Roy Oxlade

He was educated at the Bromley School of Art and Goldsmiths in London, and was a student of David Bomberg for two years at the Borough Polytechnic.

[3] While studying at Goldsmiths, Oxlade met the painter, Rose Wylie, a fellow student, and they married in 1957.

At the beginning its relationships don’t amount to much – it’s a rectangle in a jumble of art history I relate to.

So I have put in some other stuff, some characters, some actors – tables, pots, colours, easels, lamps, scribbles, figures and faces to interact with each other.

"[2] In a written dialogue with the painter Marcus Reichert in 2003, Oxlade said: "Like poetry, painting’s got its own language of metaphor: I think of van Gogh’s The Night Café, a bowl of flowers by Rousseau, many Matisses: the aubergines still life in Grenoble, Music, the Red Dessert.

Matisse sometimes managed to achieve wonderfully direct drawing within his painting like he does with the box of pencils in the Red Studio.

Michelangelo, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Titian, Velazquez – even the greatest are all deeply implicated in a history of narcissism and literalism.

Such art, because of an apparent brilliance which goes unquestioned, is especially dangerous when it provides the cultural underpinning of a society now in need of different support."