// Workers AI · dad joke modeWho drew Bryan Charnley? A charnley good artist.
Bryan Charnley | |
|---|---|
 Charnley sometime during June or July 1991 | |
| Born | 1949 |
| Died | July 1991 (aged 41–42) |
| Education | Central School of Art and Design |
| Website | bryancharnley |
Bryan Charnley (1949–1991) was a British artist who had paranoid schizophrenia,[1][2] and explored its effects in his work. He committed suicide in July 1991.[1]
Early life and flower paintings
[edit]Bryan John Charnley was born on 20 September 1949 in Stockton-on-Tees. With his twin brother he grew up in London, in Chislehurst in Kent, at Cranfield, where his father worked as a senior lecturer, and finally in Bromham near Bedford. In the summer of 1968, aged 18, he had a nervous breakdown but was able to study at Leicester School of Art later that year. In 1969 he gained a place at the Central School of Art and Design in Holborn, in London, but was unable to complete the course due to another breakdown that was later diagnosed as acute schizophrenia.[citation needed]
From 1971 until 1977 he lived at home with his parents between periods of hospitalisation and treatment including electroconvulsive therapy. In 1978 he moved to Bedford and began painting.[citation needed]
His work during this period drew heavily on photo-realism, then enjoying popularity in America, rather than the conceptual art that was fashionable in the London art scene, and he produced many large-scale paintings of flowers.[3]: 9 He was also interested in the work of Bridget Riley, in which he saw a 'cool discipline' combined with a strong emotional charge.[3]: 24–26
Relationship with Pam Jones
[edit]In 1982 Charnley painted a double portrait of himself and his partner Pam, in what has been called "the high point of [his] photorealistic early period".[3]: 12 The composition and treatment demonstrates his interest in the work of David Hockney.[3]: 12 Five years later Pam – who also experienced mental illness – attempted suicide by jumping out of a window. Though she survived, her spine was badly damaged. Charnley's trauma is explored in his painting of the same year, Leaving by the Window.[3]: 15
Stylistic development
[edit]Charnley had been exploring his inner life through painting since at least 1982, particularly addressing the experience of schizophrenia.[citation needed] Writing in 1988, he said he had "found [himself] on an interior journey in which landscape and subject were subsumed to inner vision".[4] From 1987 onwards he increasingly drew on Sigmund Freud's theories about dreams, using elaborate symbolism to convey his mental state.[citation needed]
In 1984 four of his paintings were purchased by the Bethlem Royal Hospital for its permanent collection. During this period he studied the work of other artists held in the same collection, notably William Kurelek and Louis Wain, whose work "seemed to me to have a power to move far beyond that expected of the patient as an artist. Here I saw art stripped of all esoteric and conceptual pretensions".[4]
Charnley had a solo exhibition at the Dryden Street Gallery in Covent Garden in London 1989, and exhibited two paintings at the Visions exhibition at the Royal College of Art in 1990, curated by Aiden Shingler.[citation needed] Several of his paintings – including To the Farm, Grey Self-Portrait and Broach Schizophrene – are held in the collections of the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, and others are in the Wellcome Collection.[5]
Final works and death
[edit]Charnley was frustrated by his apparent lack of success in the art market, and what recognition he received was outweighed by the day-to-day problems of his illness and the powerful drugs he was prescribed for it. These factors contributed to his decision early in 1991 to paint a series of self-portraits chronicling his experience as he reduced his medication.[citation needed] Marjorie Wallace, a journalist and the chief executive of the charity SANE, encouraged Charnley to keep a diary of his progress.[6] Charnley made the diary an integral part of the portraits using the text to explain the imagery he was using and to describe his existential state.[7] The Self Portrait Series consists of seventeen paintings. There is debate as to whether the last painting is incomplete due to the presence of a date in the lower right corner.[citation needed] He committed suicide in July 1991.[1]
Exhibitions
[edit]- Bryan Charnley, Dryden Street Gallery, London, 1989
- Visions, Royal College of Art, London 1990 (group exhibition)
- Crossing the Border, Harris Art Gallery and Museum, Preston 1995
- Bryan Charnley: Self Portrait Face to Face with Schizophrenia, National Portrait Gallery 1995[8]
- Bryan Charnley The Art of Schizophrenia, Bethlem Museum of the Mind, 2015[3]
Gallery
[edit]
Self Portrait (1991); oil on canvas, 51 x 51 cm
Clown in a Landscape, 1983; oil on canvas, 40 x 50 cm
Jealousy; oil on canvas, 76 x 101 cm
References
[edit]
- 1 2 3 Robert Howard (October 2001). Psychiatry in pictures: Broach Schizophrene. The British Journal of Psychiatry. 179 (4): A14. doi:10.1192/bjp.179.4.0.
- ↑ Artists: Bryan Charnley. SANE. Archived 1 October 2015.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 Kirsten Tambling (2015). Bryan Charnley: the Art of Schizophrenia (exhibition catalogue). Beckenham: Bethlem Museum of the Mind. Catalogue of an exhibition at Bethlem Museum of the Mind, 12 February – 22 May 2015.
- 1 2 Bryan Charnley (1988). Artist's Statement,1988. www.bryancharnley.info.
- ↑ Bryan Charnley: 1949–1991. ArtUK. Upper Beeding, West Sussex: Public Catalogue Foundation. Accessed September 2026.
- ↑ Marjorie Wallace (7 December 1991). 'Bryan Charnley'. Telegraph Magazine.
- ↑ Self Portrait Series 19th July 1991 – Bryan Charnley. www.bryancharnley.info.
- ↑ Bryan Charnley. www.bryancharnley.info. Accessed November 2017.
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