Cover: The Seven Legends Self
Portrait 1939 – Albert Richards
This self portrait was inspired by
the work of the Surrealists. Richards saw over 60 Surrealist
works in an exhibition at the Walker Art gallery in 1938. He
imagines himself in a dream-like landscape with devils and
demons. Seven strange incidents take place around him. The left
half of the picture is darker than the right. We are not sure
why. It may be that Richards originally began another painting
underneath.
Liverpool Walker Art Gallery tag
Albert Richards was born in
Liverpool in 1919. He had already served three years as a
sapper, followed by a year as an engineer parachutist before
being transferred for official duties as a war artist. He found
subjects everywhere : anti-tank ditches, searchlight batteries,
camouflaged huts, bailey bridges and the myriad of physical
tasks of the sapper were all recorded. Perhaps Richards most
impressive work of early 1944 were his renditions of parachute
training in Tatton Park England (see back cover).
He was an adventurous
watercolourist. Often he ignored the customary rules; a
favourite technique was to rub a wax candle into parts of the
paper so as to animate the picture surface and create a texture
that might evoke the surface of a glider canopy or an abandoned
vehicle. As well as being an intuitive colourist, Richards had
no fear of the colour black : he used it frequently to unify a
picture's design or to control the swathes of orange and red
that appear so often in his work. Richards' best work bears
comparison with the Great War work of Paul Nash; there is a
similar ability to animate a picture through surface design, and
a keen understanding of the role of outline in the internal
scaffolding of the paintings.
He was
killed on 5 March 1945 when his jeep drove over a landmine. He
is buried at Milsbeek War Cemetery, near Gennep.