Lizzie Rowe: Life and Works
An exhibition in Sunderland is a fine reminder of the talent of the late Lizzie Rowe. David Whetstone was shown round by her brother, Ben
Lizzie Rowe always wanted a big solo exhibition and here it is, the towering walls of Sunderland’s Abject Gallery filled with pictures large and small.
There are about 135 of them, with pride of place given to several arresting self-portraits unflinching in their honesty, ageing as the artist aged.
This wasn’t the first gallery Ben Rowe approached about hosting such a show but Alex Breeze, who runs it, was the only one to say yes.
In many respects it’s the perfect venue, flamboyantly muscular with its rafters, high ceilings and quirky angles. Call it post-industrial chic.
Lizzie, who would have revelled in it, isn’t here to see the exhibition, sadly, or bask in the attention it has generated.
She died on December 20, 2023; Lizzie who had been Stephen until embarking on the road that would lead to a high-profile sex change in 1996 that was documented by Channel 4.
It fell to brother Ben to arrange the funeral, clear the Fenham house where she had lived alone for the last few years of her life and then organise this wonderful tribute to her talent.
Showing me round before it opens, he remembers the big brother-turned-sister he had “loved to bits”, speaking fast but choking occasionally on the still raw emotion.
He opens a treasured photo album, a bit battered but showing Stephen (as was) as a long-haired teenager on family holidays, at the centre of things with girlfriends and with mates.
“It’s a real privilege to have this,” he says.
“I was his little brother, nine years younger. He was always impressive to me and my friends who were like, ‘Let’s go with Ben because of Steve’. I’d say I wanted to be a greaser like him when I grew up.”
Steve was born in Portsmouth but the family moved to Manchester, where Ben was born, and then to Wolverhampton when their father became head of fine art at the polytechnic.
After Steve came siblings Louise, Daniel and finally Ben who well remembers his precocious skill with pen and pencil.
Once, while on the phone, he absent-mindedly doodled a brilliant cartoon of King Kong on the directory beside it, which Ben later took away and tried to copy.
“I have no artistic ability at all, sadly, but Steve was always incredibly talented. Although he was an artist, my old man wasn’t particularly supportive of him going into art. I think he thought it was sodden in booze and could be a hard life.
“So Steve applied to Reading University to read philosophy and it was only at the end of his second year that he revealed he’d transferred to fine art in his second week.”
Steve worked in the students’ union bar as a bouncer, a commanding figure who wasn’t afraid to chuck people out when required.
He came to Newcastle in 1980 to lecture in the fine art department at what was then Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University).
Arriving in the city a couple of years later, I remember him at exhibition openings, a tall and striking figure in leathers and with long dark hair.
“And always wearing two belts,” says Ben.
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“His was often the loudest voice in the room and he was often the drunkest person in the room, and always with a tab on. He smoked from when he was about 16.”
The Sunderland exhibition is called Lizzie Rowe: Life and Works and the two are very much intertwined.
The path he travelled from man to woman, Stephen to Lizzie, young father to lesbian lover can be traced on the walls in paintings that have come from private collections, under beds and from Lizzie’s house.
Some, says Ben, were found in the attic, folded up as if brutally discarded. Here, stretched and framed, and despite the damage, they can be appreciated for their painterly qualities.
An early painting shows partner Cheryl, standing naked and pregnant in the garden of the cottage they shared in Quaking Houses, near Stanley. In the background are the moors and she is flanked by guardian angels, modelled by a young woman straight out of Vogue.
These ‘angels’ are beautifully attired, attention clearly having been lavished on getting the dresses just right.
There are a lot of dresses. But Ben swears the family never had an inkling of what was to come, even though fancy dress parties would tend to see Steve clad as one of the belles of St Trinian’s.
Other early paintings show baby Ellie, Steve and Cheryl’s daughter. Cheryl had another daughter, Van, who became Steve’s stepdaughter, and in one big painting her dolls are lined up on the settee as Ellie crawls on the floor.
There are poignant memories in these paintings.
With the benefit of hindsight, Ben can see the significance of a lingerie shop Steve painted – a real shop in Sidmouth, called Fantasie – and of the series of pictures of dresses he did in 1988 as artist-in-residence in Berlin.
There Steve had felt free to wear women’s clothes and he drew them too. The last in the series of the Berlin dress pictures is signed not ‘Steve’ but ‘Elizabeth’ – Lizzie Rowe’s first appearance on paper, Ben believes.
His relationship with Cheryl didn’t last long after his return from Germany. After Christmas – quite rightly, says Ben, with respect to the kids - she told him he would have to leave.
“Stephen and I went into Newcastle that night, him dressed like that (indicating one of the transvestite self-portraits), and we both got our heads kicked in,” recalls Ben.
“The world was different then.”
Steve had taken on a studio in Newcastle’s Waterloo Street where he would dress up and paint. Soon he was living openly as a woman and suffering the consequences.
