Biography | graham-sawyer

The Music Is Made As Soon As You Listen - Graham Sawyer (1963)

Text by Charles Davis, Graham's nephew, son of Alan & Cynthia Davis. Some images are embedded in the text. For others, click on the hyperlink. There are also a few external links for additional information.

Graham Sawyer (1911 - 1978) was the eldest child of Ernest Morris Sawyer (1878 - 1948) and Emily Sawyer nee Hawkins (1889 - 1968). The other children were Norman (1917 - 1984), Cynthia (1920 - 2014), Dulcie (1922 - 1989) and John (1923 - 1993). Graham was born in Newton Abbot and educated at Torquay grammar school. In the 1930s, he trained as a chemist in Oxford and worked as a rep for a Swiss pharmaceuticals company (probably Hoffmann-La Roche, which was established in the 1890s, though Interpharma was founded in 1933). During the Second World War he was a junior officer in the Royal Artillery, commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant judging by online records, though Mike (Norman's son) thought he had the rank of captain. His painting career began after the war and spanned three decades, during which time he lived in East Anglia.

The Sawyer family were not well off. Ernest, a master confectioner, was in poor health, having been gassed in World War One and subsequently contracting tuberculosis, as a consequence of which he was hospitalized in Hawkmoor County Sanatorium near Bovey Tracey. Softly spoken and unfailingly gentle at home, he could be quick tempered in public, and according to Cynthia he once concluded an argument with an employer by emptying a bucket of icing sugar over the man's head. Employers aren't keen on this sort of thing and the family frequently had financial difficulties, at one stage having to resort to council housing, much to the humiliation of Emily. Though no less loving than Ernest, Emily sometimes blew her top at home, largely as a result of the frustrations involved in struggling to raise five children on limited means and in trying circumstances. Cynthia recalled that on laundry day the copper would occasionally boil over. When that happened, the children scattered, knowing it wasn't wise to linger in the vicinity of their exasperated mother, not while she was wielding a large wooden washing dolly.

According to Cynthia, Graham was acutely aware of his mother's difficulties and, as the eldest of the children, he did a lot to help the family, encouraging his siblings in their studies, and helping out financially during the 1930s, when he had a good salary and even, as part of his job, a car. Norman and Cynthia, who were circumspect and studious, both went to the grammar school. By contrast, Dulcie and John were the tearaways of the family, always up to mischief and not massively enamoured of schoolwork. When they failed to get into the grammar school, Graham arranged for them to attend boarding schools, Dulcie in Malvern, John in Oxford.

The role of responsible older brother may have typified Graham's life at this time, but it does not appear to have been a happy period for him personally. He clearly had an artistic talent and we have some sketches from before the war, but duty and necessity limited the time he had for exploring his gift. In one of his postwar notebooks, there is the following entry (Graham's underlining): For the encouragement of other 'delayed' personalities. I well remember in my twenties walking aimlessly amid the dross of Baubles at Fortnum & Mason etc (it would be about 1937) knowing inside me that I had a gift and mission - but utterly ignorant of what it was - and so wasting my time by assessing Fair Isle jumpers (two other products illegible) and feeling miserable for lack of direction. The despair is echoed in entries about his artistic and financial difficulties after the war.

I know nothing of his wartime experiences, however there is no suggestion that they were particularly harrowing by the standards of the day. Later on he could jot down the following joke without any sense of underlying trauma: Went to join the navy. They said, "Can you swim?" I said, "What's the matter, ain't you got any boats?"

According to an early sketchbook, he was in the Dutch city of Nijmegen in March 1943, though there may be some mistake here, as online sources say the battle for the city did not take place till 1944. Another sketchbook is marked 'Arnhem 19 April 1945', i.e. four days after the liberation of that city.

Army officer cadets. Graham is second from the left, front row.

The first of the wartime sketchbooks contains drawings of soldiers, Dutch civilians (mainly children, mostly named), and many studies of hands, as if this was something he was trying to master. The second book includes drawings of foliage and of a young couple in swimsuits, and numerous minimalist figure sketches practising spontaneity of line.

