Artist Statement:
I was born in Manchester 1922, amongst the soot and coalmines of the Industrial North of England.
My parents never left England, except my father for a brief war spell, and I was resigned to a life of unexciting boredom in the World of Insurance; as were all my family.
I taught until 47 years old and the had the courage or was it courage? to leave my profession, to paint. No, it wasn't really courage:- it was the only way out to avoid becoming a mental wreck. At the same time I realised that security, a pension at 65 and brown polished shows were not necessarily the recipe for happiness or fulfillment (my father died at 53. Very sad)
Anyhow, I painted, and pushed a lawnmower for 50p an hour, and ate cream teas and that was it…………
I was never ambitious to be a top painter or a wealthy man. I became typed as a school teacher, and it was obvious from the way I conducted myself in life - conventional in dress and behaviour, and I knew I should end up with the rocking chair, pipe and slippers.
But one day an angel sent me Hazel Court and friends Mary and Andrew Flint of Boscundle Manor. I was whisked into the world of Film Star make-believe, - but it wasn't make-believe - it was real.
Now after my 'long associations, and growing success in Geneva, Provence, London and the United States I wink at the world and say I'm still a Manchester Man at heart, I'm hardworking and stubborn and still a wee bit conventional but you won't change me. Ever. I promise.


Catalogue introduction to 2002 exhibition:


Fred Yates lives in a rural village in the Limousin region of southwest France. It is a village of sturdy, stone houses and barns. There is a shop, a garage, the Café du Commerce and a restaurant. The assorted buildings are clustered together side by side and though the architecture is older, the village provides a backdrop not dissimilar to the terraced streets that have been in Yates's paintings from his earliest days in Manchester. Of the many moves he has made, even in the last ten years I have known him, - from Cornwall to Provence, then Brighton, Devon, Somerset back to Cornwall and now in France once more - he has always chosen to live right in the heart of a town. Though in all other respects Fred's life seems a solitary one, he is no recluse and enjoys living and painting in a busy community. One of his few dislikes is the fuss that the label `artist' can sometimes attract; his is a job like any other and deserving of no more attention than the blacksmith's or the plumber's. He recently sent me a cutting of a quote by the French painter, Jean Dubuffet which sums up the only ambition that Fred has probably ever had:


`... It is the man in the street that I'm after, whom I feel closest to, with whom I want to make friends and enter into confidence and connivance, and he is the one I want to please and enchant by means of my work `


Fred moved to Rancon three years ago and has fitted very quickly and comfortably into village life. He joins the other members of the `troizième âge' on excursions, entertainment and the weekly dances. Having taught himself to play the piano four years ago, he will often bring sheets of old music-hall songs to their weekly get-togethers (sent to him by a book dealer in Somerset) and `bring the Belle Époque', as he says, to the elderly farmers of the village. Even in a foreign language it would be hard not to get swept along with the energetic, style with which he performs Al Jolson and Flanagan and Allen songs, his fingers hopping across the keyboard, to use his own, perfect description, like `bouncing frogs'. He has become a part of life in Rancon and there is genuine affection as he greets his neighbours in the street. Fred is grateful for their acceptance of his solitary life and, most of all, for their understanding of his need to paint. They will look at his work at home or hanging on the walls of the Cafe du Commerce with the same polite and honest attention they might give to a some flowers or vegetables in a neighbour's garden. `Bon continuation' is the common courtesy and a response that fills Fred with pleasure. It is neither gushing, nor patronising, nor critical; it is an unspoken understanding that these paintings are central to his life and he will continue regardless of anyone's opinion. His neighbours have the sense to realise that what he paints is beyond comment - as one farmer flatly told him, `C'est Votre Passion, Monsieur'.


Since arriving in Rancon he has always kept two houses in the village most recently buying the old forge in the next door street to his studio. None of them are modernised and Fred will simply move his things in and do little else - in his first house he even kept the hazel branches in an upstairs room that an earlier occupant had used to make brooms. He never seems to throw things away so it could not be said his home is uncluttered , but as he rarely buys anything new he maintains a simple existence and tries to keep a daily routine: coffee with the old men in the morning, then gardening till noon (marked each day by the gong of the nearby Buddhist Monastery). After lunch he may work on the house and later he will cross to his studio for two-and-a-half hours painting.
The studio is not so different to his house and when he used to live next door (the subject of his enormous painting `My Two Gardens') it seemed the mirror image of his home. There is a narrow garden, a bedroom, a table and a few chairs. There is an old display easel, but he rarely uses it, preferring instead to pin his canvas to the wall or rest it on the kitchen table. In an otherwise frugal existence, paints and canvas are his one indulgence and he will paint all but the largest paintings without pause using everything up. He loves using the freshest paint (even a day old he says it can be too dry) and I have seen him squeeze eight full tubes of oil paint into huge mounds on his palette and onto the canvas within an hour. When he has finished for the day, brushes are left on the ground and emaciated tubes of paint lie scattered across the garden like spent bullets on a rifle range. On the other hand, if he has not been able to get new supplies of art materials he is quite prepared to scavenge for old palettes, doors or hastily stretched tablecloths, using whatever old paint he is able to coax out from their empty tubes.


