Jack Simcock Overview
Simcock was born in 1929 in Staffordshire, where he began technical drawing for a coalmining machinery company before attending Burslem Art School and shifting his artistic focus to oil painting his local area. Determined to make a career out of his art, Simcock travelled down to London with six paintings and the plan to take them round various art galleries until one of them liked his work enough to buy and sell it. It was the first gallery that he tried, The Piccadilly Gallery, which took his paintings in, and served as his agent for the next 30 years. He went on to have over 50 one-man exhibitions and has been represented a number of times in public galleries like the Tate.
His works are often described, positively, as ‘dark and gloomy’, almost monochrome, although the artist would insist that they were not, but in fact built up of a range of subtle browns, reds, and greens. The success of his depictions of the Northern landscape is built around the contrasts he achieves between the dark forms of buildings and the earth and the pale sky that backgrounds them; his paintings of the North are made exaggerated by this, reflecting the artist’s own pessimistic yet loyal relationship to his area.
Just before he died in 2012, he had started to change his style towards more colourful and abstract work, but it is these striking images of his earlier career that remain the most admired and sought after. For more detail on Simcock’s life, beliefs, and artistic preferences; the artist released his autobiography, Simcock, Mow Cop, in 1975. At Wilson55, our in-house expert Stephen Sparrow has years of experience in assessing and valuing Jack Simcock’s paintings, so do get in touch if you’d like to learn more about a piece you own, or discuss a potential sale or valuation.
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