Artist returns to his Warrington roots 50 years after attending art school in the town

An experienced artist who started his creative journey in Warrington 50 years ago will be returning to his roots with a new exhibition.

Ian Irvine was just 16 when he started a two-year foundation course at the former Warrington College of Art and Design back in 1974.

It was in Warrington that he fell in love with art, and particularly collages, but after that he found himself pulled in other directions. Ian pursued a career in music in Liverpool and then left to experience life in London.

He returned to the north west, and his original passion, in the early 90s when he did his Fine Art degree at Manchester Art School and began to teach, particularly art history.

But more recently Ian has started to think about where it all began in Warrington.

So it will be a full circle moment for the artist when he brings his show, Visual Cocktails, to Warrington Museum five decades after he stepped foot in the old college just across the road.

“When I applied to do a show here I had no idea it’d been that long because in your head you feel much younger,” the 66-year-old said.

“So that was a bit of a shock to think it’d been about 50 years since I walked through the doors of the art school across the way. It was really sad to see it closed as it’s a nice old building.

“But I’ve always like Warrington Museum. We came in here quite a lot when I was a student and often that would be to draw as part of our classes.”

Ian’s exhibition will open on Saturday, 19 October, and come in two different mediums – collage and screenprint.

The collages are influenced by the original Surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. They often have a ‘key’ image such as a reproduction of a painting from past centuries.

Ian then adds figures, objects or backgrounds which change the ‘story’ of the picture and presents the viewer with something weird, amusing, confounding or mysterious.

He added: “It’s nice to surprise people, confuse them even. They’re like visual puzzles a lot of the time.”

The screenprints are influenced by some of the pop artists of the 1960s and 70s such as Robert Rauschenberg.

The images used are usually from past eras, and include illustrations, diagrams, covers from ‘pulp’ novels and images from movies – put together in a way that unites all the disparate elements.

The thing that the collages and screenprints have in common is they both offer a playful exploration of the history of art. Some have also been created in response to Warrington Museum’s own collections.

Ian said: “I called the exhibition Visual Cocktails because that’s what they seem like to me. Putting bits of unlikely ingredients together and somehow making them work through colours, shapes, images and marks.”

Visual Cocktails is also dedicated to Ian’s brother David, who died last year and lived in Great Sankey for much of his life.

Ian added: “We were very close. David’s family will be coming to the show. So that is another thing that gave me a connection to Warrington. David never came across as particularly arty, but he was always so encouraging of what I was doing.

“He came to preview evening for my previous exhibition at The Williamson and he was really impressed and said some lovely things about it to me then.

“And I think he would have loved to have come to this one in Warrington. It felt like Warrington was calling me back and finally I’m here.”

Visual Cocktails will be at Warrington Museum and Art Gallery between 19 October and 19 January and is free to view