Edward Beale: Doing the Lambeth Walk
Growing up in a working-class family in South London provided a nurturing environment for artist Edward Beale, who has a new one-man show opening in October. By Viv Lawes
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illing an entire wall of the terraced house that London artist Edward Beale (b.1950) shares with his partner Claire Edwards is a painting of the Lambeth rooftops viewed from the terrace beyond. It was painted on this very spot nearly thirty years ago, just a stone’s throw from where Beale was born and brought up. Gnarled peaks of impasto define the grey and red brick buildings that throb with life, the tight structure of the composition anchoring it to urban reality. This painting encapsulates a slice of Beale’s life, during which time he has become an increasingly respected and successful figure on British figurative art scene. “I sold this work through Agnew’s in
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1982,” he says. “Barings Bank bought it. After the firm collapsed in 1995, it was eventually returned to Agnew’s. I decided to buy it, so it was back on my living room wall twenty years after I first sold it.” The style of this particular painting is more contained than the fluid, joyful broad strokes of colour Beale uses nowadays. His palette is easy to recognise as the viewer’s eye jumps across the stacks of paintings in his basement studio at the property: bruise-like purples, cerulean blues, peach and ochre, and reds from vermilion to crimson. Some of the paintings in the studio go back to his student days at Camberwell College of