BRIAN BRADSHAW (b. 1923)
Green Growth and Stone Hut
year unknown
medium unknown
size unknown
BIOGRAPHY
Brian Bradshaw was born in Bolton, Lancashire, England and attended the Bolton School of Art and Manchester Regional College of Art. After World War II demobilization in 1948, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, London. After graduating, he won the Prix de Rome and spent a further two years based at the British Academy in Rome, travelling and working in Greece, Spain, France and Germany.
On returning to England in 1953, Bradshaw produced work for an exhibition of paintings in Manchester, while residing in a cottage in the Welsh Mountains near Snowdon. While working in England at industrial and moorland landscapes and in Wales at mountain and seascapes, he won numerous art awards, including British and Welsh Art Council prizes, as well as associateships and honorary memberships of various UK academies.
His first solo exhibition was held at Salford City Art Gallery in 1953. He went on to hold numerous solo exhibitions in the UK, US, South Africa, Australia and Zimbabwe, including four retrospectives.
In 1955, Bradshaw was appointed Vice Chairman of the British Parliamentary Committee on Art Education and continued in this post until 1960, when he was invited to South Africa to take up the Chair of Fine Arts at Rhodes University. Under his influence, a new style of painting emerged from the Eastern Cape.
In 1964, he formed the ´Grahamstown Group´, exhibiting in their own gallery in Grahamstown and throughout South Africa and then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He resigned from Rhodes University and the Directorship of the National Galleries of Rhodesia in 1978 and returned for a while to the UK. Many of his students went on to become well- known South African artists, heads of art departments, university professors and directors of galleries.
In his paintings, he was centrally concerned with the expression of the energetic and mineral patterns that emanate from the African bush and desert.
‘I don’t think he looked beyond the spiritual physicality of the landscape. He was interested in the volcanic moment of creation rather than the human steps one sees. Force, creation, energy, mass and how it rises up and joins with the sky is what interested him,’ said Christopher Till, who curated an exhibition of Bradshaw’s paintings at the Association for Visual Arts Gallery in Cape Town in 2019, titled New Horizon.