ALLONBY BACKS - THE STORY OF A PAINTING

Date Posted: 9th May 2022

Allonby Backs. Gouache 23 x 33 inches (57 x 86 cm)

Sorry for my recent lack of communications. I have been grounded for the last 6 months.  My partner Michael has been seriously ill and my world shrank to the circumference of just a few miles. My position as chief carer was all-embracing which meant that the Kelly website suffered from neglect. I will update it very soon.

But things are changing and I’m pleased to say Michael is now slowly recovering and my days are filled with surprises, coincidences and some remarkable findings which I will tell you about shortly. There have been so many revelations that I wake every morning wondering what excitement will catch up with me that day.  It is astonishing what can be achieved without venturing further than a 10 mile radius of home. I couldn’t have done that when I started the gallery in 1987 - there were no mobiles, the World Wide Web was in its infancy, no APPS and no e mails -  hard to imagine now and impossible for Millennials to grasp the concept of a world without social media, mobiles and google.

The latest news is about the impressive painting attached.  It comes with a story. You may have seen it hanging in the 2017/18 Kelly retrospective at Tullie House (illustrated page 53 in the Line of Beauty catalogue available to buy on the merchandise pages at www.percykelly.co.uk. @ £20). The Kelly estate has just given me permission to sell it. It is very special because when Percy’s son Brian inherited his father’s work in 1993 he chose to keep this one because it reminded him of his teenage years in Allonby.  Brian was a man of few words but he told me it was the backs of the houses in Garden Lane. He remembered climbing the gate as a short cut home from the West Newton road.  He remembered his father wandering the village drawing and painting. So I got it framed for him and it hung in his sitting room in Silloth until his premature death in 2000. It was stolen from Brian’s house when he died, was recovered and legally claimed by his mother, Percy’s first wife Audrey, who asked me to look after it for her as she hadn’t the space for it. I have stored it for the past 22 years and now 10 years after Audrey’s demise her estate has decided to sell it. It is signed PK boldly on the bottom left and again a faint one bottom right and is one of his larger brightly coloured works  (23 x 33 inches framed).  Audrey thought  it was painted about 1960 just after they moved to Allonby from the Post Office at Great Broughton when he was recovering from depression and  making bigger works. The scene remains largely the same today - the last time I looked even the greenhouse was still there (hope it hasn’t blown away in the strong west winds off the sea in the meantime.) It was a favourite Kelly subject and he did many drawings and sketches of that line of houses and many studies of the gate.

Get in touch if you are interested.

More exciting news to follow.