The Last Picture Show

Wooden toys, furniture, sculpture, drawings and paintings.

Harry Sowden is a man of many talents.  From a blanket woven in a cave in Morocco, to still lives painted recently, the former photographer has excelled in several art forms.
Now he has decided that his exhibiting days are over. But then, he is 96.

I caught up with Harry at the Birdwood House gallery where his abstract oils, spare, rather sombre in colour, but with a sense of humour underneath, were on the walls.

National Service

The Last Picture Show is now over but Harry says he won’t stop painting. “My other half says oh go out and play.. so I will carry on painting.” His life as a craftsman began when he trained as a carpenter. His father was a prisoner of war in Poland so Harry left school at 14 to earn a bob. As his son Mark writes in the forward to a book about his father’s 60 years of creativity, Harry did National Service then travelled Europe by scooter. He became a furniture designer then joined internationally renown architects Arup Associates as a photographer – assigned to cover everything, he told me, “from an architectural model to an oil rig.”

“I was photographing the glass being made for the Sydney Opera House in a French factory….every time I took a photo one of the bosses said Oh Monsieur Clac Clac. That’s when people paid me to work…now I paint.” He said that the pictures were a kind of a diary. “I never know what I am going to paint.”

Lockdown

One, painted during the Covid lockdown, is called Chocolate Box because everyone was doing so-called chocolate box picture jigsaw puzzles. Another is Ham and Beans – his lunch. Another, with two green bottles standing up and one prone, has a sad origin. “A friend had died and I couldn’t go to his funeral, so I painted this – if one green bottle should accidentally fall…..”

As his son says in the book: “Each painting is a construction, parts laid out like a floor plan.”

Harry is sanguine about this show being his last. “My other half said what are we going to do with all this stuff when you’ve gone? She said you’d better sell something.” 

So he has. Red dots on pretty much all of them. But there will be new work to get rid of, he assured me, smiling.
“People tell me I have to paint, so I do.”