Drawing strength from the past

BORN on a settee in a three bed terraced house, which was home to 11, it would be easy to say that Mackenzie Thorpe didn't have the best start in life.

But sitting in a chair 44 years later, in his new gallery in Richmond, North Yorkshire, he realises now that the trials and tribulations he has endured - the toil, the abuse, the despair, which on one occasion drove him to try and take his own life - are the things which have shaped him. They were as much a part of his destiny as the success he now enjoys all over the world.

To tell his story is easy, it's chronological and it starts from the moment he drew his first picture in the ash on the hearth of his council house in St Paul's Road, Middlesbrough.

"It's the only thing I have ever done that I was any good at," he recalls. "I never rode a bike, I didn't play any sport, I just drew.

"I drew in the ash on the hearth, I drew on cigarette papers. There was such a lack of space in the house and so much noise, that they would give me a bit of paper to keep me quiet and my granddad, a bricklayer, always had a small pencil behind his ear, which he would give me."

Mackenzie was born with a gift, but not one which was recognised in a tough steel town. Instead, he was ridiculed for being "thick" and reviled for being sensitive. He was unable to write, unable to spell and would forget which times table he had begun to chant, let alone the answers to the multiplication sums. "So it was a case of you are useless, you are thick, get to the back of the class and draw pictures. At junior school, they wouldn't let me do essays, they would say just draw."

What they didn't realise, in the 1950s and '60s, was that Mackenzie wasn't thick, he was severely dyslexic. "I can't visualise words in my head, I just see pictures. So I was great at tech drawing. I could draw isometric figures free-hand."

So his world became what he saw. "Saturday morning cinema. John Ford movies. Cowboys and Indians. I would go back and be these people." And he breaks off to canter around his studio, demonstrating the detail of how he and his pals would saddle up imaginary horses, load imaginary Peacemaker 45s (they weigh 3.5lbs, he says) and talk to one another in a made-up Red Indian language, which they could all understand. "I used to draw them when I was 15. Now I can draw them at 44 with skill and no-one says 'you are thick'."

All too soon his childhood was over, and, at 15, he left school on the Friday to start work crushing boxes on the Monday. He then got a job at a bakers, drawing in his spare time.

At 18 the drawing stopped. "It was looked upon as weak. It was getting harder and harder to walk down the streets," he says.

A brief spell in the steel foundry led to a job at Smith's Docks. "Me and my dad got made redundant on the same day. I hated signing on. I felt like s***t and I thought my mam can't handle this." It was his lowest ebb and, in his mind, the logical thing to do was take his own life, so she wouldn't have to feed him, which he tried to do with brandy and painkillers. Fortunately, he was allergic to the cocktail and rather than slipping into a fatal coma, he woke himself up scratching and was rushed to hospital to have his stomach pumped.

It was then that a friend urged him to consider becoming an artist and going to art school. "I took my sister's easel and her chopping board, attached some straps from a rucksack and walked around Middlesbrough drawing everything. I was in the park at 5am painting ducks or up at 2am drawing the moon. I even drew a toilet roll while I sat on the toilet."

So he plucked up courage and tried to get into art college. "I turned up and rang the bell at the hatch. A woman appeared and I said I wanted to be an artist. She gave me an application form and I cried my eyes out because I couldn't fill it in. I eventually put my name and address on it and the fact I saw Van Gogh in a film and wanted to be an artist - and I got an interview.

"I had been painting for months, round the clock, and I had piles of stuff. I was sat in the foyer and a bloke with a beard and a smock came out and said you can't come to art college because you can't spell and you would have to read and write about artists. But he told me to get my stuff out and he said 'I don't care whether he can speak English or not, he can draw, he is in."

After that he secured his first commission, a mural for Cameron's Brewery, which he painted on a club wall at Park End, Middlesbrough. "I got paid £300 and that was me settled."

His art teacher Tom Wall asked him if he wanted to go to college in London. The only one which didn't require any qualifications was the Byam Shaw and Tom sneaked Mackenzie on to a school trip to London - he had to hide in the train toilet - so he could go to the interview.

"I turned up for the interview in jeans with the crotch held together with safety pins. I couldn't afford underpants and the stitching had rotted. I stumbled down a step going in and the safety pins popped.

"But the interview was fantastic. I'd painted in a virtual trance. I'd cut my hand open with a knife and dripped my blood onto the canvass as I wanted to put everything of me into them. They were really dark pictures. They were all about loneliness and after I explained this, they said you are in. I was the first person in ten years from the North-East to get in."

Married at 22 to a nurse, Susan, he spent a year travelling from London to the North-East. Then in the late 1980s his two children - Owen and Chloe - were born and it was time to move back north where they could enjoy open fields and rivers.

"We ended up in Richmond in 1989, in a shop selling artists' materials," he says. "It didn't work. Then one day I was in a field trying to draw sheep. I sat on the wall and they were all over the bloody place and I couldn't draw them. So I came back and drew three sheep on a hill, in black and white, . No colour, really bleak.

"It was November, we had no money, we were behind with the rent and all the rest of it. Then, as I drove through Darlington, I hit black ice and put the car into a tree on Carmel Road. They had to cut the roof off to get me out. They thought I was dead. I woke up in hospital and when I got out I painted three sheep and a landscape covered in roses and a nice sky. Then it twigged. It was Susan, Owen and Chloe. They deserved paradise and it was up to me to get off my backside and get to work."

Since then Mackenzie has become one of the most prolific artists in the country, his abstract works enjoyed by former leader of the opposition William Hague, who commissioned him to do his Christmas cards, rock star Huey Lewis, millionaire impressario Cameron Mackintosh, actor Rod Steiger and Rolling Stones bass player Bill Wyman.

His work is proving so popular in America he has decided to move there for a few years.

He will leave soon to live in Mill Valley, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

While he is away, his gallery Arthaus will be run by a manager, Wendy Bowker, and the new display area opens tomorrow night.

It has turned out to be an incredible success story ... for a man who was told at school he would never get anywhere.