Bryan Wynter was a fundamental member of the St Ives group of artists. Moving to Cornwall in 1945, he found his niche as an abstract painter, working alongside artists such as Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton. The present work was painted during an exciting period for Cornish abstraction. The St Ives group were starting to gain worldwide recognition after influential American art critic, Clement Greenberg visited Cornwall in the summer of 1959. Greenberg had started to draw parallels between the British artists and the already critically acclaimed American abstract expressionists. Later in the same year, Lanyon hosted Mark Rothko in St Ives where he stayed with the painters for a few days.

As with the fast-emerging American pop art movement, the early 1960s saw imagery from mass culture become a significant source of inspiration for members of the St Ives group. Wynter, however, drew inspiration from his surroundings, looking towards the natural environment for ideas. The rural landscape of Cornwall served as a perfect vessel for his artistic practice, for, as Wynter explained, ‘My paintings are non-representational but linked to the products of nature in as much as they are developed according to the laws within themselves’ (B. Wynter, quoted in M. Bird, Bryan Wynter, Farnham, 2010, p. 140). In Maremma, Wynter likely references the Tuscan coastal town, both in the title, and through his application of paint. His turbulent abstractions echo the processes of coastal erosion and the sea’s erratic currents, while the terracotta hues draped across the right of the canvas, evoke the warm sun-drenched homes that pepper the coastline.

Wynter’s technique of layering paint associated him with the European abstract movement, Tachisme, where paint was freed from describing form, other than that of the brushstrokes themselves. Wynter’s work, however, still retained an element of figuration. In the present work, we see hints of fragmented skeletal forms surrounded by layers of dynamic brushstrokes.

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