John Brunsdon

John Brunsdon, born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire in 1933, attended the local College of Art and then moved to London where he studied at the Royal College of Art from 1955 to 1958.

He worked for sixteen years at St Albans College of Art as Head of Printmaking while exhibiting extensively in Britain and abroad. In 1965 he had his first one man show in Lund, Sweden, and his first one-man show in UK at the Curwen Gallery, London in 1967. After establishing printmaking at St Albans School of Art, Brunsdon became one of the first artists to join Christie's Contemporary Art. Notable exhibitions include The Alice Simsar Gallery (Ann Abor, Michigan) in 1975, John Owen Gallery (Cardiff, Wales) and Chapman Gallery (Canberra, Australia) in 1984, Shakespeare Centre (London, England) in 1990, CCA Galleries in 1996, a retrospective at the Bankside Gallery (London, England) in 1998 and Rostra & Rooksmoor Gallery (Bath, England) in 2006.

Brunsdon is considered one of the finest British printmakers and is represented in many major public collections, including the Tate Gallery (London, England), the Scottish Museum of Modern Art (Edinburgh, Scotland) the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, England), the Arts Council of Great Britain and the MOMA (New York, New York).

Although he was influenced by American Abstract Expressionism in the beginning of his career, he turned to a more representational style in his later pieces. His work is characterized by the strength of his landscapes, composed of sweeping shapes rendered in bold colors that embrace principals of Fauvism. In the 1970s he travelled around Western Michigan where he was inspired by the distinctive Lake Michigan dune geography.