This was a very demanding, dark and exhausting period of work.

It was a difficult period of my life. 1981 found me divorced with custody of three children aged 4, 8 and 12 (and a new family member, Flip the dog)

Somehow the extra responsibilities thrust upon me, together with my full time job as Head of the Art Department at Redditch and North East Worcestershire College made me all the more determined to pursue my role as an artist as well as that of parent and lecturer.

During this period, I also had to contend with the loss of my father (9 January1990) and an agonising custody suit (1986) followed 2 years later by the death of my ex-wife in a road accident (10 May 1988). The consequent trauma for my children, of effectively losing their mother twice, once through divorce and once through her death, led me into a soul-destroying series of fruitless attempts to obtain a comparable teaching post nearer to our home and their needs. (Redditch was a 45 minute journey away)

In 1982 I had exchanged my car for the flexibility of a Leyland Sherpa van which I converted into a multipurpose vehicle that could be quickly transformed to fit various roles and functions, from family transport to camper/sleeper. This enabled me to enrich the lives of my children very economically by taking them, equipped only with sleeping bags and pillows, (sometimes with friends of theirs) on economical “adventure weekends” to the Welsh Coast or London to see galleries and museums etc without incurring accommodation costs.

During the early 1980s, the children would stay with their mother every other weekend so during those weekends I set about adding to the van another quick-change facility, that of a mobile “field studio” with a comprehensive, ready-to-use drawing and painting kit and embarked on an intensive 4-year topographical study of The Black Country from a high vantage point at Oldnall near Lye.  But time pressures intensified continuously. My “child free” weekends were progressively consumed by increases in administrative paperwork connected with Governmental initiatives, and the expansion of my department at College to include other areas of curriculum responsibility.  The tragic death of my ex-wife at this stage put even more pressures on me, as I tried to compensate the children for this new loss and re-establish some degree of stability and security in their lives. In spite of all of this I was determined to continue the development of my art so in an attempt to find more hours in the day without infringing on the already limited time I could devote to the kids I hit upon the idea of painting landscapes at night, and so, with a newer van (Renault Trafic) and yet more adaptations, a removable fixed easel, low powered interior light and with the rear doors open, I was able to make drawings and paintings of the landscape at night from direct observation. Alex 10.

I worked consistently 4 or 5 nights per week for over 5 years on this project.  Having put the children to bed (Rachael was now 17) I would leave the house at around 11.30pm, work till 3.30 – 4.00am and then snatch what sleep I could before rising at 7.30am to prepare the children for school and leaving for College. These severe and absolute time restrictions forced me to develop still more rapid techniques of execution.

Occasionally, during the winter, I would arrive back at home so severely chilled that I would get into a hot bath and fall asleep only to wake up one hour later immersed in what was now cold water!

Each piece was completed on location at one sitting and I worked with a range of media, charcoal, conte crayon, pencil, pen and ink, pastel, gouache and oils in sizes from A4 (210x298mm) to 48×72 inches (122x182cm)

Look at this drawing and imagine, if you can, sitting in my van with the rear doors wide open making this drawing in virtual lonely silence, when, illuminated by the interior light, a Policeman’s head appears from the right-hand side and says “Ah, the night painter”

Word of my activities had obviously got around the Station.

During an earlier four-year project depicting the panoramic view of the Black Country from Oldnall Hill near Lye, I had equipped myself to work in the depths of winter, with thermal under-leggings, thick woollen sweaters, navy-blue donkey jackets and full face balaclavas, so when I prepared to go out painting at 11.30pm on 20^th January 1987 after a heavy snowfall, I thought “No problem” and simply donned the outfit described above, naively unaware of the threatening “urban terrorist” type of appearance I was projecting!

After I had set up and been painting for about half an hour I heard a door opening close to the van but just out of sight and a woman’s voice saying “Who’s there?”

I jumped out of the van to explain myself but before I could utter a word she shrieked and slammed the door violently. So now I was in a dilemma!  I thought “ I can’t possibly knock on her door to explain without giving her a heart attack or worse” After giving the matter some thought I decided just to carry on working. In the meantime, unbeknown to me, telephones were ringing at various houses in the street and about 15 minutes later a number of  front doors opened simultaneously,  five men emerged and approached me as a group, one leading a large Alsatian dog and another carrying what looked like a baseball bat.

However, satisfied with my explanation and the evidence of the work I had already done, they explained the situation to the lady concerned and returned to their respective houses.

Needless to say, after this incident, I always wore brightly coloured clothes and never again used a full-face balaclava.

