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Patrick Procktor - A Brief Biography (11 Mar 2005) |
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Patrick Procktor was born in Dublin in 1936 but was largely brought up in London and Brighton. He attended Highgate School in London where his art teacher was Kyffin Williams the Welsh landscape painter. On leaving school Procktor worked for approximately three years for a builder's merchant before being conscripted into the Royal Navy in 1954 as a Russian student. In 1958 Procktor finally started serious art study by entering the Slade School of Fine Art where, amongst others, he came under the influence of William Coldstream and Keith Vaughan. After graduating in 1962 he travelled in Italy and Greece and then, in 1963, he held his first exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in what turned out to be a long association with them. In 1968 Procktor held his first exhibition in New York and although it was not particularly successful in terms of sales he continued to show his work abroad regularly thereafter. Although Procktor painted in oils and acrylics he often employed the then unfashionable medium of watercolours. In fact in his obituary of the artist in the Guardian Michael McNay stated , ...he also used watercolour extensively, and very largely the techniques he learned for this deeply unfashionable medium measured the distance between his work and that of his contemporaries. He continued to paint in watercolour on his travels in India, China and Japan. Procktor was also a successful printmaker and perhaps one of his finest achievements in this field were his illustrations for an edition of Coleridge's, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner produced in 1976. Procktor was made a Royal Academician in 1996 and his works are well represented in public collections in Britain and abroad.
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