Vortex

Tomorrow I am travelling to Cleckheaton to visit Prospect Street & Waltroyd Rd the two home locations of local artist Edward Wadsworth.

Wadsworth came to prominence in the early part of the century as a member of the Vorticist movement of artists who were influenced by the Futurist movement but who saw themselves as a balance between the organic & the machine worlds. Their works are abstract but at the same time a social comment on the world around them. His woodcuts of Cleckheaton, Newcastle & Mytholmroyd are examples where Wadsworth has taken the Northern landscape & transformed it in to a machine age vision.. Newcastle is pictured below.

He served during the first world war but was invalided out in 1917, he then went on to produce camouflage for so called “ Dazzle ships “ the idea was that interference patterns painted on the ships sides would deceive the eye. His implementation of this work can be seen in his later paintings. He died in London in 1949.

 
It is quite a surprise to find after some slight research that an artist who I admire still has a connection to the area. So Saturday is a chance to increase my knowledge, not that I would ever want to live in Cleckheaton. There is nothing there.