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Noel Rowston Brannan was born in Northumberland on Christmas Day 1921. In 1926 the family moved to Cleethorpes, where he grew up in a very art-orientated household. He would return from school to find his father, Edward, busy in his studio. Many who came to the house were artists, one of whom went off to Tahiti in a sailing boat to follow the trail of Gauguin. Romantic stuff for a teenager.
Brannan did not start to paint until about 1940 when he joined an evening class at the art school in Lincoln where his wartime job in the Admiralty had taken him. Each weekend he returned to Cleethorpes to paint and draw with his father and younger brother, Peter*. The three of them would journey out together, drawing entirely from nature without references to photographs or other sources. Brannan later wrote;
It was very much a family affair, my younger brother was talented from a very early age.
In 1945 the Admiralty transferred Brannan to Edinburgh, in ’46 to Bath and in ’47 to Blackpool. Everywhere he went he would draw and paint. He was then awarded a grant for a 5-year course, resigned from the civil service, and became a full-time student at Lincoln School of Art.
The early days had been halcyon ones. He was able to paint as he pleased. At Lincoln he was taught by Anton Bartl, a Czechoslovakian refugee, who had studied art in Prague under Kokoschka. Brannan who was older than most of his fellow students had some knowledge of German Expressionism and he and Bartl soon became firm friends. He later wrote;
To be a student at 25, with a wife and child and to have to think about passing examinations, and about finding a job eventually, took some of the guilt off the gingerbread. A picture I sold at the R.A., and one bought by the Usher Gallery, Lincoln in 1948 were both painted before I became a student. I found myself a garret-like studio so that I could carry on with this work, but did less of my own painting in the next 5 years than I had done in Blackpool and Bath where I had been very free and prolific.
In 1952 Brannan took up a teaching job in Hinckley having studied painting for a year in Leicester. For the next 5 years or so he found his painting restricted to work in the studio from jottings in pocket sketchbooks. As a teacher he felt himself too public a figure to be able to set up an easel out of doors. The result was fewer landscapes but more portraits and figure compositions and it was not until he could afford a car that he was able to travel to Nuneaton with its mines, tile works, chimneys, quarries, canals and areas of wasteland, which were to become his favourite sketching ground and satisfy his great love of industrial landscape.
Noel Brannan took early retirement from teaching in 1980. In 1985 he had a solo retrospective exhibition in Lincolnshire. He died in August 2001.
This exhibition focuses on his work in the late 1940s; Cleethorpes, Edinburgh, Bath and Blackpool.
*Peter Brannan died in 1994 and a year later Goldmark Gallery held a major retrospective exhibition of his work. The gallery continues to represent his estate.
Goldmark Gallery would like to thank Noel Brannan’s wife, Mavis and daughter, Jane for their great assistance in the mounting of this exhibition. |
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