Roland Collins
Roland Collins b.1918
"Favourite places become obsessive subject manner" says Roland Collins and for over 50 years he has recorded just that. He belongs very much to the style and tradition of his contemporaries Eric Ravilious John Piper and Edward Bawden. The exhibition is by nature nostalgic, but it is also part of the continuity of a series of exhibitions I have put on over nearly twenty-five years devoted to the Cafe Royal, Fitzrovia, the Colony Room, the Gargoyle, Marcel Boulestin and Jacques Emile Blanche. It is people that make places and so it is memories of Dylan Thomas Nina Hamnett, Augustus John, Gaston Berloment, Charlie Allchild and Walter Sickert that take Roland Collins and myself back to the Fitzroy, the French, Mornington Crescent, Dieppe and the café Suisse.
A Londoner by birth, Roland Collins was educated at Kilburn grammar school, whence with the encouragement of the art master Robert Whitmore and the munificence of a grant from the London county council of £25 a year, he was able to go to the St Martins School of Art, in the Charing Cross Road. This was in a building, since demolished, approached behind a disused burial ground.
"As a new boy I had my rubber thrown out of the window by sculptor Leon Underwood in his life class ,and suffered Vivian Pitchforth's strictures on my lack of form. "Pitchy" who became a royal academician -wrote to me later about my painting" "you've got Whitstable just right. You've snapped me up in the general atmosphere." After a year the school was transferred to the former Archbishop Tennyson's school on the site of Hogarth's house in Leicester Square. here we deserted classes to hold protest meetings in the basement against Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and the Baldwin inspired abdication of Edward VIII."
Ever since those pre-second -World-War days, Roland Collins became an acute observer of the London and later the Dieppe scene. The Old London as we used to know it has disappeared, and it is with more than nostalgia one is taken back thirty, forty or fifty years. Roland Collins has managed to record the landscape of the time in a way the camera never has. it is not just a case of buildings destroyed by the war and the property developer, but the disappearance of items-all clues to what was a more leisured way of life-like the hand-pushed cardboard box delivery cart-massive but presumably light in weight. the old carriages and stable in Knightsbridge Mews; the Watney's Lion and Shot Tower that became the South Bank Site for the Festival of Britain. We had hope then, and hadn't reckoned with or thought of the prospect of the ugliness of buildings such as the Hayward Gallery on the same site today.
For Roland, favourite places became obsessive subject matter. a black and white drawing Thames at Chiswick ,was accepted by the R.A. in 1937,and Market Place, Waltham Abbey the following year was chosen by Wyndham Lewis in his royal academy selection. In 1939 the R.A. showed Mill on the Cam, Cambridge. St Johns College and Montpelier street, and in 1940 he took his first job in the studio of a then leading advertising agency, the London Press Exchange, and worked for many well-known advertisers.
Then came the war. Conscientious Objection and a doubtful lung g took him into light agricultural work and briefly to Dartington Hall in Devon and its orchards. The Art Department had closed, but there was a memorable concert in the Great Hall given by two young men before they left for America-Peter Pears, accompanied at the piano by Benjamin Britten.
"Back in London, painting places brought its hazards .in Cumberland Terrace, Regents Park, I was taken by a policeman to be questioned at the barracks. My subject was occupied, it seemed, by military police. Months later the painting, which was on paper came back from the War Office pleated in concertina folds. Rudely introduced to Fitzrovia through the bombs of 1940.i took the studio at 29 Percy Street that remained for over forty years a base and a refuge .that year I painted murals for the Akropoilis, one of the first Greek restaurants in London and opened in Percy street by Christos Ktori ,a chef with stais at the White Tower. Unfortunately a bomb in Tottenham Court road did fatal damage to the Parthenon! When the business was transferred to Charlotte Street, the excuse was repeated till this too disappeared in the change to Anemos. Later Christos's son Andrea opened the Grecian Tavern in a Percy street basement and I painted murals on a theme of Greek vase decoration-and of course, the Parthenon! The fragments of broken plates with which customers showed appreciation of the cabaret performers were sprayed gold. Along with a Nike of Samothrace in a papier mâché everything disappeared with the arrival of the present Japanese restaurant. Alas gone too, yet another Parthenon re-created for a restaurant near Victoria."
