Joash Woodrow
Self Portrait
Oil on board, circa 1960/65
40 x 30cm Private collection

Portrait of Danny Padmore. Oil on hessian, circa 1960/65.

Portrait of Jacob Kramer. Paint on sackcloth. 78 x 63cm.

Painted during the early 1960’s this painting is one of three paintings of Kramer known to have been produced by Joash. Joash recalls having seen Kramer on occasions at Leeds Art Library. Although he never approached Kramer,  Joash made  small sketches of him which he would most probably have used as reference later.

Portrait of Jacob Kramer. Paint on sackcloth. 63 x 35cm

Portrait of Jacob Kramer.
Paint on sackcloth. 68 x 48cm.

Joash Woodrow died on the 15th February 2006 at North Manchester General Hospital. His funeral was attended by a small group of family and friends at Philips Park Cemetery, Whitefield.

In recent years Joash had become aware of the critical acclaim his work was beginning to receive and in the summer of 2005 he visited Manchester Art Gallery with his brother Saul, to view the first major retrospective exhibition of his paintings.

His work provides an incredible artistic legacy that will undoubtedly inspire future generations of artists and continue to provide great pleasure to many.

Exhibitions of works by Joash Woodrow have now been held in numerous public art galleries including:

Leeds Metropolitan University Art Gallery, 2007
Whitby Art Gallery 2007
Liverpool University Art Gallery, 2006
Hull University Art Gallery, 2006
Manchester Art Gallery, 2005
Ben Uri Art Gallery, London, 2005 (The Ben Uri exhibition was complemented by the first exhibition of Joash's large scale works held at the Royal College of Art, London)
Leeds City Art Gallery, 2004

Annual exhibitions of his work have been held at 108 Fine Art, Harrogate, 2002-2007

His work is now held in several prestigious public and private collections including Leeds City Art Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery and Hull University Art Gallery.

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Following the publication of the Joash Woodrow book in June 2004 the writer and musician Danny Padmore contacted 108 Fine Art, astonished to see a portrait of himself illustrated in the book. Danny sat for Joash in the mid 1960's, having been introduced to Joash through his good friend and fellow musician Paul Woodrow. Danny has written a piece on his memories of Leeds during his student days and of his time spent sitting for Joash.

Recollections
JOASH WOODROW (Portrait of Danny Padmore)

I  sat for Joash sometime in the mid-sixties. The catalogues specify the date 1965, so I suppose that must be right. At the time I was a student at Leeds University reading English and Fine Art. Brought up in a children’s home on Tyneside, I was half  English and half West Indian,  fiercely proud of both my Geordie background and African heritage, and wholly intent on seeking maximum advantage from what was then free higher education. I often wonder what I would have done in today’s harsher market driven educational climate.

They were truly heady days. Quentin Bell taught me how to look at paintings. The poet Geoffrey Hill lectured brilliantly on Keith Douglas and the poetry of the Second World War. I shared a flat in a huge rambling house off the Otley Road with the late poet John Silkin. He introduced me to George Trakl, Owen, Rosenberg, and other war poets. I’d wake up to the recorded sounds of Silkin’s beloved Mozart and Beethoven. I was into jazz and would reciprocate with Coltrane and Miles Davis on my treasured Pye Black Box record player. I shall never forget the sight of T.S.Eliot making his way gingerly down the Otley Road one fine day. Frail, tentative, but immaculately attired, he exchanged a fleeting glance with me. I recollect that he smiled. But perhaps I’m making that bit up. Anyway it all seemed far removed from the rough and ready back streets of North Shields.

I had moved from listening to jazz to doing jazz, and was learning to play the double bass. I had two fine teachers in Bernie Cash and Peter Ind, and progressed enough to earn a few bob in public performances. The Peel Hotel in Boar Lane was a popular bar and piano lounge much favoured by Townies in the sixties.  Morrell, the proprietor, was a stern Belgian who was never seen to dress down. Tall and imposing, he wore exquisite three-piece tweed suits at all times. Height apart, with his gold watch and chain, starched collars and elegantly waxed moustache, he would have made and excellent Poirot. No one knew his first name. You didn’t feel inclined to ask. It was simply, “Morrell”; a bit like “Morse”.

He hated paying the band. At the end of the night we, the musicians, would line up at the door of his office to receive our earnings. Twenty-eight shillings, counted out carefully in small change, never paper money. It was as though for Morrell, the absence of notes made payment less painful.

So, during the day, I was uptown for lectures on the Carracci’s and the Italian Mannerists, or the Metaphysical poets, and at night, downtown for jazz and the American Songbook. Twenty-eight bob would feed you and provide you with booze, or whatever your choice, for a week. As a student I was relatively well off.   

One of my closest friends at this time was Paul Woodrow. We had much in common. We shared a love of the creative arts, and an active passion for jazz in particular. Paul seemed to me to be, like myself, a young man without privilege, in contrast to the overwhelming numbers of private-school educated students I mixed with at University. On reflection, without ever articulating it, our respective African and Jewish heritages spoke of a shared understanding of oppression and prejudice.  

