Michael Ayrton, Roy Turner Durrant, Anthony Egan & Clifford Fishwick

Michael Ayrton was an important and leading figure in British art over three decades from the mid 1940s until his early death in 1975. He was a painter and sculptor, illustrator, stage and costume designer, and also worked as a writer, critic and broadcaster. A prodigious talent, Michael Ayrton was commissioned at the age of 18 to design the production of John Gielgud's Macbeth in 1942. From then on his work was exhibited at major London galleries, and he is represented in most British museums, with 20 works in the Tate Gallery collection, and also at MOMA, New York.
He began to sculpt in bronze in the early 1950's, receiving some advice from Henry Moore and visited Cumae in 1956-7 and Greece in 1958, turning to Greek myth as his principal source of inspiration particularly the legends of Daedelus and Icarus, the Minotaur and the image of the maze. His powerful style sought to reinterpret mythological ideas in terms of the figure.

Roy Turner Durrant painter and poet, born in Suffolk, England. After a childhood addiction to drawing aeroplanes, he did war service in the Army, then attended Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, 1948-52, being influenced by Keith Vaughan and John Minton. In the 1950's he developed from figuration to abstraction and said that any titles on his pictures were "meant to be interpreted as poetry, to engender a state of mind rather than describe exactly what the particular picture is."
He was influenced by European abstractionists and by English poetry, such as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, also by the work of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Dylan Thomas. As well as painting, Durrant was employed in administrative work at Vickers from 1956-63 and was a director of the Heffer Gallery, Cambridge, 1963-76.
Durrant showed with Free Painters and Sculptors, of which he was a fellow, and with NEAC, of which he was a member, and quite often with RA from 1950. After a solo show at Guildhall, Lavenham in 1948, he showed regularly at Loggia Gallery, Gallery of British Art in Lausanne and Belgrave Gallery in 1991. Roy Turner Durrant, Painter and Poet, was held at Chappel Galleries, Chappel, in 2003. Several dozen public collections hold his work, including Imperial War Museum, Bradford City Art Gallery and Balliol College, Oxford.

Anthony Egan was a prolific and passionate painter encompassing different styles such as Surrealist, Abstract and Impressionist.
Born in Hampshire, Anthony studied at Ipswich Art School and went on to teach at Westbourne High School in Ipswich for the next 20 years where students described him as being a "gifted and inspiring" teacher. During this period of his life he produced hundreds of well executed works, illustrating the feelings of the artist based on his perception of events which he both witnessed personally and observed through the media. Anthony Egan drew on influences from a wide range of subjects, notably the two Great Wars, the microcosm and macrocosm of organic cells, black holes in space and other wonders of the natural world.

Clifford Fishwick painter in oil, watercolour and gouache, lithographer and mural painter. Fishwick was born on 21st June 1923 at Rising Bridge, near Accrington in Lancashire.
He studied at Liverpool College of Art 1940-42, 1946-47 and in New York. Fishwick held his first solo exhibition in 1957 at St. George's Gallery, Lancashire and subsequently exhibited widely, including shows at the Royal Academy, Royal Society of Artists and the R.W.A. He was a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists and his work is represented in a number of private and public collections.
From 1958 to 1984 Clifford Fishwick was Principal of Exeter College of Art. Most of his works originated from sensations aroused by coast and landscapes and as well as a painter, was an accomplished rock climber and yachtsman.