Bryan Trueman Artist

ARTICLE BY IVAN DAY*

I first heard of Bryan Trueman in the early nineties from an Australian friend who spoke with wide-eyed excitement about his artistry. Bryan’s name came up again a year or two later during a conversation with another neighbour from Melbourne, who was also familiar with his work and equally impressed with its virtuosity and inventiveness. From these early whisperings, I came to realise that Bryan was considered an artistic legend in Australia with examples of his work in many national collections. A few years later he moved to the English Lake District, where I had the privilege of getting to know both the man and his remarkable work first hand. I quickly discovered that as well as Australia, he has practised as an artist and exhibited in many other countries, including the USA, New Zealand, Holland, Malaysia, Japan and Bangladesh.

Bryan is fundamentally a painter and printmaker, who for many years used the surfaces of ceramic vessels as a crucible for exploring stunning gestural mark making. And what vessels! Bryan is also a consummate ceramic artist. His extraordinary understanding of the very essence of clay as a material and his finely tuned sense of form has meant that his three dimensional work is never forced. He lets the clay do what it naturally does best. His exquisite appreciation of form is evident in all of his ceramic pieces. But it is the surfaces of these vessels that make the greatest impression on us. For much of his long career as a virtuoso ceramicist, Bryan has treated his creations in clay as if they were handy canvases. He has always been true to his early training in painting and printmaking.

In the last few decades Bryan has diverted his creative energies from ceramics back into printmaking and digital mark making. He first realised the creative potential of digital processes three decades ago when he lived in the Lake District, but it was his move to the wide skies and venerable villages of Suffolk that have shaped his recent vision. Throughout his life, Bryan has chosen to live and work in exciting visual environmentsfrom the wetlands of New Jersey to the magisterial shores of

Tasmania; from the tea tree groves of Victoria to the ethereal beauty of the English Lakes and his beloved Brittany. His imagination is charged by such places. But in recent years I have seen how the flint flushwork and ancient windmills of Suffolk and Norfolk have gradually percolated their way into his visual vocabulary. His excitement at discovering a graveyard of ancient barges at Pin Mill, or the reedy beauty of Snape, has profoundly shaped the direction of his artistic journey. His creative eye is as much at home in East Anglia, as those of John Sell Cotman or John Nash.

However, much of Bryan’s recent East Anglian output is still profoundly influenced by past experiences of other visual worlds. There are strong echoes of windblown tea trees on the edge of the Tasman Sea in some of his strongly animated Suffolk landscapes. Compare the swirling energy of this recent print to that of a 1979 platter executed during his Australian years. Bryan’s powerful visual vocabulary has developed over a long and eventful artistic life.

*Ivan Day is an historian of the social history and culture of food. He is celebrated for his reconstructions of historical table settings, which combine museum objects with accurate recreations of period dishes. His work has been exhibited in many major museums in the UK, Europe, and North America, including the Fitzwilliam Museum, Getty Research Institute, Metropolitan Museum NYC, Detroit Institute of Arts, Gardiner Museum, and Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He is the chair of the celebrated Leeds Symposium on Food History and Traditions and is the author of a number of books and numerous papers on food culture and dining.

Bryan’s pictorial repertoire is rich in calligraphic gesture, explosive brushwork and a vibrant sense of pent up energy. The rural lanes, hedgerows and ancient field boundaries appear to almost detonate in these chromatic apparitions of the Suffolk landscape.

I find Bryan’s working methods fascinating. Take this confident and highly energised initial painting, which will be worked up and eventually culminate in a gicleé print, probably going through many transformations in the process. Layer upon layer are built up by the artist, one over the other, reflecting the laminated strata of the landscape itself. These are the pictorial progressions of a master whose painterly skills have been honed over a lifetime.

The calligraphic mark-making possibilities afforded by a recent visit to Mickle Mere have resulted in some novel visual explorations.

This image illustrates how Bryan exploits graphic manipulation on his computer in the same way that he uses a sketchbook in order to develop his ideas and reconnoitre new creative routes. Bryan’s is a constant visual adventure that never stays still for a moment.

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