"Favourite places become obsessive subject manner" says Roland Collins and for over 50 years he has recorded just that. He belongs very much to the style and tradition of his contemporaries Eric Ravilious John Piper and Edward Bawden. The exhibition is by nature nostalgic, but it is also part of the continuity of a series of exhibitions I have put on over nearly twenty-five years devoted to the Cafe Royal, Fitzrovia, the Colony Room, the Gargoyle, Marcel Boulestin and Jacques Emile Blanche. It is people that make places and so it is memories of Dylan Thomas Nina Hamnett, Augustus John, Gaston Berloment, Charlie Allchild and Walter Sickert that take Roland Collins and myself back to the Fitzroy, the French, Mornington Crescent, Dieppe and the café Suisse.
A Londoner by birth, Roland Collins was educated at Kilburn grammar school, whence with the encouragement of the art master Robert Whitmore and the munificence of a grant from the London county council of £25 a year, he was able to go to the St Martins School of Art, in the Charing Cross Road. This was in a building, since demolished, approached behind a disused burial ground.
"As a new boy I had my rubber thrown out of the window by sculptor Leon Underwood in his life class ,and suffered Vivian Pitchforth's strictures on my lack of form. "Pitchy" who became a royal academician -wrote to me later about my painting" "you've got Whitstable just right. You've snapped me up in the general atmosphere." After a year the school was transferred to the former Archbishop Tennyson's school on the site of Hogarth's house in Leicester Square. here we deserted classes to hold protest meetings in the basement against Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and the Baldwin inspired abdication of Edward VIII."
Ever since those pre-second -World-War days, Roland Collins became an acute observer of the London and later the Dieppe scene. The Old London as we used to know it has disappeared, and it is with more than nostalgia one is taken back thirty, forty or fifty years. Roland Collins has managed to record the landscape of the time in a way the camera never has. it is not just a case of buildings destroyed by the war and the property developer, but the disappearance of items-all clues to what was a more leisured way of life-like the hand-pushed cardboard box delivery cart-massive but presumably light in weight. the old carriages and stable in Knightsbridge Mews; the Watney's Lion and Shot Tower that became the South Bank Site for the Festival of Britain. We had hope then, and hadn't reckoned with or thought of the prospect of the ugliness of buildings such as the Hayward Gallery on the same site today.
For Roland, favourite places became obsessive subject matter. a black and white drawing Thames at Chiswick ,was accepted by the R.A. in 1937,and Market Place, Waltham Abbey the following year was chosen by Wyndham Lewis in his royal academy selection. In 1939 the R.A. showed Mill on the Cam, Cambridge. St Johns College and Montpelier street, and in 1940 he took his first job in the studio of a then leading advertising agency, the London Press Exchange, and worked for many well-known advertisers.
Then came the war. Conscientious Objection and a doubtful lung g took him into light agricultural work and briefly to Dartington Hall in Devon and its orchards. The Art Department had closed, but there was a memorable concert in the Great Hall given by two young men before they left for America-Peter Pears, accompanied at the piano by Benjamin Britten.
"Back in London, painting places brought its hazards .in Cumberland Terrace, Regents Park, I was taken by a policeman to be questioned at the barracks. My subject was occupied, it seemed, by military police. Months later the painting, which was on paper came back from the War Office pleated in concertina folds. Rudely introduced to Fitzrovia through the bombs of 1940.i took the studio at 29 Percy Street that remained for over forty years a base and a refuge .that year I painted murals for the Akropoilis, one of the first Greek restaurants in London and opened in Percy street by Christos Ktori ,a chef with stais at the White Tower. Unfortunately a bomb in Tottenham Court road did fatal damage to the Parthenon! When the business was transferred to Charlotte Street, the excuse was repeated till this too disappeared in the change to Anemos. Later Christos's son Andrea opened the Grecian Tavern in a Percy street basement and I painted murals on a theme of Greek vase decoration-and of course, the Parthenon! The fragments of broken plates with which customers showed appreciation of the cabaret performers were sprayed gold. Along with a Nike of Samothrace in a papier mâché everything disappeared with the arrival of the present Japanese restaurant. Alas gone too, yet another Parthenon re-created for a restaurant near Victoria."