India, Spain, Morocco, France,Tunisia and the USA are the countries which Antony Bream has chosen to visit and depict over the last two years, on trips which were fitted around his schedule of commissioned work.
In his hunger for foreign landscape Bream has collected countries, as others might collect exotic postage stamps.
No souk was too impenetrable, no Indian temple too vast, no noonday sun too unendurable, to prevent Bream from capturing the unique quality of a particular landscape or city.
But Bream cannot be defined as a purely topographical artist; he does not provide detailed descriptions of picturesque scenes, which is the fascination and limitation of this genre.And yet there is a vivid sense of place in all his work, all the more potent for Bream’s simplification of the scene before him, almost to the point of abstraction.
This is partly the result of having to work rapidly “en plein air”, due to its attendant problems. But it is also because he deploys an intensity and range of colour to capture the sense of light, and therefore depth, particular to each location.
This is the key to these vigorous and sensual paintings which mark Antony Bream out as one of our most talented traditional painter today. James Knox, Editor, The Art Newspaper.
