Pictures of everday local folk

PICTURE PALACE . . . Gallery Oldham Curator Stephen Whittle observes some of Roger Hampson’s paintings with Mr Hampson’s wife, Betty and daughter Caroline Walmsley. Picture: CHRIS SUNDERLAND

THE work of late artist Roger Hampson was celebrated as Gallery Oldham prepared to launch its summer exhibition programme.

Mr Hampson, born in the mining and cotton spinning town of Tyldesley, in 1925, captured in his work the decline of industry and the rapidly changing urban scene where he lived.

After studying at Leigh Grammar School and spending the war years in the Navy, he studied at Manchester College of Art and later worked as an art teacher in Bolton.

Much is his work featured the people of Tyldesley going about their every day lives and reflected his empathy with their hardships.

He was elected president of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts in 1969.

He eventually left the North-West in 1978 to explore the collieries and mining villages of the Midlands and Wales and run the Loughborough college of art and design.

Oldham Gallery curator Stephen Whittle said: “Hampson’s paintings and prints record not just a vanished landscape but a lost way of life.

“Beyond that, however, they are important in their own right, as autonomous works of art, skilfully composed and reflecting the artist’s deeply imprinted sense of a shared history and a common humanity.”

Lost Landscape runs until July 25 at Gallery Oldham.