William Gear

Born into a mining family in Fife, Scotland, the particular landscape of pitheads, the sea, rocks, castles, trees, storms and poverty marked Gear's earliest identity with a place and probably remained the most influential to his art throughout his life. While some of his paintings are purely abstract, others carry their own suggestion of a landscape or even a form of Celtic figuration.  Making the deliberate choice not to live in London or join his fellow abstract artists in St Ives, Gear preferred to follow his own path, resulting in work that could only have been created by his hand.