Артур Берри: Художник и летописец Стаффордшира

English artist and writer (1925–1994)

Arthur Berry (7 February 1925 – 4 July 1994) was an English playwright, poet, teacher and artist, who was born in Smallthorne, Stoke on Trent. His individual creative work became deeply rooted in the culture, people and landscape of the industrial pottery town of Burslem.

After the war, Berry became an art teacher. He worked in London and Manchester, but as a teacher, he is best known for his long association with Burslem School of Art, where he had studied. Burslem School of Art was absorbed within Stoke on Trent College of Art, which in turn became part of North Staffordshire Polytechnic in 1971. Berry was a lecturer in painting at the Polytechnic until 1985. Berry's second wife, Cynthia, was one of his students. They married in 1966 and lived at Wolstanton, Newcastle under Lyme. The Arthur Berry exhibition of work at Ford Green Hall is compact but conveys the flavour of what the local writer and poet was all about. There is an earthiness and a vitality about much of his work and though abstract painting is not everyone's cup of tea, there is a power about Berry's that is probably best conveyed if you look at the pieces collectively. The Sentinel's article called him the Lowry of the Potteries, though in my opinion, the paintings of Biddulph Moor born C W Brown, sometimes known as "The Potteries' Primitive", stand comparison. Berry was a fan of Brown, incidentally. From July 2015 to January 2016 a major show titled Lowry and Berry: Observers of Urban Life, displaying works dating from the 1960s to 1994, was held at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke on Trent.

Berry recalls the artistic inspiration he obtained from "the streets of my early childhood, the moorland landscape, pit villages, public houses, chip shops, night town and later avenue life." Lamenting change, he bemoans that, "the old wooden mangle rollers were replaced by rubber wringers, the iron range grate by little fancy tiled affairs, the elegant, slim paper packets of five Woodbines disappeared " He said of his childhood "every house seemed to have an old woman, a drunken man, a gang of kids and a snarling dog." And indeed "propping up the bar at his local public house is where he felt most comfortable." Yet it was during the 1950s that the, "crushing black agoraphobia descended on him, virtually imprisoning him in North Staffordshire for the rest of his life." But as a man, poet, playwright and artist he came into his own. Peter Cheeseman (Director, for thirty five years, of the Victoria Theatre, Stoke on Trent and, latterly, the New Victoria Theatre, Newcastle under Lyme), recalls the many animated conversations they had enjoyed, and "the swift gestures of his good left arm, banging at the elbow of his useless right and the rich talk that pours out of him." "and the publican had got a clean collar and tie on, and all the world was ship shape this was happiness."