Helen Clapcott: In the Light of Buildings

In a painting career spanning half a century, Helen Clapcott (b.1952) has remained consistent in both her choice of subject and her disregard of the art establishment's playbook. In this, the first major monograph on the artist, Andrew Lambirth charts Clapcott's unconventional path and presents a painter with an uncompromising vision.

Clapcott is a painter pre-occupied with the destruction and regeneration of the landscape of her native North-West England. Depictions of the mutation and evolution of what was once Stockport's industrial valley, now a commuter corridor, are expressions of our developing environments and the growth of vernacular townscapes.

Based on numerous conversations with the artist, and an in-depth understanding of Clapcott's oeuvre, Andrew Lambirth's text provides a lively account of the artist's background, training and working methods, including her mastery of tempera. Above all, this is a study of an artist's very personal relationship with the evolving landscape of her childhood and her lifelong artistic engagement with the city that she loves.

Andrew Lambirth is a freelance writer, critic and curator who has written extensively on 20th-century British art for a wide range of newspapers and magazines. He was art critic of The Spectator (2002-2014), and his reviews have been collected in a paperback entitled A is a Critic. He has published more than 50 books including full-length monographs on artists such as Ken Kiff, RB Kitaj, Allen Jones, Maggi Hambling, John Hoyland and William Gear. His curatorial projects include shows on the work of Eileen Agar, Peter Blake, Cedric Morris and Ivon Hitchens for various museums and public galleries in the UK. His previous monographs for Lund Humphries include Rose Hilton (2009), Margaret Mellis (2010) and Richard Eurich (2020) and he contributed chapters to Edward Burra (2011), Barbara Rae (2008) and Eileen Gray (2015).