Ray Waterhouse was delighted to present a special selection of paintings by Martyn Brewster dating from 1975 to 1990 under a previous gallery name.
The majority of these works have been stored carefully for 30 years in Martyn’s Finsbury Park studio. During the intervening years the studio was leased out and only recently has Martyn been able to recover and catalogue his work, a process that has revealed some extraordinary paintings.
The works we are showing date from a time when Martyn was closely associated with the Warwick arts trust in London. He exhibited there regularly alongside such luminaries as John Hoyland and Gillian Ayres. The trust provided a welcome haven for abstract artists and their collectors at a time when figurative art was more prevalent in commercial galleries. These early paintings are an emotional and lyrical response to the environment; they have abstract qualities but retain a connection to the natural world and the landscape tradition in art. On a very emotional level, the simple joy of working with oil paint is clearly evident in the thickly impastoed surfaces and rich colour palatte.
