Spotlight On: Laimonis Mierins

Laimonis Mierins was born near Riga in Latvia in 1929. After leaving Latvia in 1944 as a refugee, he eventually settled in Hull in 1947, initially working as an agricultural labourer.  He eventually made his way to Shipley (where he still lives) and was employed at Salts Mill as a textile worker during the 1950s.  Shortly afterwards, he began to attend evening classes at Bradford College of Art, where he was encouraged by David Hockney, a fellow evening-class student.  In the early 1960s he studied painting at Leeds College of Art. He then went to Goldsmith's College of Art in London to specialise in teaching art, and from 1965-94 he lectured in Fine Art at Leeds College of Art and Design.

Although he exhibited regularly while teaching, it was not until he retired that international interest in his art began to grow.  In 1995, a major retrospective exhibition of Mierins' work was shown in the State Museum of Fine Art in Riga, Latvia.  The exhibition was one of the first by an émigré artist following Latvia’s independence from Soviet rule in the early 1990s and made a great impact. It provided an important cultural bridge for political and business links between Latvia and the West. The private view attracted the largest attendance in living memory at the museum, and the exhibition was opened by the Latvian Minister of Culture. It later toured to Cartwright Hall, Bradford and to the Barbican Centre, London, where the private view was attended by ambassadors from numerous countries around the world.

In May 2001, Mierins had a solo exhibition at the Riga Gallery in the centre of the Latvian capital - one of the most prestigious commercial art galleries in the Baltic States. The exhibition received tremendous publicity on television, radio and in the national press, and the artist was honoured by a visit to the exhibition by the President of Latvia, Mrs Vaira Vike-Freiberga and her husband Professor Imants Freibergs. The President was shown around the exhibition by the artist and she expressed great interest in his work, asking many questions about his paintings and drawings. She purchased a large acrylic painting entitled Red Whirlpool for the Presidential Art Collection. The painting is now hanging in the President's official residence in Riga Castle and is prominently displayed in a room where the President receives foreign dignitaries and her ministers.

Mierins is represented in many museum collections in the North of England, including Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal; Cartwright Hall, Bradford; the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; Huddersfield Art Gallery; and Bury Art Gallery. His works are also to be found in the university collections of Leeds and York, as well as in the corporate art collections of the Halifax plc and Provident Financial plc.

Mierins's painting is exclusively abstract and has an intriguing, distinctive language of geometry, optical effects, clashing colours and sweeping brushwork. His paintings are characterised by a feeling of a carefully constructed order which is threatened by an underlying tension of opposites, often between swimming forms and stripes or blocks of colour.  The artist has commented: 'I try to communicate ideas and emotional states of mind, developing visual imagery in a way which is impossible to do in other artistic disciplines.'

Mierins is also an outstanding draughtsman. His large-scale charcoal and ink figure drawings, reminiscent of a sculptor's rather than a painter's observation, analysis and expression, are some of the finest being produced in the UK today. They reveal an astonishingly assured command of line and bravura of execution. The artist challenges himself with increasingly complex figurative arrangements, difficult viewpoints and angles.

Laimonis Mierins' paintings can also be found in private collections in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Russia, Sweden, the UK and the USA.

SOURCE: http://www.sheeranlock.com/pdfs/current_lm_article.pdf