Bryan Pearce (1913-2007)
Bryan Pearce was born in St Ives, Cornwall in 1929, a sufferer of a then unknown condition, which affects the normal development of the brain. Encouraged by his artist mother and by other St Ives artists, he began drawing and painting in watercolours in 1953 and till1957 attended St Ives School of Painting under Leonard Fuller. In 1957 Pearce began painting in oils and started to exhibit regularly at the Penwith Gallery in St Ives and, having been sponsored by mentors Denis Mitchell and Peter Lanyon, had his first solo show at Newlyn Gallery in 1959. In the early 1970s Pearce began to make small etchings with the assistance of fellow artists Breon O’Casey and Bryan Ingham, and later Roy Walker. He has always worked slowly, but consistently, producing perhaps twelve oil paintings a year. Often compared to Alfred Wallis, the late Peter Lanyon has said of him: “Because his sources are not seen with a passive eye, but are truly happenings, his painting is original.”
Over the past 40 years Bryan Pearce exhibited throughout the country and became one of the country’s foremost naive painters, Pearce is well know for portraying the local St Ives landscape and still-life compositions in oil, conte, pen, ink, and pencil.