Occasionally I would devote the whole four hours to rapid site-changes, producing what I call “snapshot studies” executed with a strict time limit of 20 minutes or less per drawing. This enabled me to cover a considerable number of differing environments in one night, from dual carriageways to back streets, from dark, quiet churches to noisy illuminated industrial units with the nightshift working at full tilt.  I would sometimes employ this “20 minutes strategy” simply to re-invigorate my work if I thought it was becoming too repetitive, predictable and losing its investigative sharpness.

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Most of the work centred on local urban areas, but industrial and rural settings were also included. On very rare occasions I would venture as far as Birmingham or Worcester but, obviously, any time spent travelling limited productive working time and, more critically, took me further away from the children.

The Police

During the five year period of this night-work project, I frequently attracted the attention of the Police. Sometimes they would arrive in response to phone calls from residents who happened to be out of bed at 2.00am for some reason or other and saw what looked like suspicious activity going on in the street outside their house or, at other times just coincidentally whilst on their normal patrols.

They were usually very affable and I would occasionally get involved in a bit of banter along the lines of “You lot come out to me regularly but I never see the same officer twice. I am beginning to think that there are more of you than there are of us!”

In fairness to the police, the only aggressive attitude I experienced was around 1.30am one night when two police cars screeched to a halt, six officers jumped out and a burly Sergeant ordered me (in a fairly forthright manner) to get out of the van immediately and demanded to know where my accomplices were.  However, I was again able to convince them of the innocence of my intentions and after a while they left quite amicably. Perhaps at this point I should mention that at the time I was parked with back doors wide open directly outside the Brierley Hill branch of Barclay’s Bank.

These encounters increased my already considerable respect for the police and other emergency services, working hard for the protection of the community whilst most of the population was safely tucked up in bed.

The Workers

It was always amusing during the summer months to see groups of factory-workers sitting on the boundary walls at the roadside with their flasks of tea, eating their sandwiches and having a smoke during their breaks at 2.30am just as if it were 2.30pm on a sunny day when they were on the day-shift.

Three lives

As this pattern of lifestyle continued over time a strange, almost surreal awareness evolved in my consciousness. It was almost as if I were living three totally separate lives, my domestic life with my children, my work as head of department at College, and finally the strange melancholy silence of the night. Sometimes as I was painting, the nocturnal solitude and silence seemed the only reality, and all daylight activity just a dream.

“Finished works”  

In addition to the “snapshot “ studies mentioned above, I made many substantial drawings of up to A1 size (60 x 84cm) using a variety of media (sometimes in combination) charcoal, Black or Sanguine (dull red) Conte crayon, pastels, pen or brush and ink. These studies contributed to the necessary speed of execution I developed (because of  the absolute time constraints involved) to produce works in oils ranging in size from A3 (30 x 42cm) to large pieces (120 x 180cm)

Whenever I drove around for domestic reasons, day or night, I would be making mental notes “this looks an interesting composition or area to revisit one night” etc. I was always drawn to unusual lighting conditions or atmospheres.

It is interesting to note the sparsity of overnight roadside parking in 1987 compared to the current time of writing (2018) when the line of parked vehicles in many residential streets is virtually continuous, sometimes making the roadways almost impassable.

As time passed, experience, intense observation and constant practice made me more and more adept at summarising what I could see, breaking it down to its simplest elements and rendering it with increasing swiftness.

The drawing above I consider one of my best, very broad and spontaneous. Using a square stick of compressed charcoal, the whole drawing was done in less than 20 minutes. Strangely, when making these night-time drawings, the fist thing I did was to plot out, in simple outlines, the areas which had to be left white i.e. the lamps, the reflections on the car roofs etc and then carefully avoid getting any charcoal on those areas throughout the drawing. There is no other way of achieving the required brilliance of the white paper (by applying white gouache etc)

So the drawing technique is a combination of very broad and spontaneous strokes, sometimes using the side of the charcoal stick and sometimes the “point” executed with very swift movements and meticulously controlled movements when you work anywhere near these light areas which must be protected at all costs.

Incidentally the times and dates which I meticulously record denote the moment the piece was completed and reflect the long term preoccupation with time and space which underlies all my work, be it the Welsh Mountains or the battlefields of the First World War.

The discoveries I made in colour were fascinating, for instance, I was amazed to find that Indian Red, a colour which since childhood I had dismissed as utterly dead and lifeless could in the right circumstances become quite luminous in depicting cloudy skies subjected to light pollution As a result it became an important component of my palette during this period (and since)

As a child, walking the three-quarters of a mile home at night from the “Olympia” Cinema (known affectionately by everyone locally as “the Lymp”) I had always disliked the lurid orange/yellow coloured light given off by the sodium street lamps which lined the main road, turning everything into an unpleasant yellowish monochrome in contrast to the white light emanating from the less powerful lamps in the side streets. The two paintings above show clearly these differing light characteristics.

