The art of drinking

A former research scientist and one of the founding professors at the University of Sussex, this charming Australian has been “dabbling” in art since the 1950s, when he and a group of scientist colleagues decided to take an evening class at Central St Martin’s college of art and design in London.

“We all went down there and the tutor looked at us in amusement and asked if we had any experience. We said we didn’t but he grinned and said, ‘Well, you may as well come along anyway.’”

Not only did he meet his late wife at the very first class, but from there on in, drawing and painting became a favourite retreat from the discipline of science, something Neville would turn to in cafes, bars and on holiday. He filled dozens of sketchbooks with thousands of sketches made all over the world.

But it wasn’t until a couple of years ago he’d ever considered showing them.

“It was just a game,” he laughs. “Like sailing, it was just something I needed to do. I wasn’t bothered about making a career of it.”

But Angie Osbourne at Lewes’s Hop Gallery encouraged him to mount an exhibition and together they chose a cross-section of his work from the past three decades.

The exhibition is accompanied by a book, Lewes Locals, focusing on Neville’s pub sketches, all drawn in pen and washed with a drop of beer or coffee.

He has always drawn in felt tip after being introduced to the first variety brought out in the UK in 1963 – Pentel’s Sign Pens. “They’re wonderful because you can get a flexible line but they’re also water soluble so you just get a bit of water – or beer, or coffee – and you can create shadows and all sorts of things.

I’ll use whatever I have to hand.”

The book features an array of figures deep in conversation or hunched over their drinks.

“I used to go down to The Gardener’s Arms most evenings. It’s one of last few real pubs in Lewes. Its clientele are mostly working people – builders, bricklayers, jewellers, a lot of retired people who spend their lives in the little bar there – and I started to draw them.

“Normally you’re drawing stationary objects but in the pub they’re moving targets and that’s more challenging.”

Neville moved to the UK just after the Second World War and went on to work with the world-famous physicist Erwin Schrödinger in Dublin.

He had attended one of Schrödinger’s talks in London as he was just completing his PhD and, at the end, plucked up the courage to ask if he might work alongside him.

Schrödinger “changed his life”

he says. “I was never a big noise in science myself but I worked with some excellent people at an exciting time.”

In 1965, he moved to his current home in Kingston, just outside Lewes, when he was appointed professor of the new University of Sussex’s school of biology.

“It was a lot of fun then.

The university was great. It’s a different place now – a business – whereas when we started it was an attempt to educate people and get them to think. There aren’t many of us left from those early days.”

Retirement in 1989 gave him the chance to concentrate on his twin passions for art and sailing his yacht from Newhaven. He has never been one to stick at only one thing.

Even science, he says, was “never a matter of life or death as it was for some of my colleagues”

and he has preferred to pursue a range of interests and enthusiasms.

So it comes as no surprise when he names his artistic hero as Picasso, who was a painter, printmaker, ceramicist, sculptor and even a stage designer over the course of his 91 years.

“Oh, Picasso is my favourite,” sighs Neville. “He did so many different things.

I wouldn’t like to say I was in the same world but I loved his ability to have a go at this and have a go at that. He’s my hero by a long shot.”

*Lewes Locals by Neville Symonds is available from the Hop Gallery, Fisher Street, Lewes, priced £8.

For more information, visit www.hopgallery.com