Donald Macauley

I was born in Cambridge in 1949 and grew up in the East Anglian countryside. I began painting at school aged 16 and my earliest efforts were semi-abstract but I soon discovered that I wanted above all to paint from life. I was at Reading University 1968 to 1972 and learned a lot from two very different painters-Ray Atkins and John Wonnacott, who have remained friends.I have in the past shown at the RA Summer Exhibition and the New English Art Club and Lynn Painter-Stainers shows and had a retrospective at the Grant Bradley Gallery, Bristol, in 2010. I admire many painters past and present but especially the fifteenth-century Italian and Flemish masters- if there ever was a golden age of painting, this is it for me.

In September 2019 I had my first solo show in London, at the Graham Hunter Gallery in Baker Street, after only 36 years residence in the capital – doesn’t do to rush these things, does it? It went well, with some sales and renewed acquaintance with some people I last saw 17 years before. A few months later I sold my huge painting “A bar at the Warrington Hotel”, the first sale of anything this size to somebody I did not already know. Another large work, the Church of St Michael and all Angels, was completed in 2021, and I have begun repainting three Cambridge pictures from the 1970s (they never were up to scratch) necessarily from photographs. Since commuting or renting temporary accommodation would be ruinously expensive.