“My wife said she always wanted to be married to an artist”, says Steve Randall, facing towards one of his works hanging on the walls of Liverpool’s Walker art gallery.
Steve, 55, grew up in Kirkby in the 70s and 80s and later carved out a career in London, first working for Prudential before moving on to Allied Dunbar, Zurich and Openwork. In 2004 he returned to Liverpool, this time as part of the board of a significant financial services company.
This lasted for another 10 years until life turned upside down in 2014. It was then that Steve’s wife, Canan, originally from Istanbul, was diagnosed with an incurable tumour.
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The prognosis was bleak and shattered the life Steve and his family had built around them. “We thought it was five years at best,” says Steve, sitting downstairs in the gallery’s café, “so we said we were going to go and make memories.”
While a statement initially said in passing, Steve chose to walk away from his career, pick up the paintbrush and fulfil his wife’s wish. But what started out as making new memories opened space for Steve to look back on his own which are captured in his works chronicling life in Kirkby in the 1980s - currently showing as part of the Art of the Terraces exhibition at the Walker.
It’s a transformation Canan has also been able to witness. “She's still here and fit - we're lucky,” says Steve, adding: “I did well in my chosen career, but when facing a life event like that it was a no brainer. I had to do what I had to do. I was always going to walk away from it.”
Initially drawing silhouettes when on holiday in Spain, Steve’s work found its defining muse when recalling childhood memories one night in the pub when catching up with friends. The result was a sprawling collection of scenes and moments with Kirkby as its backdrop.
The town’s market, Tower Hill estates and teenage lads - dressed in the latest sports brands and gear - feature throughout a collection of 33 paintings “celebrating a life well lived and a life really well loved,” says Steve, who had no formal training and started out through YouTube tutorials.
Steve later became the artist in residence at Aintree Hospital. It was there where many of his works were created.
One of the paintings hanging in the gallery is ‘Kirkby boys chippy dinner’. It shows four lads sitting among the stalls of the town’s former market. Pod shoes, monkey boots, adidas Tenerife and Kickers can be seen proudly poking through the hems of their trousers.
“I wanted to show the success in the area,” says Steve, explaining that the painting is a pastiche of many lads he grew up with and who went on to achieve great success in their careers. Careers such as actors, accountants, business executives, lawyers and police officers - something to push back against the “Kirkby kids, feral kids” stereotypes of the time, he adds.
In the back of the painting is a collection of high rise flats. Only some remain today in an area now bounded by a new retail park.
The presence of the towers is an important but painful one for Steve. His brother was found dead lying at the bottom of one of the flats.
Steve says an open verdict was delivered at the time after learning his brother had fallen from a high rise. While the foreground of the photo captures the warmth of friendship and a portion of chips on a rainy day, Steve says the photo also depicts the “drug epidemic” and tragedy of “too many male deaths in the area.”
“We still don’t know what happened,” says Steve, "we have to live with that as a family.” It’s a story that makes another of his paintings difficult to look at for too long.
Around the corner in the gallery is ‘Where’s the Party’, a painting featuring a group of teenagers huddled on the street corner, the Tenterhook pub and Tower Hill tenements in the back. Flying above is a pigeon, which Steve says represents the memory of his brother.
“People had to leave the flats as they were derelict,” says Steve, noting how the quality of some residential developments in Kirkby fuelled the Rent Strike of the 1970s. The title ‘where’s the party’ derives from evenings spent between the off-licences, plotting somewhere to go with little else to do.
Sports brands are once again prevalent in the painting. But this was not necessarily a sign of money and comfort. “In the picture there is a fake Fila coat,” says Steve, noting how many people would pick up brands from market stalls around the city, including Greatie market in West Everton.
One other painting in the exhibition shows the 151 bus, a group of young Liverpool and Everton fans waiting to get on. The service was the circle route that would travel around the town and also doubled up as a meeting place of sorts, with teenagers in the area congregating on the bus once all the youth clubs had shut for the evening.
It reflects a simpler time when fans of the two rival clubs would travel together and visit both Anfield and Goodison side by side. The 151 service also resembles a circle of life, according to Steve, and a connection to Kirkby, a place that still houses the most cherished and challenging memories.
“For me it's a realistic view of Kirkby,” says Steve of the works, “I didn't want to sugar coat it." He added: “It's easy to get lost in nostalgia. To me personally I found comfort in the melancholy of what I was painting.
“It was definitely an escape from current issues with my wife. It was a time where my mother and grandfather and brother were still alive.”
As for Kirkby, why it remains such an important muse and what his memories are defined by: “Its identity is the spirit and the way that we were brought up,” says Steve. “The Kirkby I was brought up in was once of great pride. There was a strong work ethic. There were issues, but the town was still creating champions. It was all about the spirit.”
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