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Conrad Atkinson
With a solo show currently at the Courtauld Institute, Conrad Atkinson talks to Sue Hubbard about the evolution of his career – a practice rooted equally in the political and the personal.
Art literally changed Conrad Atkinson's life. As a young Catholic of Irish descent growing up in the 1950s in the northern town of Cleaton Moor there were few career opportunities for a working class boy: "It was either down the pit or Sellafield nuclear power station." Art college provided "a short window of escape for kids who were not too academically bright". After school he got into Carlisle College of Art. From there he went on to Liverpool and bought an easel from a fellow student, John Lennon, for thirty shillings. "I thought Lennon was a loser, that he was just messing around with music because he couldn't hack art school." Now he wishes he had got the easel signed. Atkinson's childhood was steeped in politics. His grandfather was involved in the Independent Labour Party in the 1930s and acted as a political agent for the miners "but by the age of seventeen I had had it with politics". Later at the Royal Academy he began to see the possibilities of painting as a political act. To be a painter was to be at the cutting edge of intellectual investigation "though, in those days no one ever got into the academy doing abstract paintings". The great watershed was in1968 when he...
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