Carving out a niche for Liverpool

Oct 1 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

The great Italian Renaissance of the 15th century inspires a classical artist working today from an old shop in Bootle. David Charters reports

LAZY grass stretches and yawns to the whims of the breeze on the lawn of this garden, behind what was once the florist’s shop, opposite the tall trees and glowering blackbirds in the town cemetery – on a road where wary, high-tailed cats prowl and pensioners clutch their bus passes and hats.

Here you will find the artist, a brown-eyed chap, who himself looks as if he was sculpted by some old master in Florence.

“Ah, yes, the Renaissance lives on in Bootle,” says Terry McGunigle, spotting a quizzical expression blinking on the eyes of a visitor, who is approaching the bearded head of a marble man stationed in front of the potting shed.

Terry has just emerged in his white T-shirt from a side door of the red-bricked house, designed in the 1940s when square buildings were all the rage.

But this truly is a rebirth of fine art on the Mersey, following in the tradition set in the 1920s and ’30s by Edward Carter Preston, sculptor to Liverpool Cathedral, and Herbert Tyson Smith, renowned for his war memorial panels on the Plateau of St George’s Hall, Liverpool.

“Proper art” as it would be called by those of us who have grown weary of unmade beds, piles of bricks, pickled sheep, slices of bread, mops, buckets, and avant-garde critics in denim suits posing in our galleries.

And “proper art” is the purpose of the Merseyside Forum for Sculpture Painting and Allied Crafts, which Terry runs from the house, supported by five student artists.

Their present Liverpool projects include a replacement pediment for St George’s Hall, restoration and replacement of the Victoria Monument mosaic, a statue/sculpture for Lime Street station, a 15ft statue of the Risen Christ for the Metropolitan (Catholic) Cathedral, a Minerva (Spirit of Liverpool) statue, a Celebration of Liverpool plaque, and a memorial plaque at St Anthony’s Church, Scotland Road, remembering those who died in the city from typhus after fleeing the Irish potato famine.

This is an ambitious pro-gramme, but it suits the style of Terry, 44, whose occasionally rebellious and passionate nature is cooled by a determination to ensure that high art continues to flourish in the city he loves.

Terry is sitting behind the desk in his upstairs office beneath leather-bound volumes of Dante’s Purgatory and Paradise, with illustrations by Gustave Dore.

Dore was, of course, a glorious illustrator, whose name remains familiar to many. But a wee twist in his story would bring a sad smile to some knowing Liverpudlians, including Terry.

James William Carling, a barefoot waif, who had started his career as a pavement artist in Liverpool, eventually moved to the USA, where, with his brother, Henry, he gained a reputation as an instant caricaturist and appeared in travelling shows.

In 1883, as a break from this work, he entered a competition run by Harper’s magazine to illustrate a new volume of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, The Raven.

He entered 33 drawings in blue, black and white and came sec- ond, behind Dore. Four years lat- er, Carling returned to his native Liverpool in broken health. He died in Brownlow Hill workhouse and was buried in a pauper’s grave in Walton Hall Cemetery.

Terry was commissioned to design and sculpt a plaque remembering Carling. It was unveiled in July at Holy Cross School, Fontenoy Street, Vauxhall, in the parish where the little pavement artist grew up.

His advancing work on the plaque for St Anthony’s, known as the church of the famine, has the same sombre mood.

Terry takes his work very seriously. After leaving Hillfoot Hey School, in Hunts Cross, he worked in an advertising agency, before studying fine art at the old Mabel Fletcher College, Liverpool.

This led to challenging work as a freelance artist, painting altar pieces and saints in churches across the North West.

But, in their souls, many art- ists yearn to experience one city above all others. Terry spent four years in Florence, studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti, where he was a pupil of Luigi Falai, who had himself studied under Pietro Annigoni, the portraitist.

Now, though, he is based in Bootle, hoping that his projects will enhance Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture year.

“You get a lot of sculptures in our environment, which may be good ideas, but they are not put together properly,” he says. “Artists should be adequately equipped to put them together properly, but I have had so many students coming through my studio, who can’t do the fundamental stuff.