Background
Bob Law was born in Middlesex, England on January 22, 1934, and moved to St. Ives in 1957 where he painted and made pots.
Bob Law was born in Middlesex, England on January 22, 1934, and moved to St. Ives in 1957 where he painted and made pots.
As a result of the war Bob had little formal education and left school early, possibly at the age of twelve.
After the education, Bob Law began a series of apprenticeships and phases of self-tuition. Initially he learned technical draughtsmanship, then geometry; this led him to carpentry and then to architecture. He became highly skilful in all these fields and by the mid-1960s was building and designing houses for a property company run by the collector Alan Power. After two years of National Service in the mid-1950s, he started to paint and draw. By 1957 he was in St. Ives, meeting Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and other artists. The landscapes of Nicholson may be seen as a starting point for Law’s mature work when considering the way each artist defines the area of the landscape on the paper.
During that time, he began to read widely in philosophy, mysticism, alchemy, and palaeontology. He had a particular interest in the writings of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, Peter D. Ouspensky, and Richard Jefferies. Law’s first mature works – the Field drawings and paintings – bring together his interests in Euclidean geometry and metaphysics with his technical skills in draftsmanship and carpentry. As a craftsman Law was highly skilled. He made furniture early on in his career, according to the artist, often as a substitute for sculpture.
In 1970 he began to make his own stretchers for his paintings, seeing that process as fundamental to the creation of the whole work. He built sculpture for Donald Judd for his first London exhibition at the Lisson Gallery in 1973. In the early 1980s he turned to carpentry again, fabricating his furniture-sculptures, particularly chairs. Perfect execution and technical competence were integral parts of his creative process.
Out of Law’s interest in geometry and technical excellence came a pursuit of absolute perfection in execution. He wrote in 1978 about seeing the perfect work in his ‘mind’s eye.’ His role as artist was to bring that work into existence. Inevitably there would always be small flaws that required correction to match this vision. The serial paintings can be seen in this way as repeated attempts to eliminate flaws and achieve perfection. There is a trial and examination process in which the artist is solely responsible to himself for the quality and conviction of the work. There was a dark side to this striving, inevitably most works did not live up to expectation and were destroyed.
With such overreaching standards of quality, any sustained sense of achievement ultimately eluded him. It was not just current bodies of work that were subjected to such harsh critique. Law periodically returned to his past to eliminate works that he no longer felt passed muster. As a result, it looks as if his work suddenly appears at the end of the 1950s, seemingly fully formulated, without hesitation or gestation. No juvenilia exist, except one small watercolour that survives in the Prints and Drawings Collection at the British Museum, possibly because it was safely out of the artist’s reach. Of the celebrated Field drawings of that period, Law kept about twenty out of the hundreds he produced. Throughout his career he continued to exercise this editorial rigour; it was as if, for Law, the works were in a linear progression towards an absolute so that the earlier attempts were not required any more.
While Law’s proclivity for erasure can be considered a factor in his current status, there also remained the challenges of the populist response to the art of the 1970s in Britain. Law became the archetypal avant-garde artist to be pilloried. This was evident in the reporting of the Hayward Annual on BBC television in 1977. The presenter, Fyfe Robertson, understood himself as a critic for the people; Law was the subject of a particularly pointed public lambasting. Robertson explained that the exhibition baffled him; he saw in it ‘an undisciplined, despairing, free-for-all meaninglessness.’
Bob Law was never fully part of any school or style and whilst he could be positioned at the margins of successive artistic movements, such placement was never permanent, convincing or comfortable. Whilst some of his works were conceptual in nature, he was seldom included in Conceptual art survey exhibitions. As he returned to sculpture in the early 1980s, this was not as part of the New British Sculpture. He was seen primarily as a painter in spite of his early sculpture (he was also far older than any of the other artists in that group). Despite this, Law continued to be productive and towards the end of the 1980s had two solo exhibitions in Karsten Schubert’s Charlotte Street gallery.
Bob Law’s works are intense and demanding. They have a physical presence and an intensity that is entirely out of proportion to their actual scale, insistently demanding (and receiving) the viewer’s fullest attention. Coming across individual paintings, sculptures and drawings by the artist in group exhibitions or private collections is always a startling experience. Each work is a really a distillation of all those that went before. Law actually came closer to realizing his inner vision than he was ever, in his self-doubt and modesty sometimes, willing to grant himself. He returned to live in the west of Cornwall in 1997 and died in April 2004.
Twentieth Century Ikon Series 8.8.67 II
Twentieth Century Ikon Series 8.8.67 IX
Drawing 25.4.60
Mr Paranoia VII 20.10.72 (No. 106)
No. 62 (Black/Blue/Violet/Blue)
Is a Mind a Prison
Nothing to be Afraid Of IV 15.8.69
Drawing 24.4.60
Tall Obelisk with Two Holes and a Notch
Kiss for Me - Cross for You
Twentieth Century Ikon Series 8.8.67 IV
Twentieth Century Ikon Series 8.8.67 I
Castle CCCXXXIII 15.7.01
A Cross to Bare
Untitled 29.8.87
A prolific artist throughout his lifetime, Law struggled with ideas surrounding the legitimacy and significance of abstract art.
Bob was affectionate and brutal, sincere and treacherous, matter-of-fact and occasionally romantic. He instilled a particular brand of loyalty and affection in his friends, a feeling that remains. Law’s personal traits sabotaged his professional relationships with the all-important supporting cast of writers, curators, collectors and dealers. These traits were in turn reinforced by the harsh cultural climate that surrounded him.
Bob Law married Georgina Cann in 1965 but they divorced in 1988.