Bryan Pearce; primitive painter (fascinating)
Hyfler/Rosner
St Ives primitive painter
Beautiful work:
http://www.bryanpearce.co.uk/
The Independent
13 January 2007
Peter Davies
The unaffected and child-like paintings of Bryan Pearce, who
lived and worked in the famous artist's colony of St Ives in
Cornwall his entire life, had a simple and colourful charm
that brought the legacy of Alfred Wallis into the modern era
and kept alive the cult of the primitive or self-taught
artist.
Suffering since childhood with the rare congenital disease
phenylketonuria that causes damage to the brain, Pearce was
unable in his work to convey perspective or assimilate other
accepted structural canons of Western academic art. The
result was an enhanced feeling for surface design and an
immediately recognisable style based on bright, vivid colour
and a Matisse-like decorative intensity.
Walter Bryan Pearce was born in St Ives in 1929. His father,
Walter, a long-established family butcher, was one of seven
brothers and played rugby for Cornwall. Walter's father had
been a mayor of St Ives. Bryan's mother, Mary Warmington, a
talented painter, came from a musical family in nearby
Carbis Bay. After marrying, Walter and Mary Pearce moved to
"Chylowen", a solid granite house in Market Place close to
the Parish Church of St Io that Bryan would later depict in
his work.
Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, Bryan was away at a
special needs school. This was followed by the auspicious
years between 1953 and 1957 when he studied at the St Ives
School of Painting situated in the heart of the artist's
quarter at Back Road West near to the Porthmeor Studios.
Founded in 1938 by the portrait painter Leonard Fuller and
his wife Marjorie Mostyn, the still extant School of
Painting provided Bryan Pearce with the ideal introduction
to his painting career. An inclusive ambience welcomed
novice, amateur, professional and established artist alike.
Pearce's years under Fuller were marked by the production of
many watercolour paintings which have an unbelievable
stiffness but a touching naivety of interpretation, using
characteristic motifs like boats moored in St Ives harbour.
In common with the modern Cornish school in general,
landscape became Pearce's main idiom. From this early stage,
however, Pearce also diversified into still-life and the
occasional portrait appeared. The colour-infused motifs of
striped table-cloths or of baskets of fruit provided ideal
material. Portraits of his mother, of Leonard Fuller or
later of the well-known local painter Misome Piele posed
more difficult problems that pointed up Pearce's technical
limitations.
Shortly after leaving Fuller's school, Pearce was sponsored
by the sculptor Denis Mitchell for membership of the
modernist Penwith Society of Arts, where he exhibited
regularly for the rest of his life, enjoying a retrospective
there in 1966. A first solo exhibition was mounted as early
as 1959 at the Newlyn Gallery, whose director, the painter
Michael Canney, shared with his friend and fellow Cornishman
Peter Lanyon an appreciation for Pearce's status as part of
a select band of Cornish-born painters.
Solo exhibitions followed in rapid succession, first at
Elena Gaputyte's Sail Loft Gallery in St Ives in 1961, then
in London at the St Martin's Gallery in 1962 and 1964, and
at the New Arts Centre in 1966, 1968, 1971 and 1973. Lanyon
wrote the catalogue for the St Martin's exhibition.
Applauding Pearce's contribution at a time when Lanyon felt
that "sophistication is disintegrating St Ives painting" and
a "boutique primitivism" threatened artistic authenticity in
his home town. "It is necessary to accept these works,"
Lanyon wrote "as the labour of a man who has to communicate
this way because there is no other."
Pearce's imperative and idiosyncratic style was accompanied
by a blissful detachment from the kind of art-world politics
that inflamed Lanyon and others. His quiet and perfunctory
manner of working - the result of an orderly and disciplined
workaday studio routine - ensured that enough work was
produced to satisfy a steadily growing market for his work.
Sir Alan Bowness, the art historian and director of the Tate
1980-88, became a trustee and guided the management of
Pearce's career. Together with Pearce's devoted mother Mary,
who relinquished her own painting to support that of her
son, Bowness provided the security and with it the clout to
ensure Pearce became a widely acknowledged and collected
painter. Writing Pearce's catalogue for the 1975
retrospective at MOMA, Oxford, Bowness explained how "a
therapy has become a profession . . . This has given his
work particular innocence that, in the nature of things,
can't be corrupted by self-consciousness."
The landmark "St Ives 1939-64" exhibition during Bowness's
Tate directorship in 1985 included a pair of Pearces, St
Ives Church and Portreath Harbour. Never fazed by a mass of
visual information, Pearce used his patient methodology to
striking effect. Thin, tentative pencil lines were overlaid
with ochre and then filled in with what Bowness described as
the artist's "preferred" colour. What this palette lost in
terms of naturalistic credence it more than made up for in
terms of a bright, clear and unmodulated colour that
captured the pure and unpolluted environment of west
Penwith.
Alongside that of his co-exhibitors in the Tate show
Pearce's reputation grew in stature during the next 20
years. A sign of that esteem was the appearance of books -
Ruth Jones's pioneering biography The Path of the Son (1976)
followed by Marion Whybrow's Bryan Pearce: a private view
(1985) and Janet Axten's The Artist and His Work (2004). A
large exhibition at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro in
2000 was followed by a retrospective at the Victoria Art
Gallery in Bath in 2004, the year Pearce celebrated his 75th
birthday.
After Mary Pearce's death in 1997 Bryan was cared for by
full-time assistants in the beachfront flat where he had
lived since moving there with his parents in 1967. The
settled and supportive atmosphere at home and the sense of a
wider artistic community nearby were factors immediately
reflected in the reassuring continuity of an art that has
grown in esteem and popularity throughout an age of cultural
upheaval.
The retrospective exhibition "St Ives All Round: the
paintings of Bryan Pearce" will open at Tate St Ives on 3
February.
Walter Bryan Pearce, painter: born St Ives, Cornwall 25 July
1929; died St Ives 11 January 2007.