"Sharp observations of people going about their daily lives with strong, impressionist colours and expressive brushwork"
Fred Yates was born in July 1922 and grew up in Urmston, a suburb of Manchester. After a spell as an insurance clerk, he served in the Grenadier Guards during the war and returned to Manchester as a painter and decorator.
Untutored, but with tremendous self-discipline, Fred began to paint the rich industrial architecture of Manchester, capturing the red brick terraces and street life with humour and vitality.
With a serviceman’s grant he later enrolled a teacher training course at Bournemouth College of Art where he received a formal education in drawing, printmaking and painting and in 1950 won a travelling scholarship to Rome and Florence.
He taught for twenty years battling continuously against artistic sophistication, for him, beauty resided in "simplicity and a child`s mind". His shyness and gentle manner made it impossible to maintain any discipline in the classroom and the only way he could keep control was to embark on painting demonstrations where he could lose himself in his work and try not to notice the pupils behind him. Nonetheless he continued painting in his own right and in 1954 came second to L.S. Lowry for his painting of Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club in a competition organised by the Football Association. The painting is now in the collection of Brighton Museum and Art Gallery.
In 1969 Fred finally made the decision to quit teaching and moved to Cornwall to enable him to devote all his energy to painting, supplementing his income with gardening work for neighbours. While he still painted scenes remembered from his childhood in Manchester, he also worked on sunnier landscapes, new faces and activities that surrounded him.
Most of his early work was painted outdoors on rough boards using household paints, but his approachable style and manner earned him some notable early collectors and in 1976 he had his first solo show at the Reynolds Gallery in Plymouth and in the same year was a finalist in the John Moore’s Prize. During the 1970s and 80’s Yates began to gain wider acceptance and in 1992 had his first London exhibition with Thompson’s Gallery.
He painted almost exclusively outdoors - scenes of local village life, cliff top and beach scenes. Following the ‘St Ives’ exhibition at the Tate Gallery where his work was purchased by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Fred forged his success. Cornwall provided boundless inspiration.
In the early 1990’s Fred moved to France to a small village called Rancon in department 87, Haute-Vienne. Here, new scenes, colours and characters burst onto his canvases. He became a master of his fresh and lively, thick impasto scenes where he was known to paint direct from the tube, often using his fingers to apply the paint. A likeable character, Fred met and encouraged local artists and also worked with British artists in the area.
Fred’s solitary nature and fear of emotional entanglements made him a habitual house-mover. He collected houses like people collect postage stamps and each house was as individual as himself. In the early 1990s Yates moved to France, first of all to a mill house near Beaume De Venise, then to the village of Rancon in the Haute-Vienne, later back to Sablet in Provence, then Nyons and finally the mountain village of La Motte in the Rhône-Alpes. It was during this period that Fred began to produce some of his most daring paintings, often working with huge quantities of paint applied by stick or hands.
In his last years Fred made repeated efforts to return to England, eventually finding a small house in Frome, Somerset. He died in University College Hospital of a heart attack in July 2008 and is buried at Marazion graveyard, overlooking Saint Michael’s mount; one of his favourite spots in Cornwall and a subject he painted repeatedly.
