Donation of Artworks by Alan Caine

Alan Caine was an artist who worked in Leicester for much of his life and was a co-founder of Attenborough Arts Centre. He died in 2022 and a society called the Friends of Alan Caine was set up to promote and look after his art. They have recently donated four works to Leicester Museums & Galleries Fine Art collection and have provided the following information about the artist and his work.

Born in 1936 in the American mid-west, Alan Caine took a degree in art at Macalester College, St Paul, Minnesota and in theology at Princeton Seminary, New Jersey, including a year at New College, Edinburgh. In the 1960s he moved to Paris then to London. He settled in Leicester in the early 1970s to teach art in the University’s Adult Education Department.

Gallery of works by Alan Caine

Mop
Donated by the Friends of Alan Caine, 2025

The Journey of Our Life
Donated by the Friends of Alan Caine, 2025

Self-portrait with Postcard
Donated by the Friends of Alan Caine, 2025

Summer Walk to Spinterov Mlyn
Donated by the Friends of Alan Caine, 2025

He took a primary role in the conception, funding and design of Leicester University’s Richard Attenborough Centre for Arts and Disability, now the Attenborough Arts Centre, which was opened by Diana, Princess of Wales in May 1997. He was its associate director and continued teaching there until he was almost 80. He died in December 2022.

Alan Caine's art grasps at the essence of the everyday natural world. Its detritus finds its way into his studio: fallen leaves, dried grasses, tangled vine stalks, eggs, rugs, and string. In these humble elements, their unfolding patterns, colour and geometry, Caine discovers a profound sense of wonder, he reveals fragments of a larger consciousness.

Caine described his practice of creating stripes of colour and form, as a means of reflecting the spatial rhythm of landscapes seen while walking. In the geometric cadence of hills, of ploughed fields and of grass tangled by the wind, he uncovered an elemental, significance. His paintings delve into the core, the one-ness of the world—the nodus mundi. We see this in his depictions of everyday objects: rugs, mopheads, carpets, and bundles of cloth. Though his subject matter is humble, the deep intricacy of his draughtsmanship reveals unity and cohesion.