Many of Lowry’s works include buildings which fade away into the distance along the lines of perspective. Though some would claim the perspective Lowry used in some of his pieces is not entirely correct, they are missing the point of the paintings. As Lowry said himself, he only painted ‘what he saw’ (ref. no. 1), and to represent buildings, which were a big part of his local environment, Lowry would need to indicate scale in some way.

The use of a ‘vanishing point’ is demonstrated in Lowry’s oil on canvas piece ‘Street Scene’ (Right). It can be seen that the buildings move away into a single point somewhere near the centre of the piece, starting off ‘large’, the closer to the front of the piece they are, and ending up ‘smaller’ towards the back. The large building right at the back seems to ‘fade into’ the background. This is fairly typical of Lowry’s outdoor scenes.

‘Street Scene’

Lowry’s paintings always seem to have quite a dull atmosphere. This is probably because of the fact Lowry always dealt with poverty (ref no. 3), and to represent this, he used five main colours: yellow ochre, blue, red, black and white. He usually worked on a light brown canvas, which he blocked out with bright white before applying the other colours to make up his picture. This predominant use of white is displayed in his oil on canvas painting Regent Street, Lytham, of which I have created a similar oil pastel representation, aiming to recreate the atmosphere of the original by using the same colour palette.

‘Coming from the mill’