Having spent the greater part of his working life in Cornwall, Bryan Ingham has inevitably become associated with the post-war Modern Movement in St Ives. And in many ways his paintings and, especially, his drawings can be seen to be in the spirit of Ben Nicholson’s work of the 40s and 50s. However, Ingham’s inspiration for these still-lives of his cottage table and landscapes of the hard, rock-strewn fields of the Lizard Peninsular goes beyond Nicholson and St Ives, to Cubism and the work of Picasso, Braque and Gris, from whom Nicholson himself had drawn extensively.

There is a toughness to Ingham’s work, an earthy feeling cut deep into the texture of the surface but also strengthening his line that the debonair Nicholson never attempts. Its kinship is more with ‘Art Informel’ and it comes as no surprise that when Ingham escaped his freezing cottage to spend the winters in the artists’ colony of Worpswede, near Bremen, he would go to Hamburg and look at Dubuffet.

With his interest in surface texture, literally carving his landscape from a gesso base before stippling the contours in paint, Ingham found himself increasingly drawn to `carving and quarrying' copper etching plates and his print-making of the 70s and 80s is some of the finest of its kind in Britain.

Ingham was a contemporary of Hockney at the Royal College of Art and like many of the brightest and best of his generation in the 60s, travelled to Italy on a Rome Scholarship. However, in his sketchbooks, the urban dolce vita makes only fleeting appearances: instead, even as a student, Ingham is looking to the informal geometry of run-down hill villages, the jagged lines of telegraph poles and the rigging of boats crammed in side-by-side in port.

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