He was an English painter and art teacher - based in the Midlands - who produced intense observational drawings and paintings of people in landscapes and interiors. His paintings were very often involved with recording everyday activities and normal life and life events and sometimes the very odd thing that happens. (see below for more detail)
Norman Neasom’s paintings and drawings – like those of a number of other British artists over the past century or so, record both that old, quieter, simpler England, as well as its slow, gradual passing. In Neasom’s work, we can still discover men gathering hay by hand, two old gentlemen in tweeds out for a ride, or a farmer bringing in sheep with his dog. As his obituary in The Independent in 2010 observed, ‘Neasom’s was a benign, pastoral vision in a deeply English tradition.’This is precisely the type of artwork which I have been known to lament NOT seeing very often at national open exhibitions by art societies.
I'm guessing he probably stopped being active in RWS and RBSA exhibitions before I started reviewing them as I plugged his name into my Google Search box (in the right column) and his name did not generate a reference to
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| Norman Neasom - cover of Messums catalogue of his work The Snowdon Horseshoe from Capel Curig by Norman Neasom gouache on a.b. |
- This is the link to the catalogue (which can be downloaded)
- You can view the artwork in the Messums exhibition online on their website
- This is the video about the artwork in the exhibition
What I like particularly is you can see he recorded events in his own life and he regularly pops up in his drawings and paintings.
His work is described as belonging to the genre of British realist painting from the inter-war period. Messums suggest that this is a "somewhat underappreciated genre" whose leading light was Stanley Spencer.
Messum comments further about the genre
With more than a hint of nostalgia, it is a period of British art that is gaining increasing attention: in 2017 the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art even devoted a whole exhibition to the ‘movement’ (if one can call it such), showcasing over fifty British realists from the 1920s and ‘30s, including Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, Meredith Frampton, Winifred Knights and Edward Wadsworth – as well as Spencer, Fleetwood-Walker and Tucker. One might also draw Eric Ravilious into this group, with his closely-observed watercolours devoted to the English countryside of the inter-war years.I must confess when I first saw his work they made me think of Stanley Spencer (minus religious connotations) at one end of the spectrum and Beryl Cook at the other (particularly in relation to a lot of interior scenes.
Perhaps the artist these works most closely resemble is Beryl Cook, and her comical paintings of hen nights and tea parties. It is interesting to note then, that when the mayor of Redditch met Neasom towards the end of the artist’s life and remarked that some of his work reminded him of Cook’s, Neasom replied, ‘She copied me.’
