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Michael Ayrton(Click on Picture for a larger image)1921 - 1975
Michael Ayrton was a man of exceptionally wide talents: artist, printmaker, portraitist, stage designer, musicologist, author, critic, and sculptor. By 1951 when he moved to Toppesfield he had a national reputation. After visiting Crete in 1956 Ayrton became fascinated with the myth surrounding Daedalus, who built a labyrinth to house the Minotaur and was himself imprisoned in it with Icarus. In the labyrinth he made wings and they both became the first men to fly. Icarus flew so near the sun that it melted the wax of his wings. A bronze of Icarus
, Sun Maze, is the only sculpture in the North West Essex Collection, aptly reflects this interest. Ayrton is buried in Hadstock Churchyard (five miles away) with another example of his work -a bronze maze - as his headstone.
Winter Drought |
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Oil on Canvas
1944
This is a typically neo-romantic treatment of the landscape. Ayrton has written about his fascination with dead trees - "they excite me because of the immobile fury of their arbitrary and abandoned postures." He adds that trees in the winter manifest a different kind of power and in this particular painting he intends that "the shattered stumps of the willow tree still gesture defiance through the parched earth cracks." This work was given by the artist to his friend the composer Constant Lambert, whose widow (Isabel Lambert, painter and theatre designer) presented it to the Gallery.
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