Landscape with forms (blue with green), 1964
signed, titled and dated to the reverse
oil on board
121 x 90.5cm

Provenance:
Sale; Bonhams, 15 July 2008, lot 167

Sacrosanctly private and with a profoundly apathetic attitude towards exhibiting, Patrick Venton was an artist in spite of himself. Born in 1925, Venton left school at sixteen to work as a clerk before joining the army two years later. Like so many young men of the day, however, Venton’s military service was defined by trauma. After three years, he was discharged due to clinical depression, for which he received electroconvulsive therapy. Compounding his grief, it was also during this time that Venton’s brother was killed in action at Arnhem. The family never recovered from the tragic death of their son and brother - a loss which would ultimately shape the life and works of Patrick Venton.

After being demobbed in 1946, Venton embarked upon a period of study at Birmingham College of Art where he met fellow student, Zena Hitchings, who would become his wife. Venton would later be appointed as a teacher at both Birmingham College of Art and in London, at Heatherley’s College of Art. Although he was encouraged by friends and peers to exhibit, he rarely acquiesced and sold only four paintings during his lifetime. More recently, Venton’s work has been the subject of a major 2006 retrospective, which unveiled a largely unknown body of paintings and renewed interest and appreciation of Venton’s life and work.

Rendered in motley blues and punctuated with blocks of green and orange, the present lot is one of a series of works based on the rock formations that Venton observed during his trip to the Isles of Scilly.