Biography – page 2
early career
Once launched as a professional artist he set off into extreme climates and landscapes previously untouched by British painters. He made his first visit to Norway in 1957 and immediately felt an affinity with the landscape and people. From this time the sheer cliff, the lone white bird, the pyramidal peak, symmetrical reflections in still waters and all the shades of blue would recur in his works. A travel scholarship took him back to Norway in 1961 and he returned again and again before finally settling there in 1996. He now lives in Gvarv, a small village in the Telemark region of Norway, with his Norwegian wife, Hilde, and their young daughter. Trips to Iceland in 1965, 1966 and 1973�began his series based on volcanoes erupting thousands of feet into the air and then, as a contrast, he was invited in 1982 to French Guiana to paint the launch of the Ariane rocket. This led to visits to Sarawak in 1984 and Cameroon in 1986. After the horizon-less jungle and swamp came, in 1988, the Negev Desert in Israel�where the blazing sun, which he had already explored in colder climes, became a central motif. He worked in Arctic Greenland in 1989, Venezuela and a return trip to Iceland in 1992, and in 2001-2 he was invited to co-inaugurate the British Antarctic Survey's Artists and Writers' programme. He undertook another inspiring trip to Greenland in 2006.
style
Is there another artist who has switched so often from the lush and claustrophobic vegetation of the tropics to the treeless furnace of a desert and then back to the icy wastes of the polar regions? In 1971 he was able to state his priorities on these expeditions: I am not a topographical artist, but a designer of affinities of opposites, of moods and a sense of place, but always based on observation and committal to memory of the landscapes I visit.
I am thus able to convey something of the poetry of a place as well as its authenticity.
A good landscape painting must be a combination of factual and poetic truth.
� Grant has worked in other genres beside landscape,�including illustration, book jackets, abstract sculpture and an altarpiece.
He has made portraits of HRH Prince Andrew, Jacquetta Hawkes, the Nobel Laureate for Chemistry Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson, and other distinguished public figures as well as more intimate ones of his family and friends.� His large stained glass windows and a 60 feet long mosaic decorate Charing Cross Hospital, whilst other mosaics inaugurated the scheme to place art on the stations of the Newcastle-Gateshead Metro system.
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Dr Malcolm Yorke is the designated author, a specialist in modern British landscape painting.
His previous books have dealt with the work and lives of Eric Gill, the English Neo-Romantics, Keith Vaughan, Matthew Smith, Mervyn Peake, Edward Bawden and Edward Ardizzone.
December 2006