Martin Fuller, Head on Lap, Nude Figures Oil Paintingon Arches Paper

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Martin Fuller was born in 1943 in Royal Leamington Spa and his initial studies were at the local Mid Warwickshire … Read more Martin Fuller was born in 1943 in Royal Leamington Spa and his initial studies were at the local Mid Warwickshire College of Art, from 1960–62. ‘Mid–Warwickshire College was very good’, he says; ‘they taught drawing, and I was a natural image maker, but I wasn’t necessarily a natural drawer. They made me draw objectively. In a way it’s quite beautiful to have gone through that rigour and not to have one’s creativity made dead’.

He moved to London in 1962 to attend Hornsey College of Art, where he became ‘more sybaritically cultured’, then was awarded the Guggenheim–McKinley Scholarship to Italy in 1964. He was in Positano for just under a year and says that it changed his life: in those days there was a thriving artists and writers community, long before the tourist invasion: ‘Although it was the beginning of the supposed swinging sixties, London was still fairly dour, so then I went to Italy with its food culture and more emotional openness…I remember watching a traffic policeman in white jodhpurs and a white hat pinching a girl’s bottom. It was a wonderful revelation of a different way of life’. The Italian light, which was ‘very different from Camden Town’, also influenced his art.

When he returned from Italy he took a job at Hornsey, painted portraits, and then in 1968 had his first one–man show at the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol, which he reckons at that time was probably the best provincial art gallery in Britain. He continued to exhibit widely throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

3cIn 1991 he spent a year as Artist in Residence at Santa Fe in New Mexico. Five years later he won the Discerning Eye Modern Painters Prize and also won first prize in the Hunting Art Prize in 1997. In 2001, Martin was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at Leamington Art Gallery & Museum, and was alarmed when not a single person from his early days in Leamington came to the exhibition, bringing to mind John Betjeman’s poem ‘Death in Leamington Spa’. His most recent exhibition was in December 2005 at Adam Gallery in Mayfair, just up the road from the Royal Academy of Arts, where nowadays he occasionally teaches.

Martin’s work may be found in many collections, including Trinity College, Oxford (1971), Bristol City Art Gallery and Museum (1971 and 1973), and the Sullivan Collection, New York (1995)

He also does watercolours, believing that ‘you can get saturated working in just one medium’. How long does it take him to complete a painting? ‘As one progresses through one’s career, there’s a lot more thought and a lot less work…It might take a poet an hour to physically write down a poem but the composition and thinking behind it might take six months…I tend to do some things and then hide them’. His paintings cost anywhere from £5,000 to £15,000, and he has regular commissions from collectors and other people. See less