Ben remembers Lizzie attracting “vile abuse”, being sworn and spat at, ‘bottled’ and badly beaten up. More than once he’d received a call down south from an A&E department requesting that he come and take care of her.
News of the impending sex change came out of the blue.
“When they were making the film on Channel 4, I got a phone call at home. He said, ‘Oh, I think I should tell you I’m going to have a sex change’. I laughingly said ‘piss off’, as you would.
“She never explained the transition and we never talked about it.”
There is a letter, though, that Ben unearthed recently. It was written by Stephen/Lizzie to the surgeon who had inquired what he was to do about her face.
In it, she explains that she wants to keep her masculine face because “I like being ambiguous”. That’s something, you imagine, that would be better understood today than it was in the 1990s.
As what would now be called a trans woman, Lizzie suffered life’s slings and arrows. Her relationship with Cecilia, Ce, whom she met on the Tuxedo Princess, brought blissful contentment until they parted in 2013, while remaining friends.
Lizzie was commissioned to do several formal portraits of university vice-chancellors and the like, but preferred to plough her own furrow, artistically.
A magnificent early oil painting, Dysphoria, is in the Laing Art Gallery collection, showing Stephen in feminine finery gathering pearls from a broken necklace. Other big canvases hung for several years at the Theatre Royal.
Among the paintings in the Abject Gallery is a flouncy lace skirt which was key to Lizzie’s work, a prized possession found in a charity shop and painted many times, as you will see.
To Lizzie it was ‘The dress’, a rock she returned to time and again. Nearby hangs a painting of it, The Red Dress, meticulously done and loaned by its owner for this exhibition.
Ben became a history teacher and ended up in a senior position at a further education college, derided affectionately by his big brother-turned-sister as a “prostitute” for his salary and suit.
Lizzie, always skint, would occasionally turn up unannounced, having jumped on a train without a ticket and made it all the way there without getting kicked off. Often her dog would be with her.
Ben remembers an Ofsted inspection when the college had recently banned smoking and was keen to be seen able to enforce the rule.
Accompanying the inspector along the corridor to his office, Ben’s heart sank when he got a whiff of familiar tobacco smoke and perfume.
Opening his office door, there was Lizzie in her finery, fag, bottle of cider and feet on desk. “Hello, Buster,” she’d said cheerfully.
Ben reflects: “Some would call Liz extremely selfish, and some have because she was a senior lecturer with a brilliant talent, a lovely wife, lovely children and a lovely life and she threw it all up.
“Others would say maybe we should all take a leaf out of her book and not be a prostitute in a suit but live the life we want to live.
“That’s exactly what Liz did. She wasn’t interested in selling paintings. It wasn’t about being commercial.”
She could be, though. Alongside the flamboyant portraits is a series of smaller still life paintings, done at the urging of Ben and Ce who wanted her to paint with a view to earning a crust.
My memories of Lizzie Rowe – and of Steve in that Waterloo Street studio - are of her absolute dedication to painting, of her wonderful skill with brush and palette and of her once winning a £5,000 portrait prize at Northumbria University.
For Ben and for his mother, aged 93, it has been a tough year. Six months after Lizzie’s funeral in January, Daniel also died.
Lizzie’s death at 68 was unexpected but, admits Ben, not a complete surprise. When he and his mother came up to visit last year, Lizzie, struggling to breathe, revealed she had emphysema and confessed to being “shit scared”.
Because she never went out, Ben organised day trips to Hadrian’s Wall and the coast, and Lizzie caught Covid. Not long afterwards he got a call. A neighbour, popping in to see to the dog, had found her on the kitchen floor.
As he remembers this, Ben swallows hard, saying he feels responsible in a way for what happened.
Everybody would dispute that.
But nobody would dispute that this exhibition is a fine tribute to a notable artist and it’s all down to Ben’s devotion and hard work.
One final tribute might be yet to come. Lizzie, a nostalgic sentimentalist at heart, loved the BBC programme The Repair Shop.
In a forthcoming episode, probably early next year, we might see Ben turning up with that torn, grubby but much-loved dress. How Lizzie would have appreciated that!
Lizzie Rowe: Life and Art is at the Abject Gallery, 27 Fawcett Street, SR1 1RE, until Friday, December 6 - and at 6pm on that final day there’s to be an auction of unsold work. (The gallery opens Tuesday, to Saturday, 12 noon to 4pm)
It was an amazing show.
Really pleased that Tyne Tees TV visited this afternoon and filmed for 2 hours.
I understand it is to be aired on Xmas Eve
I first met Lizzie Rowe during an art course, when she was a tutor. She became a dear and valued friend for 30 years. I loved her art, dogs and cats, lovely house, and skill in teaching, so inspiring!. I really miss her, but so glad to have known her. 🤎