Walter Dorin

Walter Dorin was born in London, England, and started to paint in 1950 while working as a newspaper proof reader in London's "Street of Ink": Fleet Street. In the late 1950s he took a six-month "sabbatical" from his newspaper work in order to study painting in Rome. Italy seduced him and he continued to live there, on and off, for more than twenty years; first in Rome and then Desenzano on Lake Garda.

Dorin had several one-man exhibitions in Rome, Venice and other Italian cities. He also travelled extensively in Canada and the United States, with exhibitions of his paintings in New York.; His paintings figure in numerous collections in Italy, Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Sweden, Germany and Cuba.

Perhaps Dorin's most endearing characteristic is his sense of humour, which is nowhere more evident than in his disparagement of authority figures, particularly those that history (both ancient and modern) has tended to venerate.

This iconoclasm has manifested itself particularly in his political, biblical and historical works and was recognised in 1981 when Jonathan Cape published a book of his "tongue-in-cheek" representations of great historical lovers, which was accompanied by text by George Melly. As the book's "blurb" had it: "Dorin's pictures of these sacred monsters are an austere and humorous corrective to our over-excitable feelings. They are salutary as well as wonderfully entertaining. We see our paragons as flesh and blood figures. Together with George Melly's text, the pictures lend our great lovers a fascinating new kind of immortality - a little more earthy, and a lot more fun. Some examples, pictured below (left to right: Virginia Woolf and Victoria Sackville-West; Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas; Bonnie and Clyde; D.H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen)

[Click on thumbnails in order to enlarge illustrations]

A further example of this humour is provided by Dorin's work of 1990 which satirises the British Royal family by comparison with a work of; Goya.

The family of Charles III - 1990 - London inspired by: 

Goya - The family of Charles IV - 1800 - Madrid

And here is Dorin's most recent work:

The Organ Grinder of Lucca

A keen observer of life around him in Italy, many of Dorin's studies depict this rich world of characterization in a series of which the following are but a small example:

The Butcher of Ostuni	Il Salumiere di Brescia	Il Pizzaiolo	Una Tavola da Rosati

The following picture is of Dorin's nephew in the United States of America

Gary's Jeep

One of Dorin's amusing idiosyncracies is to place himself within several of his pictures.; He may be seen seated (second from left) at Rosati's café in the above picture painted in 1988.; A keen eye might discover the spirit of Dorin observing the scene in the Family of Charles III above, while below Dorin has cast himself as Toastmaster in Pray Silence for the Barmitzvah Boy.

Pray Silence for the Barmitzvah Boy

Perhaps nowhere is his gift for satire demonstrated better than in the following

;

American Gothic - Schmothic

And a more recent work

 

The Hungarian Guitarist	Zwei Akkordeonspieler in Luebeck

 

Below are some of Dorin's latest landscape works

Soiano del Lago	L'Isola	Dawn over the loch	London River

Prices of these and other paintings as well as further information on the life and works of Walter Dorin may be obtained on application to 

ASPEN, 4 Shannon Way, Beckenham, Kent BR 3 1WG, UK 

E-mail: joseph.sinclair@btinternet .com