‘London, like the paint I use, seems to be in my blood stream. It's always moving – the skies, the streets, the buildings, the people who walk past me when I draw have become part of my life’
Leon Kossoff was a child of London. Born in Shoreditch to first generation eastern European immigrants, the chaotic East-End formed the backdrop to his childhood. The city became his life-long subject and he rarely left it, the only exceptions being as an evacuee and during his overseas military service from 1945-8. Kossoff was not drawn to the capital’s glamour; rather, like Walter Sickert before him, it was the real city of ordinary people and overlooked vistas which preoccupied him: ‘the kind of landscapes that many people would hesitate to regard as “scenic” but that carry their own rough loveliness’ (Kossoff, in an interview with Charlotte Higgins, April 2013). Moving from the East End to Willesden, he painted those neighbourhoods familiar to him, creating a visual record of memories and experiences on different days and in different lights.
This work depicts an area that deeply resonated with Kossoff, a view of the rail tracks looking towards Dalston Junction observed from his Dalston studio between 1972-75. The train-lines of London, representing the city’s industrial rhythms, are a familiar feature of his landscapes. Kossoff, who painted this scene on multiple occasions, captures, with tremendous energy, a fleeting moment in time on a cloudy June day in 1973. Through a restricted palette of rich colour harmonies, rapidly applied brush strokes, dabs and dribbles of pigment, the surface of this work, which will have been worked and re-worked, comes alive before us. Out of the grimy light, the train-line stretches into the distance only to be submerged by a dense network of houses which sprawl chaotically across the work. Yet amongst them Kossoff reveals the hidden corners behind walls and unexpected spots of greenery whilst conveying the unseen presence of city-dwellers playing out their lives. This ordinary scene transforms into an evocative visual rendition, communicating the delight of Kossoff’s experience of this familiar view. It was this personal and emotional response to a place that Kossoff wished to recreate in his work rather than an actual representation of the reality of the scene.
Kossoff attributes these innovations in painting to Bomberg whose now famous class at the Borough Polytechnic he attended alongside fellow London school painter Frank Auerbach:
‘although I had painted most of my life it was through my contact with Bomberg that I felt I might actually function as a painter. Coming to Bomberg’s class was like coming home’