Brian Crouch

Brian Crouch wrote three letters to Ruth Borchard between 1959 and 1961, from London SW17. In the first, he writes: 'I have an early self-portrait which I would be pleased to let you have for 15gns, providing you like it, of course. It is a straightforward, senior late-student work. I have a rather later self-portrait which you may prefer.' It seems that Ruth met him soon afterwards, and made her purchase.

In the second letter, he wonders if she would be interested in the private view of the London Group: 'In any case I enclose a card which gives details of the show. I am exhibiting a fairly large painting (London 'Nocturne'). I hope the self-portrait is wearing fairly well...' He goes on to recommend that she contact the artist William Hallé (q.v.), and gives his address, and enquires if she had managed to find Anthony Whishaw (q.v.). In his final letter, he encloses 'a card for the Wildenstein exhibition - things went well enough there in '59 for them to invite me this year.'

Alongside these letters, Ruth kept a small blank piece of card, on which the artist had drawn (in Ruth's description written at the top) a 'sketch of his painting Street in Rain at Vega, 22/1/59, violet/red': in fact he had drawn two pencil sketches, the larger one showing differently shaded, seemingly abstract areas; the smaller one showing the powerful shape of an opened umbrella against rough vertical shading, suggesting rain.

Born in 1929, Brian Crouch was around twenty-seven years old when he painted this robustly structured self-portrait (signed and dated, in red capitals, CROUCH 56). He studied at Brighton College of Art and then at the Royal Academy Schools, where he made this picture. Set against a backdrop of stark contrasts – impenetrably black to the left, window-like (letting in the light) to the right – the head appears virtually to be modelled out of spontaneous broad patches of colour; fresh, individual block-like brushstrokes are often visible. The dramatic, sculpted effect is partly created through the use of bold tonal contrasts. The pale pinkish-brown swathe on the side of his nose contrasts firmly with the long, dark brown calligraphic stroke extending from the bridge of the nose down to the retroussé tip. The big eyes, daubed black, are somewhat mask-like, stern and impassive. The hair appears a nice dirty-blond, literally so with its admixture of yellow, black, orange, green, even a bit of blue. This picture tautly describes a slender, firm-necked young man of resolute yet discerning character – but one who is evidently keen not to give too much away.

An untitled abstract oil painting of 1959 has a not dissimilar palette to his self-portrait of three years earlier, its multiple tautly sculpted ridges of colour (and streaks and patches of white paint too) rather resembling overall a sheer, multi-faceted rockface.

Ruth would have encountered Crouch's work in Jack Beddington's book, Young Artists of Promise (Studio Publications, 1957), which reproduces two of his oil paintings, Kitchen Still Life (1956) – an austere, Kitchen Sink-style rendition of domestic implements and a Tate & Lyle sugar packet on a bare table – and Wet Night, Battersea (1956) – in which swathes and rectangles of dark and light colours (perhaps presaging the artist's later colour-field paintings) are abstractly manipulated so as to evoke the appearance of glistening houses and streets, Ruth would also have seen his work in annual 'Young Contemporaries' shows, at the influential Grabowski Gallery in Sloane Street, Chelsea (which ran from 1959 to 1975, founded by a Lithuanian emigré Mateusz  Grabowski, an early champion of Pop Art, who also in an important 1963 exhibition showed Commonwealth artists such as Frank Bowling, William Thomson (q.v.) and Aubrey Williams) and at the AIA ('Artists International Association' ) –  also in London. Crouch also sent Ruth a card for a late 1963 show, 'Some Contemporary British painters', at the Wildenstein Gallery in London's Bond Street, in which he exhibited (his friend William Hallé (q.v.) also showed there).

In a 1987 exhibition catalogue essay, Brian Crouch outlined his current work, and the nature of his artistic development:

         In the first of two retrospective exhibitions which were held at the Johnson Wax  

         Kiln Gallery, Farnham Maltings in 1981, I included a group of paintings entitled

         Winchelsea Beach. These sea-paintings were made in response to my first visit to

         that particular part of the Sussex coast in the early 1960s. [In Crouch's 1961 oil

         painting of Winchelsea Beach, East Sussex (Collection: Cambridge Shire Hall),

         sea, beach, boats and headland are invigoratingly and spaciously evoked through

         sweeping arcs and swathes of colour – showing an affinity in approach to the

         subtly bright palette and abstracted naturalism of the Cornish painter Peter Lanyon

         (1918-1964)].

         There followed a longish period in which my work became more 'abstract' and

         self-contained. I made many large colour field paintings and smaller reliefs. Then

         in 1980 I began to make works which were freer in execution, often in construction

         form, and referred to events, moods and places... important to me... the present

          exhibition illustrates a return to the theme of the sea... The large 3-unit paintings...

          enable me to make a transition or even a contrast between different sea-derived...

          atmospheres... while still retaining, I hope, a strong sense of abstract structure.

          The constructions are to do with the more solid structures... by the sea: beach

          defences, navigational signs, boats and so on. They are a combination of found

          objects and carefully constructed elements. The group of sea-weed drawings

          explore the living organisms of the sea in a freely improvised way at micro-level.