A Maryport Man Painting Cumbria’s Rich History

Andrew Liddle talks to Kevin Nutter about his remarkable range of styles

“You’ll find Kevin can paint anything, in any style!” His wife, Dottie, greeting me, is not wrong.

The eye is immediately drawn to a picture on his studio wall of Carlisle railway station teeming with humanity. It has the 1930s written all over it in style and setting - all the naive realism of one of those sprawling multi-figure compositions of Stanley Spencer.

Actually, it was done as recently as 2021!

Like all Kevin Nutter’s incredible pictures, it’s not so much a scene as a story in itself. The great border city, where he has lived for the last seven years, is little more than twenty miles from the coast. Local folk have been flocking from it to the nearest beach at Silloth, a pretty little town on the Solway Firth, since the railway came in 1870. “It’s always been Carlisle’s first choice for a seaside outing,” he says. “On Bank holidays, the trains would be packed.”

Who could doubt it after admiring this aerial view of a sea of heads, men in flat caps, women in their Sunday-best cloche hats, very pretty and much in vogue at the time. It’s the Whit Weekend of 1938, all the world jostling to get on board the Silloth train. Even from on high, you feel the surge of excitement pulsing through the crowd, the sense of joyful escape.

Much of his work is infused with this robust sense of the life of Cumbria and it strikes a chord with the modern generation. “People seem to like paintings that have a narrative relating to a place and time,” he muses. “Maybe these days their roots run less deep and they’re searching for an identity. There’s more local nostalgia during these hard times.” Not surprisingly this is one of his most popular prints.

A dozen miles down the great sweep of coast from Silloth lies Maryport, where he was born and raised. Here his remarkable talent was first recognised by parents and relatives when he was only three years old. At Ellenborough Junior School he was allowed to spend any free time drawing, and at Netherhall Comprehensive he often found himself teaching artistic techniques to classmates when he wasn’t decorating the classrooms with murals.

“If I’d ever seen it, I could memorise it and paint it,” he says. “At the age of 10, Vermeer was my hero and I wanted to paint like him.” He sold his first work when he was 11. By 14, he was brightening up restaurants in Workington and Maryport with a series of contrasting murals.

He still does the murals, albeit on a larger scale, in cafes, public buildings, outside walls. There’s one on the old steelworks site at Workington and a couple in Cockermouth and Maryport that he still gets asked about. Most of the old ones have sadly been covered over as properties changed use. The one in Wilson Street, Workington, a local icon featuring people at their trades.

After school he did a Foundation Course Carlisle College of Art and Design. It seemed he was destined for a career in art and, indeed, his first job was as a graphic designer in a small firm in Workington.

He breaks off to show me Where Herring Ran, Maryport Harbour by moonlight with the fishing boats going out. “I can remember so much herring in the Solway that even by moonlight you could see dozens and dozens of harbour porpoises chasing the shoal of fish,” he says.

Now all of that has gone but the small light at the end of the breakwater still shines like a dim candle and local folk memory is embodied in such local scenes. “Once the area had pits where hundreds of men worked, ships were built on the banks of the River Ellen and the factories worked round the clock. The docks have silted up but once they handled 400,00 tons of cargo a year.”

His online gallery boasts two striking black and white portraits of man and wife, the roguish H and the long-suffering Martha, both heavily lined and prematurely old. They are Maryport people he remembers affectionately but without sentimentality. “Yes, they’re real flesh and blood,” he says,” at the same time as they are representative of their times, a generation worn down by hard work and poverty.”

Surprisingly, Kevin had 3 entirely different careers before pursuing full-time what his exceptional talent had marked him out for. He worked in civil and constructional engineering before becoming a civilian Scenes of Crime Investigator with the Police. Next he went into partnership with an old friend, Stephen Wood, to run an art and design company, creating anything from miniature fine art portraits to large-scale murals.

“Of course, I always had the evenings to paint, and I was never without commissions,” he adds. “Without the understanding gained from these experiences , I’d probably see the world differently - and paint differently.”

He’s clearly talking more of vision than technique, which has long been to work rapidly in acrylics, recently on boxed-frame canvas . He laughs: “I use acrylics for a living – and paint in watercolours more as a hobby".

Much research goes into each work. He was one of the earliest artists to employ a computer program to achieve a broad and balanced image, as a guide. “I’m happy to use technology just as Canaletto did with his camera obscura,” he says. “Once sketched out, it’s a process of blocking in colour as a tonal exercise before adding the detail.” Finally comes the all-important glazing. “The transparent coats just prior to varnish create a controlled subtlety of shading, tone and colour not achievable in any other way.”

The digital gallery showcases the work of a man for all seasons who paints in an astonishing variety of styles. Just Another Bridge, a masterly interpretation of a fortified section of the Roman wall crossing the River Eden, near its confluence with the Caldew, is one of those sylvan scenes from the High Renaissance. Carlisle Ship Canal Basin might have been painted by a Dutch master.

The Rudd Lasses, congregating at Carlisle’s market cross, in 1890, to sell the soft red stone from the Caldew at Dalston, employs the narrative conventions of Victorian painting, the same allusion and symbolism, to highlight the plight of women. Towards Spring, Lanercost Priory, Cumberland, 1912 is an archetypal Edwardian English scene, the ploughman plodding behind his team of shire horses.

"I think of a style that will suit the composition or be appropriate to the commission or the clients’ brief, then I just paint it!” Pressed for more details, he seems momentarily lost in thought, slipping into the Cumbrian dialect of his youth: “Ah’s a dab ’and wid a dutty stick!” As the smile fades, he adds, “You could say each mark, shape, tone, colour is considered and chosen to purposefully achieve a particular mood.”

One recurrent theme is transport. Above the heights of Sharp Edge, Blencathra, the sun thrillingly catches the delta wings of a Vulcan bomber which since 1983 has been based in the Solway Aviation Museum at Carlisle Airport. There are working boats and ships of all shapes and sizes in local harbours, busy steam engines crossing viaducts, rattling open-top trams, bright red Routemaster buses.

We see the social landmarks of their day, the old pubs and warehouses, town square and village greens, jetties and dockyards, bridges and boulevards. Sometimes the palette is piercingly bright; at other times, it will be subdued.

His portrait gallery bursts with the energy of sportsmen like Boris Becker, Mike Tyson and ‘El Maestro’, the great Argentinean racing driver Fangio - and musicians, Lennon and McCartney, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. His meticulously detailed studies of falcons and foxes, farmyard animals - horses a speciality - reflect his love of wildlife and the great outdoors.

A tender portrait of Beatrix Potter caught in all the beauty of her youth, brings us to the part of Cumbria so many artists choose to portray. "The Buttermere valley is one of the most beautiful places on the entire planet and a favourite spot.” The Thirlmere valley where he and Dottie celebrated their wedding day has a special poignancy. It was here her great-grandparents’ family were thrown off their farm when the valley was being flooded to create a reservoir. “As it turned out, the water never reached our farmhouse,” she says, sadly.

"I don't paint the Lakes often, because there are hundreds of artists in the Lake District painting them – and hundreds more not in the Lake District doing the same!”

He finds inspiration in the rugged beauty of the windswept coast, these days a sanctuary for high-flying gulls and wading oyster-catchers - and the area around Carlisle he now calls home. Living on the south-western edge of the city, our walks take us along the River Eden looking for otters. We have an eye out for deer near the River Caldew. We search among the history of the Solway marshes and the western end of Hadrian's Wall around Burgh by Sands.

There are so many scenic vistas he wants to capture – but not just in acrylics! “It would take several lifetimes of painting and research just to scratch the surface.” He wants to paint their story!