Bryan Organ b.1935

Portraiture | Figurative | Print
“One is simplifying all the time. It’s a lot easier to put everything in. The difficult part is seeing how much you can leave out.”>

An artist considered one of the leading and most innovative English portrait painters of the 20th century, his depictions of prominent figures and members of the royal family have become an iconographic record charting prodigious change in Britain’s social and political landscape. London’s National Portrait Gallery holds a total of sixteen of his portraits of which six were commissioned by the Gallery’s Trustees.

Inspired by the work of Alberto Giacometti and Graham Sutherland (who later became a friend), the isolation of image is a prevalent characteristic and carries into both still life and lithographic studies of animals, applying the form of the portrait throughout his work.

Notwithstanding the meticulous line, precision of brushwork, and the deeply representational nature of his painting, his minimalist approach to composition retains an essence of abstraction that somehow frees the work from its own constraints.

In a catalogue forward James Fritton described Organ’s works as;
“a mixture of objective observation, what is true to nature and a process of visual criticism that comes from personal experience and emotion.”