'Circus' Painting

Charley Foskett was born into a working class family, living in poverty in the 1949 post World War 2 period in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England. He wore mothball smelling hand-me-down clothes and drank tea from used jam jars - He distinctly remembers watching older children playing without shoes on bombsites - life at that time can only be described as Dickensian. One of Charley’s earliest visual fascinations was scrutinising the wings of bluebottle flies on his grandmother's backyard wall, whilst she hung out the families ragged washing to dry in the Tyneside smog of 1952. In 1957 he went to live with an aunt in a Victorian back-to-back terrace of which was little better than the industrial smoke blackened slums so famously illustrated in many L.S. Lowry works. Learning difficulties made his schooling miserable, but art class was his saviour. His first job was that of an apprentice silk screen printer and trainee sign writer, he was soon fired for creating outlandish artworks using the company’s printing inks and wasting their time and materials. He played blues music alongside The Animals and John Lee Hooker at Tyneside’s prestigious Club A-Gogo and when the gigs were in short supply he would go out equipped with a mahl stick, paint, sable brushes and ladders, sign-writing and illustrating every Tyneside fascia he could find. Eventually he hung up his bass for a career in record production but just before doing so was asked to take part in an art exhibition sponsored by British Steel, which was to be held in the very prestigious Grosvenor Place just outside of Buckingham Palace in London. Someone from their London offices had spotted his talent for illustration, telling him that he possessed an incredible eye for detail - Flattered, Foskett swiftly invested in a selection of acrylic paints and started a series of paintings of trees - but instead of painting actual trees, decided upon painting the light shining between the branches and the trunks. The exhibition was a roaring success and drew certain dignitaries from (shall we say) the immediate neighbouring household - Several of his ‘Tree’ works were sold - two to those aforementioned Palace dignitaries - Foskett gave all of the money earned to the charity for which British Steel were sponsors.