Northampton Boot and Shoe project
Sometimes as an artist you can find inspiration on your doorstep, not realising it was always there. Back in 2021, I saw Laura Knight’s retrospective exhibition ‘A Panoramic View’ at Milton Keynes Gallery, a collection of 160 paintings covering 50 years of the artist’s works.
Cordell Garfield, Crockett & Jones shoemakers at work
Particularly interesting was a series of Second World War paintings commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, depicting factory workers involved in the war effort. Beautifully painted, they captured the skill and concentration of the engineering workers involved. This got me thinking, this type of art had always appealed to me and maybe I should start painting workers in action.
So, I came away from the exhibition considering how I should go about doing this, and where would I start? It was only when I gave it some thought that I realised the answer was always there, Northampton where I lived.
Northampton has a proud footwear heritage dating back almost 900 years of making boots and shoes. It is arguably the shoe-making capital of the world. Capitalising on the county’s farmland, abundance of cattle for leather, a major waterway in the River Nene, numerous forests producing bark for tanning leathers and, with a close proximity to London, Northampton became the leading provincial centre of footwear production by 1851.
Northampton is also the home of the Goodyear Welt, the leather strip that joins the insole to the upper where the sole is attached to, and this is sewn rather than glued. This is probably the most important part of the shoe-making process, as the welt allows the soles to be removed without affecting the uppers. Shoes are designed to last and to be repaired, and there is a skill and craft in producing such quality shoes.
Cordell Garfield, Shoemakers at Cheaney’s factory
The history was already there, on my doorstep, and like many people living in Northampton my family had connections with the shoe industry. For nearly 60 years my father had worked as a clicker, ran his own shoe company and was a leather buyer in the shoe trade. I had worked at a shoe factory during the summer holidays as a student, and my brother had also worked in a shoe factory.
As part of my desire to capture the craft of producing shoes and the skill and expertise involved, I started contacting the remaining long-established shoemaking companies operating in the county. Crockett and Jones, Tricker’s, Joseph Cheaney & Sons, Edward Green and Spring Line Ltd, the only remaining last manufacturer in the UK, were all contacted. I was able to visit the factories and spend time making rough sketches and taking photos of the various skills conducted by the workers, and this was crucial in creating my paintings.
The focus was not on staged managed poses, and this meant making sure I wasn’t in the way while at the same time being able to capture the worker’s actions. I wanted to recreate those processes, actions, and attention to detail performed by these craftspeople in producing the quality shoes for which Northampton is renowned. Quite a few of the processes involved were hand-crafted, and a single shoe could easily have up to 250 individual operations on it, demonstrating the labour-intensive nature and sheer craft involved in shoe manufacturing.
Once I had gathered my reference material and sketches, back in the studio I would rework compositions and colour palettes, looking for ways to produce a final painting. I wanted to capture the dexterity and manual skills, but also the heat and light and smells (if that’s possible in a painting!) that I felt when I was in these factories.
As with so many of my paintings, editing and repainting were a key part of producing my final compositions, but I also wanted them to be true representational art paintings clearly derived from real objects. I didn’t want to lose that, with the ultimate intention being to produce a body of paintings that is synonymous with Northampton’s shoe industry as the arbiter and producer of high-quality footwear.
The collection of Boot and Shoe factory paintings that I have produced to date have become a sort of homage to Northampton’s shoe industry, and a celebration of Northampton being the world-renowned capital of quality shoes. Some of these paintings have already been shown at Northampton Museum and Art Gallery as part of the Northampton Town and County Art Society’s annual exhibition. But there will be more paintings and possible exhibitions to come, so keep your eyes peeled and watch this space or follow me on social media for more developments.