Paul was extremely multi-talented in a natural sort of way. He couldn’t read a note of music, but played the most thrilling boogie-woogie piano you ever heard. Simply by ear he would emulate Victor Feldman, McCoy Tyner and other jazz modernists.

We played the Peel together, lining up for our twenty-eight bob, and for a while formed a blues band. We experimented with jazz and poetry, successfully touring the North with a combo fronted by John Silkin and the late, great Ken Smith.

I recall seeing an exhibition of Paul’s student paintings at College. His work was bold and strongly defined. You didn’t feel it was about to slide off the canvas. It was resolute, fixed, with a touch of Graham Sutherland and a lot of Paul.

One day Paul came to me and said his brother Joash wanted to paint me. Paul was a local lad and lived at home, but his domestic circumstances always remained a mystery to me. He rarely spoke of his family, and though I had met many of Paul’s friends, I had never been invited to his home or met any of his family. I was vaguely puzzled and intrigued by the request. Who is this Joash? I couldn’t recall having met him. Why me…?  All I knew was that Joash was no student; he was beyond that. He was older, serious and, I instinctively felt, for real. I decided to go with it.

After almost forty years the memory bank inevitably gets a bit overcrowded, and some of the events of the past become less distinct than others. But I remember very clearly certain aspects of my meeting with Joash.

The house at 25 Allerton Grange Gardens was modest, bordering on the dull. It may or may not have been council built, but it certainly had a post-war municipal feel about it. It was without luxury or the conventional human touches. It felt merely functional to my mind, and smelt  “male”, as though the priorities of the occupants lay in directions other than the traditional home comforts. Knowing Paul as I did, this was not entirely unexpected. I somehow imagined there would be no frills.

I had entertained a few thoughts about what Joash might be like. There had been some whispers of “mental anguish”. He turned out to be far removed from my naive perception of the bohemian artist. He was quite unexceptional in appearance. No beard, no wild intense look, his clothes seeming to defy all current trends. He might have been a bank clerk or a civil servant. At first he seemed as bland and dull as the house in which I found myself.

But this was to change as the sessions began. I had felt some nervous apprehension. He was about to take something away from me; perhaps reveal something about myself. However his calm body language, polite and respectful soft-spoken manner, and the slightly shy, gentle gaze of his eyes, proved reassuring.

Behind the canvas, with brushes in hand, Joash seemed to me to take on a new kind of authority. As the session wore on he slowly appeared to me as somehow more substantial, with the controlled intensity of his painterly gaze, and the self-assured manner in which he applied paint to the canvas. Few words were spoken. It was as if  nothing should interrupt the tranquillity of the sitting and the continuity of his vision.

Far from feeling embarrassment at the long silences, I began to feel a curious comfort and peace with this man I hardly knew. We were getting to know each other without words.

Strikingly cartoon-like, the finished work was a bit of a shock, and yet unequivocally mirrored myself. The tightly buttoned-up reefer jacket and large Buddy Holly spectacles seem now on reflection to represent my defence against a hostile world, real or imagined.

It is nearly forty years on. Joash is in sheltered accommodation and has finished with his art. He has been “discovered” as a “lost genius”. I wonder: is he angry, bitter,  disinterested, bored by it all, or is he chuckling philosophically to himself? I hope the latter.

His so-called discovery, and the acclaim heaped upon his work in no way surprises me. In the quiet intimacy of our session together all those years ago, I felt, however instinctively, something real and meaningful. Amidst the superficiality of my own young and foolish student days, the brief meeting with Joash represented a signpost nudging me in the direction of a more honest, open  and committed path.

In the summer of 2004, at the invitation of the conservator and gallery owner Andrew Stewart, I made the trip up North to see a major exhibition of landscapes by Joash at the Leeds City Gallery. Wandering through the exhibition with Andrew, I was stunned into silence. Prosaic scenes of factories, warehouses, garden sheds and allotments were bathed in a translucent Mediterranean kind of light, magically transforming the mundane subject matter into items of  rare poetic beauty. In some instances you felt inclined to believe the canvas had been lit from behind, such was the brilliance and power of Joash’s colour.

Later that same day Andrew kindly drove me to his own 108 Gallery in Harrogate where I was able to see many more of Joash’s paintings.

It’s said that once before a gig, Miles Davis advised one of his talented but nervous sidemen, a new addition to the band, to play his instrument as if he didn’t know how to play it. I thought of this as I gazed at the portraits and still lives lining the walls of the gallery. The apparent primitive, almost child-like boldness of design and colour could not disguise the underlying sense of sophistication and technique in the works. It was as if Joash had to some extent, put to one side, or perhaps relegated, his considerable learning and technique in order to free the work. The power and luminous intensity seemed to come from this “unlearning”.

For half a century or more Joash produced paintings, drawings, sculpture and collages, most of which were rescued from Allerton Grange Gardens and are now in storage. They represent an astonishing level of productivity. It’s thought that not one was sold throughout the period of his activity. I have been lucky enough to see a substantial proportion of that considerable output. The experience has left me with a feeling of awe and wonder, mixed with just a tiny bit of sadness.

Even if merely as a passing footnote, I feel proud and privileged to have been a part of the bitter-sweet story of Joash Woodrow.                                

Danny Padmore - September 2004