Bryan Wynter 1915-1975

The present work, painted in 1957-58, dates from a period when Wynter was beginning to move away from the more obviously landscape-inspired abstract manner which he had developed during the later 1950’s. Frequently of a physically imposing size, these works use a very personal and distinctive technique to build up dense overlapping layers of paint that disturb the picture surface whilst at the same time creating a sense of depth, of images continually overlaid and obscuring their predecessors whilst still hinting at their own forms. Indeed, they seem to perfectly illustrate the words of Patrick Heron, the secret of good painting…lies in its adjustment of…the illusion, indeed the sensation, of depth, and…the physical reality of the picture surface   (P.Heron, Space in Colour, introduction to exh.cat., Hanover Gallery, London 1953).

However, the sheer bravura of the mark-making inherent in Wynter’s painting of the late 1950s inevitably led to comparisons with the contemporary American artists whose work, shown at the Tate Gallery in 1956 and at the ICA in 1958, was now available for first hand inspection by British artists. The gestural ‘white writing’ paintings of Mark Tobey, first developed at Dartington Hall in the 1930s, held obvious similarities, but Wynter’s work, with its vastly increased scale was perhaps superficially more akin to European artists as varied as Georges Mathieu or Jules Bissier. However, Wynter’s wide-ranging interests, including his occasional use of mind-altering drugs, mean that the paintings combine elements of philosophical considerations of time and memory with a physical involvement with the experience of natural phenomena and growth.