Bryan Inham was born in Preston, and studied at St Martin’s School of Art in the 1950s, before accepting a post-graduate place at the Royal College of Art. Having always been fascinated by Italy, he then applied for and received a Leverhulme travel award to explore the sites of the great Renaissance painters, and spent many happy months engaged in this expedition.

On his return to England he moved to Cornwall, settling in a remote cottage with no electricity or running water, on the Lizard Penninsula. A sense of place is central to Ingham’s art and the untamed beauty of the landscape became a constant source of inspiration to him. Although in some ways isolationist, Ingham was a prominent teacher and became inextricably linked with the post-war Modern Movement in St Ives. Ben Nicholson’s early works of the 1940s were a great influence upon him, as were European masters such as Picasso, Braque and Gris.

Ingham’s work concentrated on both real and implied space within the surface of the picture. The advances made at the beginning of the century with Synthetic Cubism were crucial in his exploration of painterly space, which he embarked upon in various mediums. He made relief paintings, experimented with collage and also found an affinity with cutting plates as an etcher. Later he took to interpreting his ideas in three-dimensions in both carved stone and cast bronze.

While openly acknowledging a debt to Classical and Modern masters, Bryan Inghams’s work in all mediums has a distinctly Cornish tone and is coherent, beautiful and unmistakably his own. His work is held in numerous important public collections including the Ashmolean and the Victorian and Albert Museum.