Lemon Street Gallery

Bryan Pearce at 75 | Celebrating 50 years of Bryan Pearce’s work - 28th may to 21st june 2004

The work below featured in a previous exhibition Just click on an image for a closer view. We're open monday-saturday, 10:30-5:30 including bank holidays. Please pay us a visit.

View Of Clodgy With Ten Seagulls, 1998
Oil on board
28.25 x 22.25 ins
Private collection

Interior Of St Ives Parish Church, 1998
Oil on board
24 x 20 ins
Private collection

Whether Bryan Pearce is a slow worker or not he is a consistent and conscientious painter. He has never pushed his career and much of his work has never been publicly exhibited. He is a modest figure and working with him has been a very humbling experience. Despite developing phenylketonuria during his childhood years his mother Mary encouraged him to paint at the age of twenty-four. Over the years Pearce has forged himself an immediately recognisable unique style characterised by his emotional response to his environment. His paintings, often depicted by perfectly simple lines, with use of a restricted palette provide an uncomplicated calmness which imbues the viewer with a sense of tranquility. Something totally personal evolves. The paintings are produced from the mind’s eye – a truthful and distinctly cerebral arrangement of poetic shape and form, each line being meticulously outlined before any colour is applied. Pearce like any good artist naturally lives by seeing, knowing what he feels and what intrinsically matters to him. Perception is central to everything he creates. This is a wonderful exhibition encompassing the path of Pearce’s work from the small watercolours, his favourite medium during 1953, moving to oils he produced between 1957 and 1964 until now where oil, conté, ink and pencil dominate the mood of his work. Whether it be depictions of St Ives landscape, harbourscapes or still life this exhibition must be viewed as a celebration of fifty years of painting that could very easily never have been seen. The work of Bryan Pearce is monumental in the history of St Ives painters and it is an absolute pleasure to celebrate his seventyfifth year with this exhibition here at Lemon Street Gallery.

The exhibition is a collaborative project, having run simultaneously from 6th March - 9th May in Bath at the Victoria Art Gallery and Beaux Arts. Fifteen paintings not shown in the previous venues will be displayed and on sale at the Lemon Street Gallery, along with a representative cross-section of the artist’s work that spans his 50-year-career as a painter.

In addition to the work of Bryan Pearce, this collaborative project is unprecedented in bringing together twenty-seven of the artist’s friends who have played a significant role in Bryan’s life. In so doing the exhibition “seamlessly links representational and abstract art, painters and printmakers, and artists who are household names with those who are now sadly, rarely exhibited.” Bryan’s mother, Mary Pearce, is featured in the show and acknowledged for the paramount role she played in fostering her son’s career, as well as (and because of) being an artist in her own right. Her network of friends within the St Ives community has created a context for Bryan’s work to flourish and be appreciated within.

The other 26 artist friends include Muriel Archer, Alixe Jean Shearer Armstrong, Grace Ayling, Dorothy Bordass, William Cooper, John Emanuel, Leonard Fuller ROI RCA, Elena Gaputyte, Isobel Atterbury Heath, Barbara Hepworth, William Leah, Jill Leman, Martin Leman, Peter Lanyon, Denis Mitchell, Marjorie Mostyn RCA SWA, Breon O’Casey, Sheila Oliner, Colin Orchard, Misimé Peile ASWA, Nelson Rands, Rose Rands, Roy Ray, Lieke Ritman, Barbara Tribe FRBS and Roy Walker.

Louise Jones, Lemon Street Gallery