Maurice Cockrill (lots 183-187)

Introduction
Painted in 1984-85, the following five lots by Cockrill relate to the artist's first years in London when he was exploring legendary female figures in his work, including Ophelia, Judith, Medea and Venus. Lots 183, 185 and 186 are preparatory sketches for the resultant sequence of large-scale paintings on this theme. The works directly engage with the masters of the European tradition and appeared at a time - some forty years ago - when there was a wide revival of interest in expressive figurative painting that championed allegorical, historical and mythological subject matter.

Cockrill's series followed his move south from Liverpool where he had taught for the previous eighteeen years. For the first half of his life - until the early 1980s - Cockrill had largely confined himself to the north. Born in Hartlepool, County Durham, and raised in Wales and the Midlands, his time studying at Wrexham School of Art and then in Liverpool had been broken only by three years at Reading University (1961-64). In the early 1970s he was working in a photo-realist style, but by the end of decade his work was becoming more loaded, more expressive. It was to test this nascent expressionism in a more demanding art world that he embarked on the move to London in 1982.

Cockrill first took over Bridget Riley's old studio in Clerkenwell where Paula Rego was a neighbour and soon became a friend. The first work he produced in London continued in the vein he had begun, increasingly visceral and disturbing, but now with just the slightest hint of Rego's influence (lot 184). In 1984 Edward Totah gave him a one-man show, then from 1986-96 he was represented by Bernard Jacobson, under whose aegis Cockrill's style mellowed and his ideas proliferated. Natural imagery and the themes of growth and decay came to the forefront of his work. In 1995 he was the subject of a retrospective at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and in 1998 the last ten years of his work was shown at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol. The following year he was elected an RA, and in 2004 he was voted in as keeper of the Royal Academy Schools.


183
MAURICE COCKRILL (BRITISH 1936-2013)
OPHELIA
signed with initials and dated 84 lower right; titled Ophelia lower left
watercolour
38 x 28cm; 15 x 11in
64.5 x 54cm; 25 1/2 x 21 1/4in (framed)