| AdminHistory | Reginald James Lloyd was born in Hereford on 21 December 1926. He was the second son of William Lloyd and Ada Robinson Higgins. At the age of two his family moved to Dawlish in Devon where he spent his childhood years exploring the surrounding countryside. Lloyd left school at aged 14 and started working as an apprentice to a master joiner. At aged 17, in c1944 he enlisted in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, before transferring to the Royal Ordnance Corps. In 1946, he was posted to Brunswick, Germany, but two years later, upon leaving the army, returned to Southwest in 1948, where he spent a term at Exeter Art School. In 1949, Lloyd presented his first solo exhibition in the Parish rooms in Dawlish. His work was then featured in an exhibition, Painting Pastime, held in Exeter, where he met his future wife, Diana Van Klaveren. They married on 24 April 1950 and initially lived in a cottage in Rosewarne Downs, near Camborne, Cornwall. In 1952, due to economic reasons, moved to Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, which are where he met the artist Henry Moore. The family returned to Cornwall for a brief period in the 1950s and lived in a cottage in Porth Leven, before returning to Much Hadham, again due to economic reasons. In 1956 Lloyd and his family returned once again to Southwest to the town of Bideford in North Devon, which is where Lloyd lived for the rest of his life.
Lloyd experimented with different styles and art forms, he was an accomplished potter and stained glass craftsman, but he was first and foremost a painter. His paintings were largely of the natural landscape, focusing on the countryside and coast (predominantly in the West Country. A developing theme in his paintings is the presence of a figure looking out to the landscape and embedded within it, some critics refer to these as Earth Goddesses.
Apart from the term at Exeter Art School, Lloyd was largely self-taught. For many years he was a member of the prestigious Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours. He was also an avid collector of pottery, and the R J Lloyd collection of ceramics is held at the Burton Art Gallery, Bideford.
Lloyd formed a lasting friendship with Ted Hughes and they collaborated on a number of children's poetry books: 'What is the Truth', an early edition of 'The Mermaid's Purse', 'Earth Dances' and 'The Cat and the Cuckoo'. |