Dealers Since 1876
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Roy turner durrant (1925-1998)
The first substantial exhibtion of Durrant's work in over twenty years will be held at The Fine Art Society from 8 - 22 May 2008.
Roy Turner Durrant, Suffolk-born and East-Anglian based, was in his own highly particular way, an artist of a typically English sort, and very much of his time. Not all serious and talented artists necessarily achieve the wider reputation they might deserve, and Durrant’s has been a sleeping reputation.
He studied at Camberwell in the years immediately after the Second World War, and emerged as one of that second generation of Neo-Romantic painters, post Sutherland and Piper with artists such as Craxton, Vaughan, Pasmore, Minton and Alan Reynolds as his contemporaries. And rather like Reynolds in particular, and perhaps as Pasmore had a year or two earlier, through the later 1950s he would move in his work from an increasingly stylised representation of the landcape towards abstraction. With the later, simpler abstract works of the 1970s, there remains always a strong feel for surface and texture, closer in spirit perhaps to the work of painters such as William Scott, Patrick Heron and Henry Mundy.
It is a measure of the quality of Durrant’s work that even with this carefully curated selection of his work, from the 1950s to the 80s, the references and contexts that come immediately and naturally to mind, from first to last, are with the leading painters of the time. He was nevertheless entirely his own man, perfectly content to go his own way, in no sense a follower but rather an artist among his peers.
