James Lloyd

Silent Head

Lloyd was born in Alsager, Cheshire. He had worked on his father's farm until the age of 19, when he too joined the police force. Lloyd had a variety of jobs before the war until he was accepted for the famous and exclusive British Army regiment of the Coldstream Guards. He served with distinction in his regiment overseas during the war. On demobilisation he married Nancy, she was a teenager and he in his forties, he returned to the land and took a job as - a wagonner- in Shropshire. Although he had done some paintings as a young man, it was not until he was forty, that he began to paint in earnest. He and his family moved to Skirpenbeck, East Riding of Yorkshire in 1950. He took on the job as a cowman and painted by night at the kitchen table. Lloyd began to produce so many paintings - laboriously constructed, dot-by-dot, in their naîve pointillism - that his wife Nancy, who was his severest critic, decided it was time that Jim's work was seen by a wider public than his family. Without telling Jim, she wrote to Sir Herbert Read, who paid the artist a visit and left with a couple of new purchases. Read also borrowed some to send to show to a group of London galleries. In 1958, at the age of fifty-three, James held his first one-man show at Arthur Jeffress Gallery. All but two of the 32 paintings were quickly sold. The rapidly expanding Lloyd family (eight children, and one who died young) moved to a council house further into the village and Jim took a job with the Derwent Plastics Company at Stamford Bridge, the money was better and the hours easier, he did shift work so he could paint by day and work by night. He devoted all his spare time (except for that spent at the pub) to painting. He never painted in a studio; he would usually just paint at the kitchen table. In 1961 he was commissioned by the York City Art Gallery under the Evelyn Award Scheme to paint the view of Cliffords Tower, York for the gallery's collection - his first work in a public collection. L.S. Lowry also produced a painting of Cliffords Tower. At the closure of Arthur Jeffress Gallery, James Lloyd was taken on by the Portal Gallery, where his paintings still remain. In 1963 Eric Lister of the Portal Gallery introduced James to film director Ken Russell. The result was that the BBC Monitor unit made a television documentary film about his life and work, 'The dotty world of James Lloyd'. Two years later Lloyd was chosen to play, the part of Henri Rousseau in Ken Russell's 'Monitor' film on the great French naîve painter. The photographer, David Bailey, bought several paintings by Lloyd and became a very good friend. When his book 'Goodbye Baby and Amen', an album of Bailey's portraits of celebrities of the 60's was published, Jim featured prominently.