The spontaneity was certainly something he mastered. Many years later, painting alongside him as a child, I was flabbergasted when he conjured a dog out of three deft brush strokes. I still consider it one of the more spectacular acts of magic I have seen. His dexterity is also evident in the urgency of the watercolour landscapes, some of which were ad hoc studies done in the field preparatory to working up in oils in the studio. In this respect, he was an accomplished artist by his own lights: The hardest part of any art is making it look easy (1950).

We have no specific source for this, but it is clear that, after the war, Graham decided he wasn't going to mess about wasting more time, as he made no attempt to return to a conventional career and instead went to the Slade to study art. Again, no details, but in the Gallery there is a portrait (which in a moment of derangement we fondly imagined might be a missing Old Master!) Graham did for his graduation project.

After the Slade, there ensued a decade of great creativity and considerable hardship, during which Graham lived a hand to mouth existence. For a while, he rented a large house in Kensington (33 Gloucester Walk, Campden Hill, W8) and sublet rooms to make ends meet. At other times, it's not at all clear how he made ends meet. Sometimes he didn't. The early fifties were spent between London (in Kensington, Chelsea [1 Sydney Close SW3], then Kensington again, the first two in 1950, the third in 1952 after a period in Suffolk), and Bromeswell in Suffolk.

Gloucester Walk Sydney Close

The move to Suffolk was probably inspired by his passion for the painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727 - 1788), who was born in the county, though another reason is suggested by the following entry from a 1952 notebook (Graham's underlining):

January 18 1671 John Evelyn in his diary. "This day I first acquainted his majesty with Grinley Gibbons who I first met by meere (sic) accident in a poor, solitary, thatched cottage. G then aged 23. G explained he had retired here so that he could work without interruption."

Graham found his own version of this haven in what he describes as his 'happy hovel' in Bromeswell (Hill House or Hill Cottage, Bromeswell, Woodbridge) and subsequently in the studio he rented on Fore Street (probably No. 19 or 23) in Framlingham, which he called 'Blackbird Studio'. (See below for pictures of Fore Street, past and present). Blackbird Studio had no toilet facilities, so when you needed the loo, you had to go to the pub (a stroke of genius there!). In my original notes for this page, I identified the pub as the Wagon & Horses at No. 27, now a private residence. However, when Ros, Clare, Jeannette, and myself visited Framlingham in 2019, Ros identified the pub as The Crown, an old coaching inn still in service. She wasn't entirely sure, though, so this needs to be confirmed.

Family legend has it that during his impecunious days in Suffolk, Graham kept a stew permanently bubbling over the open fire, to which he would add whatever he found, day by day. Another story related how he was once walking in the countryside, broke and desperately hungry, when he chanced upon a rabbit in a snare. Anecdotal evidence aside, money was definitely a problem, as indicated by the following notebook entry from 1950:

October 31 - God help me, I've got it - the grand conception - but money (triple underlined), I can't forget my need - and my need is to forget and concentrate (triple underlined) on work (double underlined). God help me.

Financial difficulties weren't always greeted with despair though:

Country wit is sly - when I sold my truck at Stowmarket auction -broke to the wide as usual and after hearing that paying out was delayed- I asked the foreman about speeding it up. He said, "Wait a while. You don't know if you need it yet, do ye" - with a smile. (1952)

Dad used to claim Graham could have made a good living painting portraits, but disdained catering to the vanity of people who could afford to have themselves immortalized, preferring to choose his subjects otherwise, and when he did accept a commission, he would often deliver late or not at all. Whether this was really the case or just Dad's reading of the situation, I don't know. The only concrete thing I do know about money making at this time comes from January 1950:

An almost useless piece of Art (indecipherable) - my story of de Vries and Gainsbororo (sic). Pathetic that I should have to descend to the level of the art boys to make a living. But the Burlington Magazine seems to like it and it will buy canvas and bread.

The de Vries is Adriaen, a Dutch sculptor (circa 1556 - 1626). The piece eventually appeared in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Vol. 14, No. 1/2 (1951), p. 134 under the title of "A Note on Thomas Gainsborough and Adriaen de Vries" and can be read online at JSTOR . He wouldn't have bought much bread and canvas on this, a two page article identifying a de Vries statue (see below) as a model for figures in two Gainsborough paintings, 'Mussidora' and 'Diana and Actaeon'.

