Basil Beattie, “Top Up”, 2013, Oil Paint and Wax on Canvas, 213 x 198 cm

Baeil Beattie is an English painter and printmaker. He studied at West Hartlepool College of Art and at the Royal Academy Schools, London. He taught at Goldsmiths College, London, from the 1960s to the 1990s.

He was Influenced by the work the New York artists associated with Abstract Expressionism while still a student at the Academy Schools in the late 50s. Throughout his career his work has always been distinguished by his sensuous and physical use of paint – characteristics which he shares with the Abstraction as practised by other English painters such as John Hoyland, Albert Irvin, and Gillian Ayres.

In the late 60s and into the 70s, Beattie was preoccupied with making paintings where there was no trace of the hand.The work was like ‘nature’ not so much in appearance but in the manner by which it was made, where gravity and the consistencies of paint were fundamental in the forming of the image.

It was in 1987, in his exhibition at the Curwen Gallery London, that Beattie’s pictographic language began to evolve. This was followed in 1991 with a drawing Installation – “Drawing on the Interior”, at the Eagle Gallery London, consisting of 376 drawings. The work explored the emerging imagery, such as ladders, stairways, corridors, tunnels, towers, doors, and ziggurats. Many of these images became subjects for paintings. Beattie has said of these images that they were not attempts to paint literal things, but were used as vehicles for conveying symbolic and metaphoric associations.