Competition Winner! ‘Going to the Match’: Prenton Park in the style of L.S.Lowry

As a long-standing fan of L.S.Lowry, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to enter Tranmere Rovers’ art competition to paint Prenton Park in the style of Lowry to celebrate the original ‘Going to the Match’ being on display at the Williamson Art Gallery in Birkenhead in spring 2024.

I’d already books about Lowry, so this painting was a great opportunity to understand in more detail his techniques and use them to create a painting of Prenton Park for my club, Tranmere Rovers.

Lowry used thick straight-out-of-the-tube paint in impasto naive style. He only used five colours: Lead white, Ivory black, Vermillion, Prussian blue and Yellow Ochre, which I also restricted myself to. The paint I used was all from the same manufacturer Lowry used except vermillion which is hard to find now.

Lowry 'aged' his paintings using various techniques, so I stared my painting by trying to mimic that by use of ‘crackle paste'. The original ‘Going to the match’ is more smooth in texture, but my version pulls in a range of Lowry’s styles.

Football grounds are obviously now a lot larger scale than when Lowry painted 'Going to the match' (Bolton Wanderer's Burnden Park in the 1950s) so composition was a challenge. The smaller stands at Prenton Park would have been more typical of that era. To show off the ground I needed a perspective with the buildings positioned diagonally, whereas most commonly Lowry painted buildings flat on. However, he regularly painted this perspective too so it’s not out of character. He often composed his scenes looking down from a high angle, which I’ve done here too which gives a less commonly-seen view of the stadium. I gathered reference photographs of the stadium and nearby buildings to ensure I was able to include their details. Once I’d decided on the view I sketched it onto the crackled surface and started blocking in the colours.

Working from the top down I completed the Kop and the muted background buildings first. Then moving into the foreground I added the ‘cowshed’ stand. It was in the later stages that I added the crowds inside and outside the ground and the floodlights.

The ‘matchstick men’ figures are the most famous aspect of Lowry’s style. Not a type of figure I’d painted before, I practice sketched their shape and their locations before adding them to the painting. A key to the painting is getting the 'flow' of the figures walking into the ground.  I replicated the exaggerated lean Lowry used to show purposeful directional walking, but also to angle the flow of the crowd in lines. In Lowry's 'Going to the match' the lines were defined by lining up to enter turnstyles.

The flow here is by getting the fans walking to the main entrance via the side road (Prenton Road West), Steaming in from different directions from the crossroads. Some artistic licence needed here!

The figure in foreground of the old man hitting a boy holding a ball with his stick is a reference to an incident in the late '70s where a pensioner fan came onto the pitch to beat with his cane the opposition goalkeeper for time-wasting.

The mid foreground includes characters copied directly from Lowry's original ‘Going to the match’ painting to help tie the link between the two. The characters’ clothing is not particularly contemporary with the age of this stadium which was in line with Lowry too, with characters and clothing more typical of the 1930s than 1950s.

This was such an enjoyable project, and I learned a huge amount about Lowry and how he painted. To win the competition and now have the work hanging at Prenton Park was icing on the cake! Copies can be bonught from Tranmere Rovers (as can mugs!) https://trfcshop.co.uk/products/going-the-match-exclusive-print