Eventually (a long time 'eventually', in the 1960s), Graham turned to teaching to make a living, initially in Lowestoft (at

the College of Science & Art, I think), then in Norwich at the School of Art & Design (now Norwich University of the Arts), and possibly (post 1970) at the Heartsease secondary school. In Norwich, he lived on the historic cobbled lane of Elm Hill in house No.6 (a listed building let by the council at that time, but now a private property).

Among Graham's papers, I have the following lecture notes:

This document leads into a more precise project, outlined in the following text:

PLAN OF WORK

For the next two terms I plan a combination of landscape and figure work, using Local Landscape and a series of costume models in the studio.

Seurat's "La Grande Jatte" is the seed of our work and I have a large reproduction of it here for use.

Seurat (1859-1891), Piero della Francesca (1410-1492) and Paolo Ucello (1386-1475) were three similarly minded painters closely affected by the scientific work of their times.

Ucello worked at the time artists discovered the "Laws" of perspective. Piero also used perspective but added a static monumentality of form to his work. Seurat was alive at the time scientists were discovering the optical qualities of light. His method of Pointillism was added to the command of perspective and monumental form inherited from the other two masters. Seurat's "La Grande Jatte" can be seen to use all these qualities and I think we would gain by trying to assimilate some, at least, of these attributes.

Look at the paintings, identify the qualities I mention, and make a plan of work. I suggest you do not alter Seurat's composition. Simplify if you wish, but keep tone and perspective intact. As regards colour, I advise using your own method of individual brush work: do not attempt to copy pointillism.

While we have good weather, work out of doors, take drawings of the tree formation with you, but work from similar formations outside. Drawings on the river or broads can be used in place of Seurat's Seine and so on.

Decide early on the size of your work but keep Seurat's shape (1:1.618). This will help you in stage 2, the reduction or enlarging of your studies to the correct size for your work. I think it would help if you studied Seurat's drawings. He worked with conté on Ingres paper, always in tone and mass. Costume will be contemporary - our models will merely be asked to adopt Seurat's poses. Seurat made many small colour studies and masses of tone drawings.

I cannot think of a better way of working.

He kept two works from this course, a charcoal sketch and an Expressionist version of the Seurat, though I don't think either are by him.

Graham took his teaching seriously and in a 1964 notebook there are a series of drafts for an article or lecture detailing how education should remedy the visual illiteracy of British culture. However, teaching was not a vocation and, above all, Graham's life was devoted to two major pursuits, painting and research into paints.

A glance at the Gallery is enough to indicate just how wide ranging was Graham's quest for a personal style, but his first and most enduring inspiration was Gainsborough, whose influence is most evident in his portraits and landscapes in oil. According to Norman, he travelled to Italy to study the Old Masters, though whether expressly or in the course of the war, I don't know.

Among the artists mentioned in his notebooks are: Jacobo Bellini (1400 - 1470), Constable (1776 - 1832), Delacroix (1798 - 1863), Piero della Francesca (circa.1420 - 1492), Sigismund Goetze (1866 - 1939), Jacob Jordaens (1593 - 1678), Claude Lorrain (1600 - 1682), Isaac van Ostade (1621 - 1649), Poussin (1594 - 1665), Rembrandt (1607 - 1669), Rubens (1577 - 1640), Titian (circa.1490 - 1576), Turner (1775 - 1851), Van Dyke (1599 - 1641), and Watteau (1684 - 1741). There are also extended references to the Sienese school of painting, notably Francesco di Giorgio e di Lorenzo (aka Vecchietta or Lorenzo di Pietro) (1410 - 1480), Ambrogio Lorenzetti (circa.1290 - 1348), Masaccio (1401 - 1428), and Sassetta (circa.1392 - 1450). Spanish painters are conspicuous by their absence and we have a postcard Graham received of 'Las Meninas' by Velásquez, on the back of which the sender says something about this not being to Graham's taste. Why, I do not know, but he may have been put off by the fact that Velásquez was a court painter specializing in portraits of the nobility.

