Martyn Brewster: Recent Works

Martyn Brewster is a British artist whose work is strongly linked to the English landscape tradition. Although primarily regarded as an abstract artist, many of the forms exhibited in his paintings are reminiscent of boats or islands. Brewster has had retrospective exhibitions at the Russell Cotes Art Gallery and Museum (1997), the Royal West of England Academy (2001), and the Study Gallery of Modern Art, Poole (2003) amongst others. He has won numerous awards and has work in private, public and corporate collections worldwide. Public collections include the Victoria & Albert Museum, British Museum, Russell Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Arts Institute at Bournemouth and Bournemouth University. In 1997 his painting was the subject of a monograph by Simon Olding, (with a foreword by Mel Gooding) and in 2008 a second publication by by Vivienne Light and Simon Olding documented his extensive print work.  

In the foreword to a 2018 catalogue, Dr Simon Olding noted that “Martyn Brewster’s reputation – as a painter and print maker; as an exponent of drawing withpencil or charcoal and lustrous inks – rests on his lyrical, heart-scored, abstract depiction ofimagined landscapes and, more rarely, real sites. He will also capture, in his considered andsometime urgent marks, the mood of a place. These are places without buildings or people, andif they do gesture at a place that is known to him, then the effect is never topographical. This iswork about the natural environment, or Nature that has moved even further into abstraction,into a place where the swoop of colour, the rich and chordal density of it, provide a fluid,evocative and lyrical statement.”