Art Views at the Seaside By Patrick Henry

Scarborough has an oddly uneven relation to art: an historic, refined place of coastal vistas would be expected to spawn a wealth of painters creating here, but it seldom occurred. Lord Frederick Leighton, outstanding son of the town, became President of the Royal Academy and the first artist to be made peer of the realm. In Victorian times his bright canvasses depicted classical and Biblical scenes, but hardly anything of the Yorkshire coast that he had left behind.

The parochial origins of one's background can be uninspiring, and also this town is awkward to portray. Author Tobias Smollet called it .. a paltry place overhanging a cliff, thereby giving it a false sense of drama. He arrived in the 18th century and tried the new activity of sea-bathing, resulting in him being dragged ashore naked to his annoyance, his servant believing that he was drowning. Along the cliffs and shorelines straggled in odd buildings, it is hard for artists to assemble pictures.

Atkinson Grimshaw from Leeds was the most successful, during the few years he lived here. His coastal studies, often in moonlight, impress highly, though subject to discrediting allegations that he used photographic projections to effect paintings. Another Edwardian, H.B. Carter, made deft studies of boats in the bay's harsh seas. I started landscape paintings when in the south of France, and had an exhibition in Paris. I also made and sold paintings in California, Mexico and Cuba. Then I came back to my hometown, Scarborough and started a gallery.

Strangely, this had once been a car-showroom next door to the house which I grew up in; and right across the road then had stood the house of Lord Leighton, ruined in bomb-damage of the Second World War. There we children would play and scare each other that Lord Leighton's ghost might appear, unaware he had died in London fifty years before

Now those buildings had vanished, becoming car-parks but for my odd new gallery. Large works of exotic foreign climes covered the walls. A woman asked if I had any views of Scarborough. No. Thank God for that, I'm sick of seeing pictures of that South Bay. These are really interesting. She said. I had some admirers and a few purchasers, but also trouble from awkward characters. The place had until recently been a pet-shop, and before then, a fancy-dress boutique. A girl bustled in and said she would have two Yogi Bears and a Humpty-Dumpty.

I glanced at my canvasses of The Dordogne and Yucatan, then wondered if her words were codes for surrealism, or perhaps some perverted sexual service. Where are your costumes? She demanded. Had she a transvestite orgy in mind? You are not Fiesta ! She accused. I was in no part-mood, true, but I remembered that was the name of the fancy-dress people, and told her where they had gone.

A young man blew in and requested four shubunkins and a hamster. If the seaside was hard and unrewarding to paint, I had no intention of doing portraits of weird wildlife. Then it clicked. The pet-shop, Furry Friends had moved to the end of the street, I said. An old man entered, stared at my works and grunted, Where's Arthur? Who did he let put this lot up? If Arthur sold furry friends, then he was down the road now, I said. The man glared. I know a chap eighty years old and he can really paint, He announced and stalked out.

Ten minutes later he returned, unable to find Arthur, all this clearly being my fault. How long would I be here with this lot, he wondered, implying that the shelf-life of this creativity would be less immortal than the market in Dracula masks or horned green lizards, or even the water-colours of his friend, better placed than my efforts.

Envious art-students dropped in to say my techniques were wrong. Anyone could take the plunge and launch a spot like this if brave enough. Publish and be damned, but exhibit and be abused, it seemed. Holiday lads high on lager invaded and I literally threw them out, picking themselves up from the gutter in indignant astonishment. Art gallery owners are not expected to be so big, ruthless and impatient as myself.

A Scotsman brought in a picture postcard, could I copy this? At least it was not Scarborough, but the old High Street of Edinburgh, time ago. I finished a larger canvas version of it and put it in the window, as a kind of attraction.

People came in to say it was in error as a view of Eastborough, this town's old main street of dusty pubs, pawnbrokers, gift-shops and clairvoyant booths, grim as any road up in Auld Reekie. The Scots client returned and was pleased enough to buy the work, the bleakness of his memories well-stirred by my austere style. I had sold a couple of dozen of landscapes of abroad by the time I closed up to go back overseas myself. A man and his wife said that their purchase was the first painting both had ever agreed upon liking. It would never cause a domestic dispute, though much else might.

Maybe I had nearly saved a marriage, even if nobody had learned a lot more about art, Round the corner, the town art museum hangs Lord Leighton's Ahab and Jezebel , a stark portrayal of fear and menace in marriage, unlikely to promote human hope.

Why do artists paint instead of working more at understanding real life? Atkinson Grimshaw's dark view grasped a haunted sense of this storm-wracked coastal place, but it seldom actually looks that extreme or threatened, the weather and the way of life mostly moderate and humdrum. The sprawl of the town over centuries makes it hard to grasp and depict, an elusive character which is an enduring appeal. Contradictions reside in the refined and earthy, stylish and mundane, leisured and laborious, famous and parochial factors present.

The images from Smollett, of a paltry, self-deluding, pompous, ridiculous, nude-bathing laugh of a place could be depicted better in a cartoonish seaside postcard of hearty vulgarity touched by restraint, to make memorable art from this place.

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