Bryan Wynter was born in London, after school he was sent to Zurich to study in the hopes he would join the family business. In 1938 he rebelled and returned to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art. At the outbreak of World War II, he registered as a conscientious objector and spent the war years working on land drainage and, for a time, looking after the monkeys belonging to Solly Zuckerman, the biologist. In 1940 he moved to St Ives in Cornwall and was associated with the St Ives group of artists that included the artists Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, William Scott, Roger Hilton and others, who after the war formed a strongly-linked and influential ‘colony.’ For the first ten years he painted Cornish subjects on a small scale in gouache and watercolour; the scale dictated by the restrictions of living in a small cottage. The subject matter was recognisably Cornish - gulls and fishing boats and the harsh, bare landscape. In the 1950s had has taken part in experiments with mescaline, which may have had an effect on his work as it became progressively more abstract. By 1956 he had evolved a non-figurative system using a much larger format, which he retained and developed during the remainder of his career. But the source of inspiration was the same as it had always been - the natural landscape of Cornwall but, as he wrote, approached ‘from the other side'. In 1962 he suffered a heart attack, in spite of his lithe spare frame and his enjoyment of physical activity, in particularly swimming and kayaking. Following his illness he experimented for a time with kinetic art, before returning to painting in the last decade of his life.

 

Glossary

  • Gouache

    A paint composed of water-soluble pigment, which has been ground in gum, usually gum Arabic, like watercolour, but made opaque with the addition of white pigment. Creates effects similar to those of oil paint, but lightens in colour during drying and cracks if used thickly.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.