References to modern painters are rare, though there are some fairly explicit visual allusions to Gauguin in the 'Fertility' series of paintings and associated images. Otherwise a loose sheet of paper mentions L.S. Lowry with the ambiguous suggestion that they might have met in Manchester in 1964. On the same sheet is the following outline (for a lecture?):

Classical

Enclosed and stripped bare of outside references

Lyric lesson of Giorgio Morandi

solitary genius of It. Art

Battle between Shape & Colour

This last is significant as Giorgio Morandi (1890 - 1964) is the only contemporary Graham mentions as an explicit influence:

There are two of Graham's Morandi influenced paintings toward the end of the Gallery.

Graham's work was too varied to fit into any 'school', but he was a member of the Norwich 20 Group, an association of local artists started shortly before he moved to East Anglia and still going strong today. The group used to meet in pubs where the 'discussion' could grow quite heated. Parenthetically, it's worth noting that meeting in the pub wouldn't have displeased Graham and not just because he needed to go to the loo. He liked his beer and wine, and occasional references to pubs crop up in his notebooks.

Some of Graham's paintings featured in collective Norwich 20 exhibitions. There are four newspaper clippings (see below) about exhibitions (solo and joint), appearing respectively in 1954 (The Oxford Times), 1969 (The Eastern Daily Press), and 1972 (probably also in The Eastern Daily Press). The fourth is undated, but it is by the same critic as the '72 clipping (S. E. Hamilton Wood, 1918 - 1989 painter, sculptor and teacher, and member of the 20 Group). The paper for this last clipping looks much older but was folded into an address book with my address at Lancing, so may be from the early seventies and simply weathered by exposure to the sun. The review refers to "The Road to Parham Under Snow", which I take to be the painting I dubbed 'Winter lane' in the Gallery, though that suggests an earlier provenance, as the painting was already in our house in Hampton Wick in the early sixties. The second clipping shows 'Fertility No.2', though unnamed at that point, just identified as 'Figure Composition'.

Titling doesn't appear to have been Graham's thing. The only titled paintings in the Gallery are the 'Fertility' series (not named on the back, but numbered and named on slides), 'The Game', 'Broken Family', 'A Way to the Blue Bird', and 'The Blue Bird'. Among the Norwich 20 Group records of collective exhibitions at the Norwich Castle Museum are the following 'titled' works by Graham:

1967 'Broken Family' & 'Strange Bird'

1971 'Little Landscape' / 'Thoughts on Growth' / 'Thoughts on Love'

1974 'Honeysuckle' / 'Leaves' / 'Painting'

1980 'Suffolk Landscape' Oil 1970 loaned by Mr. & Mrs. M. Toll

'Honeysuckle' and 'Leaves' are probably the oils I identified as 'Flower sketch' and 'Foliage sketch', but the identity of the works with the two most intriguing titles ('Thoughts on Growth' and 'Thoughts on Love') are open to debate.

The other great passion of Graham's life, a quest that lasted 19 years, was his attempt to unpick the lost secrets of the pigments and paints used by the Old Masters. Using his chemistry training, he experimented obsessively, almost madly at times, mixing and kilning minerals, and his notebooks (which are concerned mainly with this activity) sometimes read like the hermetic esoterica of an alchemist. In a way they were. He was trying to turn base materials into figurative gold. And, as with the alchemists, the search consisted of constant setbacks and small incremental advances. I'm sure that, when he started his researches in 1949, he never imagined they would take up the best part of two decades. That said, he did write in 1950: Persist in your folly and become wise - be more uncompromising. The book that came of this prolonged project, 'A Painter's Formulary', was never published, but we have the text and most of the key, and it will one day appear on this site.

For obvious reasons, Graham took great care of his eyesight. According to Cynthia, he wore glasses when he was young, but 'trained' himself out of it, though it may just have been a form of astigmatism that corrected itself with maturity. However, I do remember him saying that in a train he liked to travel with his back to the locomotive as it was more restful on the eyes. Moreover, I believe he structured his daily activities according to the natural light. Daylight was for painting, reading and researching, the evening for music, drinking, thinking, and talking.

