Harry Everington’s sculpture of St. Bertram in St. Bartholomew Church, Longnor
The sculptor, painter, and teacher, Harry Everington, was born 1929 near Keighley. He was the co-founder of the Frink School of Sculpture at Stoke-on-Trent.
After he died in 2000 an obituary in ‘The Telegraph’ noted that he was: “An enthusiastic, determined man with an indomitable spirit, [who] spent much of his career at odds with those whom he dubbed “grey men” – anyone in a suit who sought to interfere with his art teaching.”
Harry’s mother was a local teacher and his father was a salesman for the Heinz food company. Harry attended the Roundhay School in Leeds then went on to study at Leeds College of Art. This was followed by a post-graduate course in painting at the Slade art school in London.
After graduation from the Slade, he became a a lecturer at Shrewsbury College of Art, later followed by a promotional move to Swansea College of Art, where he was appointed as Head of the Fine Art department. From there he became Principal of Dyfed College of Art, and although popular with his students, Everington fell out with the governing body’s and was vociferous in his criticism of the 1980s Conservative government for incorporation of separate art colleges into existing universities and teacher training colleges.
After resigning from Dyfed he enrolled as a student at the Sir Henry Doulton School of Sculpture, Stoke-on-Trent, where he began to concentrate on his own sculptures, using limestone, wood, clay and steel. In 1993, when the financial backers withdrew their financial support, Everington and Rosemary Barnett, then head of the Doulton School, worked together to establish a replacement for it.
In 1996 they opened The Frink School of Figurative Sculpture, which placed emphasis on shape and form in sculpture and in more personal forms of tuition. The school, based initially at Longton in Staffordshire, was named after Dame Elizabeth Frink, who had given master classes at the Doulton School, and whose work and ideas Everington and Barnett both admired, for reasons he outlined in his 1999 article ‘The Writings of Harry Everington, 1929-2000’ .
The Frink School covered every aspect of figurative sculpture, including clay modelling, welding, carving in wood and stone, letter cutting, mould-making and casting and concentrated on work with a small number of mature students. It relocated to Leek in Staffordshire in 2005.
Harry Everington’s own work, ‘The Crusader’, can be seen at the Jerwood Sculpture Park at Witley Court, Worcestershire, installed a few days before he died in 2000. His work ‘Under Sail’ can be seen in a courtyard at St Richard’s Hospital in Chichester; and his stone statue of St. Bertram (see image above) is at St. Bartholomew’s church, Longnor, Staffordshire.
Of his ‘The Crusader’ sculpture (see image below) he wrote that it represented ‘the ancient idealist charging his winded horse into the brick wall of contemporary life’.
