William Gear R.A.

1915 - 1997

Born into a Fife, Scotland coal mining family, Gear trained at Edinburgh College of Art with Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Margaret Mellis. A travelling scholarship enabled him to travel through Europe and study wiith Fernand Leger in Paris. Back in Arbroath in 1938 he met Robert Colquhoun and Robert McBride and for a while experimented with Surrealism. Gear served in the Royal Corps of Signals in North Africa and the Middle East and took part in the Allied invasion of Italy. While there he held solo exhibitions in Siena and Florence, and after VE Day he became a Monuments man, responsible for artworks in parts of Germany. From 1947 Gear lived in Paris, meeting many of the leading international artists who congregated there, including St Ives artists like Patrick Heron, Terry Frost and Peter Lanyon, and he joined the CoBra art group in Amsterdam in 1949, when he also exhibited in New York with Jackson Pollock. The next year he moved to England with his American wife, Charlotte Chertok, and son, and produced sometimes very controversial abstract paintings for high profile commissions, including the Festival of Britain, developing a high-profile reputation as an avant garde artist, who also helped pioneer silkscreen printmaking. For six years Gear was curator of the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne and then Head of Fine Art at Birmingham College of Art. He continued to show at CoBra exhibitions internationally, and in 1995 he was elected a Royal Academician.