Rigby Graham at the Goldmark gallery in Uppingham

The obituary for Rigby Graham quoted at the beginning of this video describes him as an "irascible painter whose idiosyncratic landscapes are among the 20th century's best".

Though I met Graham as a teenager, I never experienced that irascibility, but I agree with the obituarist's judgement of his work. I wonder that Graham is not better known, even wildly popular.

The best place to see his work is at Goldmark gallery, which is also one of my lost bookshops of Uppingham.

In the video, the gallery's owner Mike Goldmark, who published Iain Sinclair's early novels at Uppingham, talks about Graham, his art and his working methods.

Rigby Graham 1931-2015

I am very sorry to hear of the death of the Leicester artist Rigby Graham.

The other day I blogged about my sixth-form Saturday job in a second-hand bookshop in the late Seventies. Rigby Graham was one of our regular visitors and was a lovely man.

Once I had been poured a tiny whisky by the owners and he complained it was just a dirty glass.

You can read more about Rigby Graham on the University of Leicester site and see his painting on the Goldmark Gallery site (from which I have borrowed this picture.)

Toni Savage of Leicester

Did you know Bernard Bresslaw once published a volume of poetry? Well he did and here it is. pic.twitter.com/j3t1v6uwbG
— Agnes Guano (@agnes_guano) February 17, 2014

Agnes Guano is the proprietor of The Downstairs Lounge and scours charity shops for "chewy vinyl nuggets of the very choicest British comedy records" so you don't have to.

But what caught my attention here was not the thought of Bernard Bresslaw as a poet, but the publisher. Who was Toni Savage of Leicester?

The answer can be found in the Incline Press book A Paper Snowstorm: Toni Savage & the Leicester Broadsheets by Rigby Graham and Derek Deadman:

Rigby Graham, whose drew this evocative sketch of Toni Savage, describes Toni's broadsheet production as a 'paper snowstorm' -- his rate of production only matched by his inventiveness and sheer sense of fun. 

A former opera singer, and a folk-club enthusiast, Savage was at the heart of a revival of broadsheet printing in Leicester in the early 1960s. Transfixed by the creative possibilities of letterpress printing, he and his friends produced hundreds of letterpress-printed broadsheets and pamphlets for free distribution to friends and strangers alike in the clubs and streets of Leicestershire. 

Toni's story is a story of the energies and enthusiasms of the sixties, but it is also a case study in the transformation of letterpress printing from its commercial hegemony to its role as a tool of the artist/craftsman that it holds today.

Rigby Graham is a Leicestershire artist who is still active and is one of the people interviewed on An Empty Stage - a DVD about John Piper. (I suspect his own style owes something to Piper's influence.)

I met him when I was 17 or so because he used to come into the secondhand bookshop where I had my Saturday job. On one occasion the proprietor had poured me a tiny whisky, which Rigby Graham said was "just a dirty glass".