Bryan Wynter was, and still remains the most enigmatic figure in post-war Cornish art. On his own admission he painted works that avoided any conscious organisation, works that asked the viewer to approach them as the artist had done, without preconceptions. This is very much “participation art”, for the viewer has to find his or her own imagery in the work.

It always seemed that an apt simile for Wynter’s paintings could be found in his immediate Cornish environment, in the tangle of gorse and undergrowth, and the barely discernible and rocky track that led up to his studio. Those who wished to view his work had to negotiate these obstacles and chart their own course. In the paintings the view found, not gorse, but a screen of coruscating and stabbing lights barring the way. It was only after a lengthy visual journey around the picture that one could enter the darker regions beyond.

Much has been made of Wynter’s debt to Cubism, and it is true that his mark-making is closer to the flicker of small planes in Analytical-Cubist painting than to anything else. The half-moon brushstrokes threaded on verticals do indeed bring to mind the bottle-top and wine-glass shapes of Cubist still lives, but the Cubist image is always centred, whereas Wynter’s painting presents an overall field of marks. The pictures appear to be sections from a larger whole, fragments from a continuum which itself is emphasised by an underlying vertical  structure reminiscent of Futurist “lines of force”, travelling from top to bottom or obliquely across the canvas. It is these striations that seem to discipline the characteristic flurry of small flicks and whorls of his brush that animate the surface.

There is however another aspect to the works, not often remarked upon, a dark and menacing quality that is only banished in the very last paintings. This seems to refer back to the Surrealist overtones of his early gouaches, in which a dark and sharp edginess is combined with the disturbing chance patterns of “decalcomania” and other Surrealist techniques.  The combination of such antipathetic and disparate movements as Surrealism and Cubism in his early development is evidence of the polarities in his own character, and may well have given his work not only its enigmatic quality, but also a certain strange poetry.

The Surrealist obsession with automatism and a variety of ingenious methods for generating a new and haunting imagery was almost scientific in its concern with the nature of mind and vision. It was something with which Wynter empathised. Intensely curious about his environment and his visual and mental self, he too was a great experimenter with materials and techniques, and he was, despite a penchant for isolation and self-sufficiency in an ancient landscape, very much a twentieth-century man. Indeed, his work with polarised light and his remarkable mobiles or “Imoos” [Images Moving Out Onto Space] are some of the most challenging kinetic works of the 1960s, and belong to the world of science and art at the same time.

If Wynter wished his paintings to resemble a kind of primordial vision before the associations established by experience, he appears to have succeeded. Whatever extraneous associations his works may promote, from the glint of light on water to Piranesi’s dungeons, they remain in the mind first of all as works that appear to research the very nature of seeing and of vision.

Wynter believed that the elemental forces in the landscape around might seem at odds with his other scientific and questioning self. What makes him such an interesting artist is, however, that he would also have subscribed to that often quoted remark of Constable’s, “Painting is a science and should be pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature. Why then may not landscape be considered a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?”