Bryan Wynter

Painting

Bryan Wynter was a landscape painter and part of the St Ives group. At the start of his career, his work was heavily influenced by Surrealism, but in the early fifties he took up a position at Bath Academy where colleagues William Scott, Peter Lanyon, Adrian Heath and Kenneth Armitage brought European developments to his attention. In 1956 Wynter spent some time in London where he encountered the work of the Abstract Expressionists at the Modern Art in the United States exhibition at the Tate Gallery. In both a Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist vein, Wynter attempted to unleash the subconscious in his painting through the influence of the then legal drug, mescaline.

Bryan Wynter was born in London in 1915. He studied at Westminster School of Art in 1937-8 and at the Slade School from 1938-40. He settled at Zennor, near St Ives in 1945 and was co-founder of the Crypt Group. His first solo exhibition was at the Redfern Gallery 1947 and taught drawing and painting at Bath Academy, Corsham, from 1949-56. He exhibited with the London Group from 1954, and with the Penwith Society, St Ives, between 1949-58. Nine of his works are in the Tate Collection, and fourteen are with the British Council. He died at Penzance in 1975. In 2001 he was the subject of Bryan Wynter: A Selected Retrospective at Tate St Ives.