Quotes
Quotes
Le Corbusier
‘This boy can see things.'
Kenneth Rowntree
‘That he can create the feeling of a whole vernacular architecture by the shrewd choice of a single door or window, or evoke a whole culture by the minimum of artifacts, suggests a happy marriage of his two disciplines’. ‘The economy, the paring away of inessentials, with poetry never very far away, and on occasions a whiff of magic.'
Berthold Lubetkin
'How can one exercise a value judgement when one is confronted with magic? Yet it is here for us to see.’ [Berthold Lubetkin 1983]
‘Some years ago I was talking with Le Corbusier about Peter Yates with whose work he was familiar, this boy can see things said he, but to me it seemed more relevant that Peter could do things. In his paintings he prodded the depths rather than depicting the surface. Simmering passions behind the stony immobility. Cathedrals like rocks and rocks like cathedrals. From the vision of his beloved Durham locked in the mist of time to the Ultramarine rhapsody of Cyclopic Islands. By staking claims on the distance he excites the imagination. Simplicity, directness and purity give his work the power. That was Peter Yates my friend the poet architect. The song is over but the chords go on vibrating’. [Berthold Lubetkin 1985]
Stephen Gardiner
'Painting, one feels, was for him a somewhat private area of his remarkable imagination, a means of commenting on places visited in his vast travels across England and Europe, or of fixing some very special image that had to be remembered for some future project. For what emerges from this exhibition is an astonishingly clear eye for colour, form and atmosphere; every idea is perfectly observed and executed; a message about a subject is exactly communicated, without blemish. It is, of course, always difficult to say which will have been responsible for what, in their remarkable stream of buildings in Newcastle – whether it was Ryder or Yates – because the imagination in architecture is often a mysterious product of an intricate rapport between minds. All the same, one identifies in them a brilliant graphic sense that one finds here, in these pictures'.
[Stephen Gardiner 1985]
