David Bates (lots 46-54)

Introduction
Bates enrolled as a student at the Royal College of Art in 1950, where he railed against his tutor Francis Bacon and also the young art critic David Sylvester about the rise of abstraction, arguing vehemently for realism and naturalism. Sylvester was disparaging of the so called 'Kitchen Sink School' to which he all too readily consigned Bates, and was especially critical of Bates' fellow student and friend John Bratby. But Bates was not to be dissuaded. He joined the Communist Party, and his strongly held socialist convictions led him later both to campaign for nuclear disarmament and to march in protest against the war in Vietnam. His subject matter in the 1950s reflected his political views and his interest in the worker in society. In London he made studies of navvies removing tram lines and emblematic paintings of industrial objects such as a cement mixer.

At the RCA he met fellow art student June Moss, his wife to be. The couple were married in Nottingham in 1957 where Bates was teaching at Boots College. They first lived together in Yeovil, then In 1961 they moved with their young family to Preston where Bates became senior lecturer in painting at Harris School of Art. They remained there until the late 1970s, by the end of which the couple were running non-vocational art courses, and Bates was directing the Preston Arts Centre, overseeing a diverse programme of music, film, art exhibitions and events. In 1978 he took early retirement and he and June moved further north to live and work at Newbiggin Hall, Carlisle.

Bates was born in China, the son of a Methodist missionary and headmaster. But with the rise of the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party) his parents returned with their children to England in 1931. Over the next two decades Bates' father had a succession of church postings. The family first lived briefly in Birmingham, then moved to Penzance, and subsequently to Nottingham before settling in Stockport in 1940, where Bates attended Stockport Polytechnic, and Bristol in 1945, where he enrolled in the West of England College of Art. In the late 1940s the family moved to Millom, South Cumbria where Bates began recording the working class community and the heavy industry of the area, before starting his studies at the Royal College of Art in London. Then, in 1951 the family upped-sticks once again and moved to Stoke-on-Trent where he drew and painted the potteries.


DAVID BATES (BRITISH 1929-2024)
SAXA SALT, JUG AND APPLES
oil on board; 18 x 20.5cm; 7 x 8in (unframed)