Date of Birth: 7 July, 1928
Place: Wakefield, Yorks.
Profession: Painter, Sculptor, Retired Teacher
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Anthony Curtis has spent twenty five years in secondary art education during which time he founded and headed the visual art department at Cressex School., High Wycombe for eighteen years.
Working from home Anthony Curtis specialises in watercolours and gouache and has extended his abilities to ceramic sculptures during his long career. He studied at the Bath Academy of Art at Corsham working under Peter Potworowski, William Scott, Kenneth Armitage, Peter Lanyon and Bryan Wynter.
Reflecting upon the nature of his work, Anthony says…
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'Although I have my preferred artists from the western and other traditions,
my influences also lie in other areas of human endeavour and with things
I know and see.
I regard our reality as ultimately a mystery. nevertheless, we are all seekers asking fundamental questions about humanity; the Who? What? Where? are we:(and perhaps Why?). Our Philosophies, Religions Arts and Sciences represent the seeker in us and I feel that beauty is the aspect common to them all.
As a lad i once resolved that I wanted my painting to be as beautiful as the music of Mozart. Another early influence was the series of short flights i embarked upon with the RAF as a cadet during WWII. This started a continuing interest in our world from the air. Landscape without an horizon? Whatever next? Since those days we have seen the ultimate horizon in the disc of the Earth surveyed from space; and no horizon appears in the vertical shots of the planet surface.
Amongst my teachers at Corsham 1950-51 Bryan Wynter later stated that his work was about change; to which time is essential. Peter Lanyon made paintings of landscape containing the totality of walks undertaken within his subject and later painted an aircraft course seen over a vertically observed landscape; also works embodying a time element. The Tate at St Ives has featured both these artists in retrospective shows 2000-01. My teacher, Peter Potworowski, has asserted that his work was 'confirming the time aspect of space'. I don't think any specific conversations on Time and Relativity occurred between myself and these artists, but it must have been 'in the air'.
My own interest in time in the arts surfaced in 1953 on reading a popularising article about Relativity; plainly an interest already simmering in my subconscious. Briefly, I believe there are time aspects embodied in the visual arts and that our experience of time is qualitatively different from people who lived previously. I think this process began with rail travel and accelerated through the 20th century to date. For example, consider Grey's Elegy and his plodding 'Plow-man' who shares walking both with us and our hominoid ancestors. Assuming an ability to walk on water we would take a long time to walk to New York. SNAP instantly into our time when we could see New York's catastrophe as it happened, simultaneously. Time was annihilated as our 'Plow-man' could never have known. Grey himself was considering many aspects of a short span of time in his poem 'The Knell of Parting Day' through his feelings and intellect using his skills to share it with us. Similarly as visual artists we are also feeling led in our work, but it is a grave error to assume that no intellectual aspects exist; or that they have no place within the arts.
We are amazing creatures. with a complement of five physical senses (plus a possible 'sixth'), we continue adding to our vast repositories of knowledge. We use technological extensions of ourselves to store and interpret data in a diversity of disciplines. The current frontier of human aspirations' seem to be populated by scientists. Physicists explore matter from fundamental particles to to far reaches of spacetime. The structures of life are gradually being brought into focus. The mystery still deepens but there is a wealth of imagery, ways of seeing our reality to be explored.
It seems legitimate for visual artists to explore the world in the light of science. Much probing inquiry has been done, for example the spacetime work of cubism and psychological insights of surrealism. However, such examples of psychological introspection as an unmade bed or a notionally 'ultimate' blank canvas though, I hope considered, seem trivially impoverished. Compare such concepts with images from space which are composites from machines searching across a variety of wavelengths; combined in a cubist manner they reveal stunning beauty. All possible insights are legitimate to art but in this prolific era important aspects are being neglected. Art fashion as a manipulable tool in the hands of commercially oriented forces creates cult of personality in place of joyfully serious scrutiny and thought.
My art is one of ambiguity and simultaneity. Ambiguities of scale and image allow room for the viewer's life experience to come to bear. Simultaneity of events and image within many pieces embody a time aspect.
He has shown extensively in England over twenty-six years and has works in private and public collections in this country and abroad. Key exhibitions have included one man shows at the Scopas Gallery, Henley on Thames, the Bloomsbury Gallery, London and a retrospective at the Wooburn Festival in 1992.
Prestigious group shows include the Redfern Gallery, London in 1952 and an Arts Council Touring Exhibition of stained glass in 1961. He has shown at the Royal Watercolour Society, London and regularly exhibits at the RWA. In 1995 works executed in Australia were selected for the RWA Seven Academicians Exhibition.
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