Politically, Graham seems to have been on the left. There's no specific affirmation of this in the notebooks, but there is some circumstantial evidence. He was, after all, a bearded Guardian reader (!), though according to Cynthia he read The Guardian because it had 'a good arts page'! Another clue comes from a conversation Clare (Cynthia's daughter) had with Graham when she was around 14 (1963): "Presumably I was giving 'my' opinion on nuclear weapons which was a pure copy of that of those around me / parents. He just said quietly 'Oh really, do you think so,' triggering my first real effort in thinking of things for myself, even a feeling of embarrassment and also of critical thinking." And when Cynthia suggested he might visit Norman and John and their families in South Africa, Graham just smiled and said: "No, I shall never go to that country." The sentiment wasn't inspired by any lack of affection for his siblings. Another hint of his political views lies in his choice of reading matter, which included Bertrand Russell, W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice.

Graham never married. According to Cynthia, women were interested in him, but he had the honesty to say he wasn't ready to give time to a marriage and wanted to concentrate on his work. The phrase I heard reported was 'art is a jealous mistress'. He liked children and children liked him. Clare remembers running up to welcome him and do a 'Mickey Mouse'. "He held your hands and you ran up the rather rotund body, flipping over from the chest." Likewise one of my earliest memories is blowing bubbles of spit down one of Dad's pipes (he must have been delighted) pretending to be a diver. When the bubbles stopped, it meant I was no longer breathing and Graham had to panic, which he obligingly did. This went on for hours! I thought it was hilarious.

Apart from art, his personal transcendent faith appears to have been problematic. The following entry appears in a notebook from 1950:

16 Feb. Tonight I walked in tears. So many disappointments. I am at the end of my hopes. But there is another and higher source than myself . I must believe. The temptation to drink for depression is here. But there lies death to whatever talent I have. No drink for me tonight.

He did not forget this night, returning to the notebook twice in later years to add the following:

Reread on July 7 1953. Now the tears do not come. I have had many disappointments since Feb 1950 - now in the happy Bromeswell hovel I still wait. I grow dauntless - with stupidity? - or by the unshakeable Belief that lives by small Earnests and is denied obvious sustenance. One must forgive the outward selfishness and lack of principle in people such as us. The fire within does not allow us honour in dealing with the world. Debt and hunger are poor things to principles. I know them both. I believe - lord I believe, help my unbelief.

1 April 1963 Sun and spring after a dreadful winter. I made this month Gainsborough's Sandground (one of the key base paints he was researching) - 15 years. Now my touch is to be made strong.

The coda to the rabbit story quoted earlier was that God will provide.

Whatever faith he had, it was to prove necessary at the end of his life. In the mid seventies, Graham had a stroke at his home in Norwich. He was not found for several days until concerned students went to his house. His remaining years were spent in nursing homes, though the first placement was delayed. The matron where he was hospitalized didn't want him to go to just any care home, so she kept him in hospital for a mythical 'ingrowing toe nail' till an appropriate place could be found.

The first home, on the South Coast, was not a success. It catered to people who had been in 'the arts', but this mainly meant former actors and advertising men, and Graham was eventually asked to leave because he wouldn't stop drinking. A more accommodating residence was found in Midhurst in a home run by a nice young couple. I don't suppose they were particularly chuffed by his drinking, but they were more tolerant. John Seward (husband of Ros, Cynthia's daughter) remembers visiting Graham at Midhurst and being sent down to the off-licence where "they have some rather good claret."

Graham never painted again. When it was suggested that he might get out into the garden and do a bit of painting, he said: "No, I have given everything I have to give". In the undated newspaper clipping, the critic observed that there was no sentimentality about Graham's pictures. It appears to have been the case with the man, too. When Emily died, he burned most of the family photos and memorabilia. He also destroyed the Sawyer family tree he had researched. And when, in the nursing home, Cynthia asked what we should do with his paintings, he said, "Burn them."

God bless us barmy bastards - Graham Sawyer (1952)