Now I became fascinated by working in streets lit by the cool white light of the conventional lamps but which opened onto sodium-lit areas as in the two pictures below.

To produce the painting of Stuart Crystal Glassworks, I parked in a white-lit side street near “the Bird in Hand” public house.. In the near middle distance is a strip of the main Stourbridge to Wolverhampton road which is lit by sodium lamps which are just off picture. Further into the picture are the factory buildings of the glassworks lit by conventional white lights, so we have that intriguing mixture of subtle warm and cool colours.  In the painting of Kinver Street we have a more extreme example of contrast between the cool light of the foreground and the almost violent orange-yellow sodium-lit façade of “The Rose and Crown” and main road visible at the end of the street and beyond the right-hand lamp.  Incidentally and surprisingly, to achieve the subtle coolness of the white lamp-light I had to add a touch of Viridian Green to the mix, a colour I very rarely use.

Atmospheres

Sometimes on my way home from College after conducting evening classes I would encounter particular atmospheres such as heavy frosts, mists or fog and would then feel obliged to return cold at midnight to record them no matter how cold and uncomfortable it was.

The painting above “Night fog at Amblecote” is another example of the cool white lamplight and the yellow-orange of the sodium lamps in the background described earlier.

Rural Scenes

Most of my “Nightwork” involved urban and industrial areas but sometimes I would venture out into the local countryside.  This posed extra technical problems and difficulties as there would be very little light and no street lamps to give the paintings particular focal points.  As a student I had experimented with very narrow tone ranges sometimes pitching the range very high, sometimes very low on the principles suggested by Gombrich “A tune is the same tune whichever key it is played in”. So now I struggled with ultra-low and limited ranges of tone and colour.

This view across the farmland fields near Wordsley with the A449 road from Kidderminster to Wolverhampton cutting across from left to right must be one of the most minimal paintings I have ever done, and one of the best.

The tones and colours are the culmination of years of disciplined, intense observation and experimentation with subtle mixes of colours, mainly Vandyck Brown, Prussian Blue, Ultramarine, Indian Red and some Titanium White (particularly of course in the distant car headlights)  The faint reddishness in the lower sky is the result of light pollution from the far distant  towns of Kidderminster and Bridgnorth.  Note the barely seen silhouettes of the two trees on the left.  Working in the low light conditions provided by the van’s interior light and restricted to such critically close tolerances of tone and colour is rather like attempting to compose a piece of music on a barely audible instrument, restricted to three close, low-pitched notes subdivided into semi-tones, not an easy exercise.

Strange encounters 

There were too many of these to mention, some of them quite surreal; from nonsensical conversations with late night drunks to a chap taking his two goats on leads for their nightly 2-mile walk round the deserted dark streets of Dudley at 2.30am.

At the conclusion of this period, the work I had produced formed an exhibition entitled “The Black Country at Night”, which was displayed at Wolverhampton and Dudley Art Galleries and was featured on BBC and CENTRAL TV and in the Mail on Sunday Colour Supplement.  At the time, I thought that this would lead to greater things, but when the doors of the exhibitions finally closed, I found myself straight back on the bottom rung of the ladder.

It was a great physical relief when this phase of my work petered out in the early 1990s when I took the risk of committing myself full-time to painting and resumed a more normal, though far less secure lifestyle, and returned to painting in daylight.

A brilliant light in the darkness

Although this was a dark period in almost every sense of the word, the latter part of it contained a meteoric affair of the heart so intense and spiritual as to provide enough light to last three lifetimes and the precious memory of which to some extent sustains me to this day.

Aftermath

The skills and techniques of working in darkness which I had developed lay dormant only for a brief period, being resurrected when I began working (with a helmet-lamp) in the deserted First World War Tunnels of Verdun and Vauquois in the mid 1990s and  in the woods and trenches of the Somme Battlefields at night. (See my book ”An Artist’s Diary. Robert Perry in the Somme Battlefields, Winter 2000”).  I have also from time to time applied these “night techniques” to lamp-lit woodlands in Wales and Scotland and the panoramic views of the Black Country that constitute  another of my long term projects.

The Nightwork Gallery

The works contained here represent only a small proportion of the whole output as many of the pieces were sold at the two Exhibition venues Wolverhampton and Dudley Art Galleries without being photographically recorded.  A BBC excerpt broadcast at the time is viewable on this website in the section “TV and Video”