to be a
disaster and before long he was sacked. The headmaster of
his school suggested instead that Vicary's evident artistic
talent for making architectural drawings should be allowed
to flourish, and so in 1935 he was sent to study at
Tunbridge Wells School of Art. The following year, he went
to the Medway School of Art in Maidstone, where he stayed
until the outbreak of war in 1939.
As a conscript in the Royal West Kent Regiment, Vicary
helped set up smoke-screens over the Thames during the
Blitz; later he worked in radar in North Wales. At the end
of the war, believing it too late to take up the place he
had been offered at London University, he instead attended
Brighton School of Art and the Kodak Photographic School.
Subsequently he taught at the Tiffin School at Kingston upon
Thames and, from 1948 to 1950, part-time at Epsom and Ewell
School of Art. The greater part of Vicary's career was spent
as Head of Graphics and Printmaking at Shrewsbury School of
Art until, in 1972, he retired on account of ill-health.
Subsequently he conducted summer schools at Henllan Mill
near Welshpool.
All the while, Vicary continued with his own work - although
he was the most modest of men and had to be persuaded to
exhibit. After various wartime exhibitions he showed in the
1950s with the Artists International Association in
Whitechapel. He also exhibited at the Oriel Gallery,
Newtown, the Gateway Gallery in Shrewsbury and the Bohun
Gallery in Henley-on-Thames and had solo exhibitions in
Birmingham, Lancaster, Shrewsbury and Leningrad. In 1974
Vicary was elected to the Royal Society of Painter- Etchers
and Engravers and to the Royal West of England Academy in
1989. His bright, optimistic work was bought by a number of
education authorities, Bath University, St Thomas's Hospital
and many private collectors.
Aside from his printmaking Vicary painted in watercolour and
pastel. He produced poster poems for West Midland Arts and
the Housman Society, as well as linocut illustrations for
the children's book The Ivy Garland (1982).
After the death of his first wife, Jean, from cancer in
1961, Vicary married again, to Deirdre Creagan, and bought a
smallholding with several acres of land near Shrewsbury,
where he lived for the rest of his life. An old cowshed was
converted into a studio - albeit one invariably in a state
of chaos - and here he installed a couple of printing
presses. The first, from Ellesmere College, he dismantled
and brought home on a tractor and trailer; the second, from
Shrewsbury College of Art, was the one he himself had bought
when he had been head of printmaking. Ever resourceful, when
the family washing machine came to the end of its working
life, Vicary took it apart and turned it into a Heath
Robinson-like contraption of a water barrel which directed
water down on to his lithographic press.
Forever on the side of life's casualties and the
dispossessed, Vicary collected both stray dogs and stray
people. His conversion to become a Jehovah's Witness about
20 years ago was typical: they were, in his eyes, another
persecuted minority and therefore worthy of support.
Staunchly left-wing in his principles, Vicary taught himself
Russian and would take his family to Russia on holiday. A
one-man exhibition at the Mukhina Gallery in St Petersburg
in 1991 came about after a long correspondence with Vladimir
Shistko, an "Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation" and
Head of Design and Graphics at the Academy of Industrial Art
in Leningrad.
Richard Henry Vicary, artist and teacher: born Sutton,
Surrey, 8 July 1918; married first Jean Bickford (died 1961;
two sons); second 1964 Deirdre Creagan (one son, one
daughter); died Shrewsbury 8 August 2006.