Many of his garden paintings and landscapes are conjured out of the narrow strip of knotted plants and and flowers that grow outside his back door. Further away, just outside the village boundary, there is also a small chapel, St Supplice, that has become a favourite place to visit and the subject of some of his most delicate recent landscapes. They are paintings of the greatest subtlety and beauty and he describes the magic of this tiny, spartan chapel, hidden in a tangle of trees with enormous feeling. There seems a perfect correspondence between this solitary man and the solitary chapel. When Fred was invited to carry the effigy of Christ at the front of the annual procession to St Supplice, it seemed that the villagers were also aware of the deep connection that exists between the two of them.
Yates has always been an outsider. For some, the warmth of his personality makes his chosen preference for solitude all the more difficult to understand, but it is important to him and has allowed him to pursue his life as an artist with complete freedom. He talks only a little bit about his past as he said to me once in a letter "I've never got the tin-opener out to show what is inside" but over the years, in his correspondence and conversation he gives small things away. He was born in Manchester in 1922, one of twin brothers. It was a respectable, middle-class background: his Father was an insurance agent and brought the children up with a strict Victorian respect for hard work and self-discipline. It was a straight-laced and conventional upbringing that provided a mask to his Father's alcoholism and the painful absence of physical affection, "... our family never showed love, no-one put their arms around me and said `I love you Fred'.". Much of his painting is concerned with his early life in Manchester, but though he is very proud of being a Manchester man, the initial impression conveyed in these paintings of happy colours and happy crowds, seems a million miles from what he once described as the "tightness, discipline and torture of my childhood.". Seventy years on, he continues to paint these scenes from his childhood with the extraordinary ability of conveying all the feelings he experienced as a small boy: not the accurate detail of places and faces, but the details that betrayed the ever-present fear of being different. Looking harder at these crowd-scenes you start to appreciate the regimented, formal attitudes and the stern, pinched faces that held the society together. You rarely see hands in these paintings. In reality they may be pressed into the small of the back or hidden deep inside the pockets, but to a small child, who did not know physical affection, they simply did not exist.


When Fred left school he took collar and tie work at the administration office of one of the big Manchester foundation schools. Looking out of the window one day (coincidentally writing out the list of art supplies for his previous school) he saw an artist in corduroy trousers. He knew he wanted to be like him so after work went and bought a similar pair of corduroys. Returning home that evening his Father said nothing but sent him out of the room. "Mother", he said " have we got a workman in the house ?". That was the end of that and had it not been for the war who knows how long he would have worked as an administrative clerk? In 1941 he joined the Grenadier Guards and served with them until the end of the war. It was an enormous change. He jokes about being selected for the cross-country team simply because he had the biggest feet and the time when on duty in Windsor Castle, the young Princess Margaret made him repeatedly present arms by walking backwards and forwards in front of him. There was also great despair. His twin brother, who was not allowed to fight alongside him, volunteered for the airborne division and was killed. When he returned to Manchester after the war, the conventions of the society he had been groomed into now meant very little to him and it was at this point that he took up painting.


He decided against art school. His Father had once taken him to Manchester School of Art but when he saw the tutor of art in his white coat it reminded him of having his tonsils out, so instead, and somewhat to his parents relief, he enrolled at Bournemouth Teacher Training College. It may seem a strange decision, but as Fred explained, a formal art training seemed too serious, "At home we didn't know the meaning of the word serious or academic. We were the people in little boxes, 3 weeks holiday a year, pension at 65.". As a profession teaching had respectability and working in a variety of schools and colleges for the next 20 years he found the time slowly to establish himself as a painter in his own right. As always, success was slow in coming but at least his Mother lived to see one of his paintings exhibited at the Paris Salon and, in 1954 he won second prize in a national competition organised by the Football Association on the subject of Football and Art (the first prize went to Lowry's painting `Going to the Match' - now on loan to the Lowry Centre, whilst Yates's painting was bought a few years ago by Hove Museum and Art Gallery).

In the mid-Sixties he began making trips to the South of France, staying `en famille' and of course encountering some of the great painters who lived there. The world was opening for him and in 1969 he decided to give up teaching, abandon the collar, tie and pension and move to Cape Cornwall. He began to exhibit his paintings with the localcontemporary galleries and art societies, and, with the encouragement of collectors and friends on the continent, it was not long before he was offered a one-man show in Geneva at which, famously, Henri Cartier-Bresson bought a painting. He worked furiously as if to catch up with all the years he had spent in the classroom and the energy and preoccupation with which he paints has only increased over time. Fred Yates has never been particularly bothered whether art critics like his painting or not but for those of us who own and love his work, whatever official recognition he has received from our public museums and galleries it always seems too little and too slow in coming. This exhibition is a celebration of a painter who, for many of us, is one of the country's finest and most original artists.


Happy Birthday and Bon Continuation, Fred.


John