Georges Terzian

French, (Contemporary)

George Terzian is a French Postwar & Contemporary painter known for his vibrant, abstract and geometric compositions. Terzian moved to Paris in the 1960s, and became a cabaret singer which enabled him to pursue his passion for painting. There he would turn to the cubist style for which he is celebrated, forming a synthesis of Picasso, Braque and Leger’s early work in his unique, post-cubist style.

Terzian's work is heavily influenced by the geometric abstraction movement, which emerged in the early twentieth century and emphasizes the use of geometric shapes and forms to create abstract compositions. His paintings are characterized by their precise and clean lines, bold colors, and geometric shapes. He often uses a limited palette of colors, such as black and white, to create a sense of harmony and balance in his compositions.

Terzian was born in Marseille in 1939, to parents of Armenian descent. His family had left their homeland for Russia at the start of the twentieth century, although they would then settle in France shortly before the artist’s birth. Georges took an early interest in drawing and painting, and his parents therefore encouraged him to join the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Marseilles at the age of fourteen. From a studio in Sainte-Miter, he would experiment with impressionist techniques en plein air in the Provençal countryside, working in gouache and oils in a manner reminiscent of Cèzanne, continually honing his technique.

Yet Terzian was clearly a man with an eclectic taste which ran beyond his skill as an artist. In the midst of his studies in art school, Terzian discovered a love of boot making, which prompted him to interrupt his education for over a year while he studied the craft. When he moved to Paris at the age of twenty, he also elected to study music, and took lessons from the famous singer Jean Lumière. In fact, while his style began to transition towards cubism in the early 1960s, it was his job as a cabaret singer which would support the young artist financially. It is easy to see Terzian’s polymathic nature in his mature paintings, which draw from a wide range of styles and cultures to create their inimitable modernist feel. His musical studies in particular bring a symphonic, lyrical quality to his works reminiscent of artists such as Kandinsky.

The influence of the work of Picasso, Braque and Leger remains constant throughout his oeuvre, while maintaining a personal style. His iconography also draws on the North African cultures that he interacted with during his many stays in Africa, alongside Russian constructivist motifs from his time living in Moscow.

Throughout his career, Terzian has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in France and internationally, and he continues to paint from his studio in Paris. Following a one-man exhibition of his work at the Parisian Giovanni gallery in 2007, his works have become increasingly wellknown on the international stage. The public interest in his works has also led to his much rarer early works gaining a particular popularity.

david leverett

British, (1938-2020)

Composition No. 2

Numbered ‘2’ (along top edge)

Gouache and Pencil on Card

55 x 80 cms / 21” x 31"

Provenance david leverett

Estate of the Artist. Gladwell & Patterson, London; acquired from the above in 2022.

British, (1938-2020)

Composition No. 7

Numbered ‘7’ (along top edge) Gouache and Pencil on Card 55 x 80 cms / 21” x 31"

Provenance Estate of the Artist. Gladwell & Patterson, London; acquired from the above in 2022.

David Leverett’s abstract paintings are emblematic of the avant-garde 1960s British art scene. With their large scale and irregularly shaped geometry, executed in vivid acrylics, Leverett’s paintings burst with vibrancy and dynamism.

Born in Nottingham in 1938, Leverett studied at Nottingham College of Arts in the late 1950s, where his early work demonstrated a predilection for bold, abstract forms. In 1961, he moved to London to complete his training with a further three years study at the Royal Academy, immersing himself in nascent movements of the 1960s, from Pop Art to Op Art. Upon graduation, Leverett began exhibiting almost immediately with a series of shows at the Redfern Gallery, followed by one man shows at the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition in 1967 and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1968. In the same year, still only thirty, his work was included at the Royal Academy Bicentenary Exhibition.

Leverett’s landscapes have enormous vitality. Preoccupied with the natural world, his compositions seek to combine the elements of water, air, sky, and earth which are always in a state of change and motion. Leverett abstracts and distorts the landscape, giving viewers the opportunity to travel in their imagination as they choose.

In his later years, he would begin to pull back slightly from abstraction, producing bold landscapes that reflect a growing concern with environmental causes. While he was perhaps best known for the geometric work he produced in the sixties, he continued to remain an important force in British art, winning the inaugural Sargant fellowship at the British School in Rome in 1990.

Alongside his painting, David was for many years a leading teacher at the Slade School of Fine Art, a role for which he is fondly remembered by numerous students. Education was clearly a passion of his, and in addition to his work at the Slade, David would often travel internationally to give workshops. David passed away in 2020, at his Kentish Town home after a career of over fifty years. During that time his work had been shown around the world, from Venice to New York and today his paintings are in multiple museum collections, most importantly at Tate Modern in London.

Donald Hamilton Fraser

British, (1929-2009)

“The West Coast of Scotland and the Highlands are the last wilderness in Britain, the last place where you feel alone with the landscape around you. You have a sense of being the only person alive on the planet; it awakens emotions that one didn’t know were there. I like that feeling because there is nothing to impede your reaction, it’s just you and the sand, you and the tide.”

