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'I want to challenge myself... the aged should be artists of one sort or another'
BRIAN Lewis opens the front door of his Pontefract home before I even have time to knock.
"I thought I heard a car so I assumed it was you," he says, welcoming me inside with a beaming smile that seems to envelope his entire face.
It's the kind of face that stands out in a crowd and with his mountainous snow white beard he bears more than a passing resemblance to George Bernard Shaw.
However, while he may look like a character from a bygone age he is, in fact, anything but. The 72-year-old has, at various times during his colourful life, been a foundry worker, teacher, lecturer, artist and van driver.
He set up Pontefract Press, which he runs with his son Jake, and has written or edited about 70 books and pamphlets, whose topics range from community regeneration to a subversive volume of poems about Prince Charles and Diana, called The Divorce.
He also holds the title for being Birmingham's first "poet laureate" and 30 years ago launched the Yorkshire Arts Circus, a Castleford-based organisation that provides support to writers and artists across Yorkshire.
Among his latest ventures is the Rivers Project – an imaginative arts campaign which won the Yorkshire Post's Climate Change Award earlier this year.
The scheme compares accounts of two natural disasters – the floods which killed hundreds of people in the Gujarat region of India in 2006 and the deluge which swept through Toll Bar, near Doncaster, the following year.
Brian, who co-ordinates the scheme, says it came about after he was invited to India a couple of years ago. "I was asked to help with the
translation of a long Gujarati poem because they wanted someone who was a writer to have a go at it.
"I had a bit of a reputation as someone who writes a lot of different things and one of the dippiest things I've been is Birmingham's first poet
laureate. This means nothing to people in Birmingham, but it means a hell of a lot in Gujarat because they have a strong culture of poetry."
His initial trip proved successful and he was invited back, this time returning with a team of fellow artists and writers to lead a conference on creative writing and climate change at the HM Patel
Institute, followed by a series of workshops attended by teachers and students.
The idea started in the wake of the floods that hit large swathes of Yorkshire in 2007. "Toll Bar got flooded and when I was in India I realised that Surat, a city in Gujarat, had also been flooded. Logic said 'okay, put the two together, see what the people of Toll Bar say and see what the people in Surat say'."
Out of this collaboration the Rivers Project was born. "Before I left some people said to me, 'you can save as many plastic bags as you want, but places like India are in the middle of an industrial revolution and it's not going to happen.' But we said to people in Gujarat, let's focus on one subject and see if we can do a book on climate change through prose and poetry, and that's what we did," he says. "Art has an important role to play in the climate change debate, because a lot of people respond to art in a way they perhaps don't with science."
When the team returned they put their ideas into practice with a series of similar workshops in Barnsley involving writer and TV presenter Ian Clayton. "The philosophy came together on the side of the River Dearne
and it was magical," Brian enthuses.
The Rivers Project has already yielded two books and Brian hopes to attract funding that will help the project be extended to Africa. "I believe what we're doing is important. It's about encouraging people to respond to a big idea and if you're involving the audience then you have a better chance of being successful."
Among the eclectic works Brian publishes is series known as "eight minute books" which, as the title suggests, are written in the time it takes light to reach the Earth from the Sun. They stem from his community workshops, open to anyone, where groups are given a topic to write about.
"One of the books we did asked the question 'What is citizenship?' I got everyone in the room to write what they wanted and they all contributed something, which was brilliant."
Engaging with ordinary people and bringing communities together are the nuts and bolts that hold Brian's artistic vision together. "I'm interested in new methods of communicating and combining this with the old technology of storytelling."
He thrives on the creative process and enjoys collaborating with other artists as much as working on his own. "It's almost a case of working with whoever I meet, but I like that and when you look at the history of art the idea that the artist is the individual is really a minority opinion, it's a Renaissance opinion," he says.
Although born in Birmingham, Brian has spent most of his adult life in Pontefract. The son of a poster writer, he left school at 16 to work in a foundry. He later trained to be a teacher which took him to Yorkshire before he became one of the first people to be awarded an Open University degree.
He works from home, which doubles as Pontefract Press, seeking inspiration in his little art studio – what he calls it his "hut", "every man should have a hut" – in his back garden where the shelves groan under the strain of countless books crammed with a
lifetime's worth of paintings and drawings.
When he's not writing about renaissance towns for Yorkshire Forward he likes to blow raspberries at what he sees as the preening high-mindedness of much of the art world.
On the eve of the Millennium, he wrote a 3,220-line poem called Mandy's Place in which he slated the Millennium Dome for being an over-hyped and costly white elephant. In The Bus to Hope he writes a sequence of mock-heroic sonnets that take Jude, a Yorkshire Everywoman, on a journey through Hell (and Yorkshire) to Hope. Along the way such esteemed figures as Henry Moore and Damien Hirst are given a good going
over, the final message being that if you want to study life through art then you should learn to draw.
To mark his 70th birthday he set himself the task of doing 70 paintings non-stop in a single day. "It took me 24 hours and 50 minutes so I didn't quite do it. I think I had about 25 minutes sleep," he says matter-of-factly.
Most people would scoff at such an idea, so why do it? "I wanted to challenge myself. If you know you can do something there's not much point doing it and I wanted to prove that just because you reach a certain age it doesn't mean you're over the hill. I believe that the aged should all be artists of one sort or another."
His energy and enthusiasm would be impressive for a man half his age, although he frowns at any suggestion that he ought to be slowing down. "People say to me 'you should retire', but I'm going to be
retired for a long time when I'm dead and it's the excitement of being alive that keeps me going," he says, his face lighting up again.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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