Martin Fuller Art

Martin Fuller was born in 1943 in Royal Leamington Spa and his initial studies were at the local Mid–Warwickshire College of Art, from 1960–62. ‘Mid–Warwickshire College was very good’, he says; ‘they taught drawing, and I was a natural image maker, but I wasn’t necessarily a natural drawer. They made me draw objectively. In a way it’s quite beautiful to have gone through that rigour and not to have one’s creativity made dead’. He moved to London in 1962 to attend Hornsey College of Art, where he became ‘more sybaritically cultured’, then was awarded the Guggenheim–McKinley Scholarship to Italy in 1964. He was in Positano for just under a year and says that it changed his life: in those days there was a thriving artists and writers community, long before the tourist invasion: ‘Although it was the beginning of the supposed swinging sixties, London was still fairly dour, so then I went to Italy with its food culture and more emotional openness…I remember watching a traffic policeman in white jodhpurs and a white hat pinching a girl’s bottom. It was a wonderful revelation of a different way of life’. The Italian light, which was ‘very different from Camden Town’, also influenced his art. When he returned from Italy he took a job at Hornsey, painted portraits, and then in 1968 had his first one–man show at the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol, which he reckons at that time was probably the best provincial art gallery in Britain. He continued to exhibit widely throughout the 1970s and ’80s. 3cIn 1991 he spent a year as Artist in Residence at Santa Fe in New Mexico. Five years later he won the Discerning Eye Modern Painters Prize and also won first prize in the Hunting Art...