Oil on Paper

23 x 30 cms / 9” x 12”

Boats on the Foreshore, Portskerra

Oil on Paper

39 x 58 cms / 15½" x 22¾"

Provenance Private Collection, UK.

Gladwell & Patterson, London; acquired from the above in 2021.

Donald Hamilton Fraser

British, (1929-2009)

Donald Hamilton Fraser is a highly acclaimed British painter. Fraser dramatised his subjects with bold colours and a confident brush. His work employs a language of visual metaphor in which abstract and descriptive elements combine to express a heightened experience of the subject.

Inspired by the Scottish Highlands of his ancestors, Fraser depicted the rugged landscape like no other artist. Captured in all its myriad guises, according to the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere, he transformed the Highland landscape into vivid swathes of colour.

Fraser was a master at capturing an array of subjects, from the natural landscape to vibrant still lives. He adored the expressive nature of paint and the striking juxtaposition of primary colours, often layering them onto the canvas with a palette knife to produce an almost collage-like effect. Under his deft brush, the tradition of landscape painting is distorted to form abstract almost dream-like fields of colour.

Fraser was born in London to Scottish parents. His father was an antiques dealer, and Fraser’s childhood was spent surrounded by beautiful objects and art. Fraser developed a keen interest in literature, reading voraciously and writing poetry, and he began to train as a journalist with Kemsley Newspapers before completing a period of national service in the Royal Air Force in the late 1940s.

Fraser studied at the prestigious St. Martin's School of Art from 1949 to 1952 alongside notable contemporaries including Jack Smith, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach and his close friend, Peter Kinley. For many young artists in the early 1950s, they felt a need to become either an abstract or a figurative artist. Fraser did not feel these had to be mutually exclusive, and an exhibition of the work of Nicolas de Staël at Matthiesson's on Bond Street in 1952 acted as catalyst to reconcile these two styles within his work.

Over the course of his career, Fraser had frequent one man exhibitions at Gimpel Fils in London and Paul Rosenberg Gallery in New York. From 1958 to 1983, Fraser taught at the Royal College of Art. During this fellowship, he taught many notable young artists that would go on to be leading figures of their generation, including David Hockney, Ronald Brooks Kitaj, Patrick Caulfield and Thesese Oulton. Fraser became a Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 1970 and was elected as a member of the Royal Academy in 1975. In Fraser’s later years, he received many private and public commissions and took part in frequent gallery exhibitions throughout Britain. Shortly before he passed away, two major retrospectives of his work were held in London at Arthur Ackerman and the CCA Galleries.

Peter Wileman

British, (Contemporary)

“For me, painting is as much a part of the day as eating and sleeping. In fact, it’s more important than that, more like breathing! I could not imagine a single day passing without talking about, reading about, or actually taking part in some kind of activity concerning art. Like a moth is drawn to a flame, a painter is drawn to the light, and although I have tried to express myself with painting in many different forms, mediums and styles over the years, my path has lead me inexorably, like so many others before me, to try and capture that elusive quality of light, that only a shimmering sunset, dawn of a new day, dazzling sparkle of reflection off both sea and river presents to one who is prepared to both look and see.”

- - Peter Wileman

Peter Wileman

British, (Contemporary)

Across the Bar

Oil on Canvas

40 x 40 cms / 15¾" x 15¾"

Highly acclaimed British abstract artist Peter Wileman is one of the UK’s leading contemporary landscape artists today. Known for his dazzling abstracted oil landscapes, Wileman’s style is bold and vigorous, both in the use of colour and handling of paint, as he explores the effect of light on his subject. Seeking atmosphere through light and colour, he works in varying degrees of abstraction.

Interested in painting from a young age, upon leaving school he went straight into his first job at Hallmark Cards, a card company, where his innate artistic talent was immediately recognised. Here Peter spent five years studying lettering and design, his first artistic training - which gave him a solid grounding in colour awareness and formal structure. Wileman later became the art editor on a number of magazines. Looking for an opportunity to develop his own artwork, Peter left his budding design career to become a freelance artist; a decision from which he has never looked back.

Peter Wileman

British, (Contemporary)

Wileman’s style is bold and vigorous, both in the use of colour and handling of paint, as he explores the effect of light on his subject. Working exclusively in oils, the medium most adaptable to changes of light and mood, he evokes atmosphere through light and colour through varying degrees of abstraction. Wileman’s work is reminiscent of the great master Joseph Mallord William Turner through its atmospheric quality. His work has a superb energy, with paint applied in washes and also with areas of impasto. The foregrounds are complex, but not disctracting to the subject within his work.

Over the last two decades, Wileman has exhibited regularly at a number of prestigious art venues including the Royal Society of Marine Artists, the New England Art Club and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters of which he is an associate member. Wileman has built a distinguished reputation as one of the finest landscape artists practising in the UK today.

April Haze, No. 3

Painted in 1957

Oil on Canvas

43 x 109 cms / 17” x 43”