Brian Yale: painter, sculptor, designer
Hyfler/Rosner
November 30, 2009
Brian Yale: painter, sculptor, designer and teacher
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6936794.ece
Brian Yale was an innovative and versatile artist whose
career encompassed teaching and designing as well as many
years undertaking public art commissions for the Greater
London Council and the London Docklands Development
Corporation.
Yale was born in 1936 in the Black Country in Staffordshire,
and his childhood experience and memory of the Black Country's
industrial landscape was to influence his later cityscape
projects. In 1952-56 he attended the Stourbridge School of
Art and in 1958 gained a place at the Royal College of Art,
though his education was interrupted for two years by
National Service. In 1961, while still at college, he won a
competition organised by Pilkington, the plate glass
manufacturers. The challenge was to invent a pattern for
sheet glass which thoroughly obscured see-through vision and
lent a fresh approach to add to the existing range. His
design, Cotswold, became one of the most popular in the
range.
In 1962 Yale was one of only three students to graduate from
the royal college with a postgraduate scholarship. He
applied for and won a part-time teaching post at Hornsey
College of Art in North London, where he worked for six
years. His time at the college coincided with the famous
student "sit-in" in the summer of 1968 whereby a number of
disgruntled students ejected the principal and took over the
running of the college for two months. Yale was a witness to
these events, though he took no active part, and shortly
after the sit-in ended he left Hornsey to become an artist
and environmental designer for the architecture department
of the Greater London Council (GLC). He would stay in this
post for the next 20 years, designing murals, sculptures,
public art works and play spaces for GLC housing estates and
schools.
True to his versatile nature Yale was not content with
working in one role. In 1965, while still lecturing at
Hornsey, he founded Group One Four in association with three
other artists. The group was dedicated to bringing art to
the attention of the wider public and between 1964 and 1970
held more than 70 exhibitions in the UK and abroad. Yale was
instrumental in developing new ways of working individually
and in collaboration with the group, and in preparing
compact travelling exhibitions. During this period his
interests had come to focus on painting and sculpture. His
aim, in his own words, was "to produce work which was
abstract and impersonal in execution, platonically classical
in form and capable of being read internationally".
The departments of architecture and civic design that Yale
joined in 1968 embraced a Modernist approach and led the
field in many areas of civic design. Yale was employed as an
in-house artist for the architects' department, where he
worked closely with the many teams specialising in different
kinds of work. Though there was never a budget for "art" as
such in building work, there existed a fund allocated to
projects that required a visual impact. Hence Yale initially
worked on designs for play facilities for children, intended
to provide play objects that also fulfilled an aesthetic
function within the landscape. His designs for play spaces
for new and rehabilitated housing appeared at Kennington
Oval, the bike track on Gloucester Grove Estate and the
South Bank. One of his most striking pieces was The Long
Man, a climbing frame in the shape of a man painted on the
roof of a ground-floor shopping area and measuring 168ft
from head to toe.
Yale combined his work for the GLC with his career as a
private artist, working as an environmental designer during
the day and painting in his studio at night and weekends.
Throughout the 1970s his paintings were exhibited regularly
in, among other places, the Thackeray Gallery in Kensington
and the Oriel Gallery in Cardiff, and in the early 1980s he
began to exhibit one of his most powerful and continuing
works, No Man's Land. This consisted of a series of
paintings of the battlefields of the First World War,
inspired by Yale's interest in the impact that Man's
presence has on the natural landscape. In his paintings he
demonstrated the enduring physical scars left by the First
World War, even after a period of 70 years, while also
showing the tranquil rural calm or modern urban development
of what were once battlefields. In 2004 the title of the
exhibition was extended to No Man's Land and the
Architecture of Terror to reflect Yale's interest in
modern-day conflict.
In stark contrast to his urban-based works for the GLC, Yale
also constructed a visual record of the very different
environment of the shingle beaches at Dungeness and Romney
Marsh in Kent. His work in architecture led him to value the
quality and simplicity of the painted image and that, as a
painter and sculptor, all choices and decisions were his
own. Working from a clapboard cabin only a hundred yards
from Prospect Cottage, owned by the film director and artist
Derek Jarman, Yale painted striking images of the area such
as Dungeness Power Station by Night and created a garden
full of quirky nautical sculptures. Jarman and Yale
discovered that they had many things in common and
encouraged each other in the creation and development of
their remarkable sculpture gardens. Yale's paintings of the
First World War battlefields and his work relating to the
landscape of Dungeness were an attempt to capture in images
"the sky, the land, the sea, how they meet and how they are
affected by the meeting".
In the late 1980s Yale was approached by an old colleague
and asked if he wished to contribute sculpture and artwork
for a project in Beckton organised by the London Docklands
Development Corporation. Yale accepted and produced a
sculpture of three lifesize horses and a man made of
stainless steel to adorn a walkway. While this commission
was in progress he began discussing another major project
for a work at Prince Regent Station. The result, erected in
the summer of 1996 and one of Yale's finest works, was The
Docklands Frieze, a series of 50 stainless steel panels that
showed the life of the Docklands over the previous three
centuries. Yale worked on further commissions for Docklands,
repeatedly demonstrating his ability and vision as a public
artist. It is worth noting that his work as an environment
artist was never vandalised, and that not even the
enormously long frieze at the Prince Regent Station became a
target for graffiti artists.
Besides his work as a public and private artist, Yale
continued to teach when invited to do so. In the summer of
1986 he was invited to teach a short course in a US
university and at the same time was asked to teach in the
department of silversmithing and jewellery at London
Guildhall University. An able and effective teacher who
enjoyed working with students, Yale stayed in contact with
many of his old pupils and took a great interest in their
backgrounds and aspirations.
Brian Yale's versatile philosophy as an artist can perhaps
best be summed up in something he overheard his wife Sheila,
a distinguished textile artist, say when asked if she had an
agenda of her own. She said: "I can't see why we don't do
something just for the joy of it." As Yale himself
commented, you can't argue with that.
Yale is survived by his wife Sheila and their son.
Brian Yale, painter, sculptor, designer and teacher, was
born on June 29, 1936. He died of cancer on October 12,
2009, aged 73