Roy Oxlade - English painter, writer on art, and an art educator.

Roy Oxlade ( 1929 - 2014) was an English painter, writer on art, and an art educator.
Oxlade is quoted in a 2013 exhibition review:
"Painting to me is like a room of the imagination. It’s up to me what I do with it. I choose its size and its materials – usually canvas and oil paint. At the beginning its relationships don’t amount to much – it’s a rectangle in a jumble of art history I relate to. There would not be much fun in leaving the room empty, a passive – one colour field – a blank canvas. And entirely abstract forms place too many restrictions on dialogue. So I have put in some other stuff, some characters, some actors – tables, pots, colours, easels, lamps, scribbles, figures and faces to interact with each other. I adjust the temperature, open the windows, shut the windows, throw things out, change the lighting."Wikipedia

Avant Garde Art

Carel Weight

Carel Victor Morlais Weight  (10 September 1908 – 13 August 1997) was an English painter.Weight was born in Paddington in 1908. His father was a bank worker and his mother, who was of Swedish and German descent, was a chiropodist.[3] He studied at the Hammersmith School of Art from 1928 to 1930. At Hammersmith he met Ruskin Spear, who became a life-long friend. At Goldsmiths College, between 1931 and 1933, Weight developed his preference for imaginative compositions. Teaching at the Beckenham School of Art allowed Weight to support himself throughout the 1930s. His first solo exhibition was held in the Cooling Gallery in 1933 and he later exhibited in some major London galleries and throughout the United Kingdom.

 

During the Second World War, Weight served with the Royal Engineers and the Army Education Corps. As an Official War Artist in 1945, he worked in Austria, Greece and Italy. Weight wrote to the War Artists' Advisory Committee, WAAC, in December 1939 seeking work as a war artist. A number of commissions were discussed and eventually, in March 1942, WAAC purchased one picture from Weight. By then he had been called up and his time for painting was restricted.In July 1942 Weight's painting of a zebra that escaped from London Zoo during an air raid was purchased, but his commanding officer would not release him for further WAAC commissions. It was not until the spring of 1945, after Albert Richards had been killed, that WAAC could offer Weight a full-time post. Weight landed in Naples in March 1945 and travelled to Rome, Perugia, Verona, Florence and reached Ravenna in October that year. During November and December 1945 Weight visited Vienna, Rome and Florence and arrived in Athens in February 1946.In Greece and Italy he depicted the immediate aftermath of the War and the role of the British Army in working to restore civil society after the conflict.

In 1947, Weight began teaching at the Royal College of Art, and was professor of painting there from 1957.He retired in 1973. He was elected to the Royal Academy in April 1965, and senior R.A. in 1984.
Many of his paintings showed suburban settings in which unexpected human dramas occurred, some of them humorous and some frightening. Each painting's location was chosen specifically for its abstract structure; the locations were usually actual places, but the figures were imagined and "gr[e]w under the brush".Weight wrote that his art was "concerned with such things as anger, love, hate, fear and loneliness", and said, "for me the acid test of a painting is: will the ordinary chap get anything out of this?"He was prolific, and typically painted 50 paintings in a year.
Weight was an instructor, mentor and good friend to John Bratby and Jean Cooke.
Weight died on 13 August 1997 at the age of 88. Works by Weight are owned by the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Imperial War Museum and feature in the United Kingdom Government Art Collection.Wikipedia

Robert Hodgins

Robert Hodgins (27 June 1920 – 15 March 2010) was an English painter and printmaker.Robert Hodgins was born in Dulwich, London, on 27 June 1920, and immigrated to South Africa in 1938.He enlisted with the Union Defence Force in 1940, and served in Kenya and Egypt.In 1944 he returned to England, and studied art and education at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he received an arts and crafts certificate in 1951 and a National Diploma of Design in painting in 1953.

He returned to South Africa, where he taught at the Pretoria Technical College School of Art from 1954. From 1962 he was a journalist and critic for Newscheck magazine. He lectured in painting at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, from 1966 to 1983.Hodgins worked using a variety of paint media, including oils, acrylic paint and tempera. he had been exhibiting since the 1950s but did not come to wider attention until the early 1980s. In 1980 and 1981 he had produced a series of paintings based on Ubu, the main character in the play Ubu Roi, who became a recurring subject of his art.

 

In 1983, he retired to paint full-time. He partook in many solo and group exhibitions in South Africa and abroad. His work can be seen in many galleries, corporate and public collections, including Anglo American, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Sandton Art Gallery, the Pretoria Art Museum, the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, University of South Africa (UNISA), the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries, and the William Humphreys Art Gallery in Kimberley.Robert Hodgins died on 15 March 2010,in Johannesburg, after a bout with lung cancer at the age of 89.Wikipedia,

 

Neoclassicism Sir Edward John Poynter

Sir Edward John Poynter, 1st Baronet PRA (20 March 1836 in Paris – 26 July 1919 in London) was an English painter, designer, and draughtsman who served as President of the Royal Academy.
He became best known for his large historical paintings such as Israel in Egypt (1867; Guildhall Art Gallery, London), followed by St George for England (1869), a mosaic for the Central Lobby of the Palace of Westminster, depicting St George and the Dragon. Visit of the Queen of Sheba (1871–75) and King Solomon (1890). He was admitted as an associate of the Royal Academy in 1869.Wikipedia

Classicism