User:MartinHolman/Terry Setch

Terry Setch is a British painter who has brought to his interpretation of landscape, one of the most traditional subjects in painting, an approach stylistically influenced as much by Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns and European and American twentieth-century art as by Turner and other masters of British landscape painting. Since the early 1970s his inspiration has come principally from a stretch of beach near his home in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, and the waters of the estuary of the river Severn. This motif has been at the centre of Setch’s most successful paintings, including Once upon a time there was OIL III (panel 1) (1981-2) (Tate, London) in which the beach becomes a symbol for the Earth and the battle to protect it from threats of nuclear, industrial and ecological disaster.

His work has often been radical, testing his audience’s acceptance of new ideas and materials in painting. Paintings by this artist have often been made on large pieces of unstretched sailcloth or insulators’ panels of blue Styrofoam with broad gestures of oil paint mixed with wax incorporating detritus collected from the beach itself. They challenged the notion of ‘good taste’ and ‘beauty’, and with their concern for the environment as well as their concerns with painterly representation and abstraction, anticipated attitudes adopted by younger artists years later. As the experienced critic, John McEwen, wrote in 1992, Setch is ‘an original. He updates Turner; politicises Jackson Pollock; ruralises Rauschenberg’.

Setch was born in Lewisham, south London, in 1936 to working-class parents. During the Second World War, his family were moved between resettlement centres in Surrey and south-west London, a situation that continued into the 1950s and may partly account for Setch’s persistent concern in his mature paintings through metaphors with the stability represented by home.

In 1956 he took up a place at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, after two years’ National Service in the Royal Corps of Signals. Among his contemporaries at the Slade were the British sculptor Michael Sandle and the painters Tess Jaray and Marc Vaux.

In 1960 he began a long career as a tutor in British art schools when he was recruited to teach on the pre-diploma course established by the art education pioneer Tom Hudson at Leicester College of Art. His fellow tutors included Lawrence Burt, Michael Chilton and Victor Newsome as well as Sandle, and all were influenced by the direct use of basic forms and materials that Hudson advocated. During these years Setch made expressive objects with materials, like shoe leather, that he could buy locally and learn how to use. With the artist Christina Bertoni, these young tutors were dubbed ‘the Leicester Group’ and showed to considerable national interest in Leicester and London in 1963-4.

In 1964 Setch moved to Wales as senior lecturer in painting at Cardiff College of Art, a post he retained until his retirement in 2001. He had reacted against Hudson’s constructivist philosophy to pursue painting that often teasingly opposed the dogmatic positions of abstract-oriented contemporary art. It made reference to the natural world as well as to American Pop art that he regarded as freer and more instinctual than British art at the time.

Setch exhibited regularly in London from 1964 until the early 1970s and again throughout the 1980s. He continued to live in south Wales, moving to Penarth in 1969. He was fascinated by the mixture in the town’s history of tradition (its historical association with the coal industry) and modernity (both the French Impressionist Alfred Sisley and the Guglielmo Marconi, the pioneer of radio telegraphy had used the shore at Penarth for their work). The beach as a place of leisure and where natural effects of light could be observed were also important for him. He married the artist Dianne Shaw in 1967.

Since 1971 Setch’s main themes have been the dangers he perceives in pollution and nuclear catastrophe, whether as a result of war or as a result of errors in peacetime such as the explosion at a power station in Chernobyl, Ukraine, in April 1986, fall-out from which reached Wales in acid rain. He channelled his anxiety through subject matter and his highly physical working methods that could include submerging canvases in the sea and using heat and corrosive substances as well as paint to create powerful images. Later work pursued these themes and celebrated, too, his fascination with the natural world and man’s place within it.

His biographer Martin Holman described encountering Setch’s paintings in London in 1982. ‘They filled three rooms at Nigel Greenwood’s gallery in Sloane Gardens and resembled an emotional landscape surveyed by highly sensitive criteria and re-presented with visceral impact on my senses. I remember those days as edgy and tense in Britain generally, and for me personally, and I found in these images an echo startling for its multiplicity from a single plane. Their integrity was compelling: elements as diverse as politics and geography, history and “presentness”, morality and weather, compassion and anxiety, seriousness and naivety, restless activity and the urgency of making, temporariness and the permanent were knit into one consistent, extraordinary fabric. The intelligence, practice and courage of this man has impressed me ever since.’

Setch resumed exhibiting regularly in London in 2007. Highly regarded by fellow practitioners, Setch’s work has been acquired by public and private collections in Britain and around the world, including Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Arts Council Collection, London. The first public retrospective exhibition of his work took place at Arnolfini, Bristol, in 1982. A fuller survey took place in 2001 at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, and subsequently at the Glynn Vivian Museum and Art Gallery, Swansea. He was third prize-winner at the prestigious John Moores Liverpool Exhibition in 1985 and showed the huge, multiparted painting, Touch the Earth Again, at the exhibition Art History at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1987. A major exhibition of recent work was shown at Camden Arts Centre, London, in 1993.

In 2002 Setch was elected a member of the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, and in 2009 he became a Royal Academician.