Bryan Charnley


Bryan Charnley was a British artist who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and explored its effects in his work. He died by suicide in July 1991.

Early life and flower paintings

Bryan John Charnley was born on 20 September 1949 in Stockton-on-Tees. With his twin brother he grew up in London, Chislehurst in Kent, Cranfield, where his father worked as a Senior Lecturer, and finally in Bromham near Bedford. In the summer of 1968, aged 18, he suffered a nervous breakdown but was able to study at Leicester School of Art later that year. In 1969, Charnley gained a place at the Central School of Art and Design in Holborn, London but was unable to complete the course due to another breakdown that was later diagnosed as acute schizophrenia.
From 1971 until 1977 he lived at home with his parents between periods of hospitalisation and treatment including ECT. In 1978 he moved to Bedford and began painting.
Charnley's work during this period drew heavily on photo-realism, then enjoying popularity in America, rather than the conceptual art that was fashionable in the London art scene, and he produced many large-scale paintings of flowers. However, Charnley was also interested in the work of fellow British artist Bridget Riley, in whose work he saw a 'cool discipline' combined with a strong emotional charge.

Relationship with Pam Jones

In 1982, Charnley painted a double portrait of himself and his partner Pam, in what has been called 'the high point of Charnley's photo-realistic early period'. The composition and treatment demonstrates Charnley's interest in the work of David Hockney. Five years later, Pam, who also experienced mental illness, attempted suicide by jumping out of a window. Though she survived, her spine was badly damaged. Charnley's trauma is explored in his painting of the same year, 'Leaving by the Window'.

Stylistic Development

Charnley had been exploring his inner life through painting since at least 1982, particularly addressing the experience of schizophrenia. Writing in 1988, Charnley said he had 'found on an interior journey in which landscape and subject were subsumed to inner vision'. However, from 1987 onwards, he increasingly drew on Sigmund Freud's theories about dreams, using elaborate symbolism to convey his mental state.
In 1984 four of his paintings were purchased by the Bethlem Royal Hospital for their permanent collection. During this period, Charnley also studied the work of other artists held in the Bethlem collection, notably William Kurelek and Louis Wain, whose work 'seemed to me to have a power to move far beyond that expected of the patient as an artist. Here I saw art stripped of all esoteric and conceptual pretensions'. Charnley's elaborately symbolist work from this period includes 'To The Farm', 'Grey Self-Portrait', and 'Brooch Schizophrene', paintings that have also since been acquired by Bethlem Museum of the Mind.
Charnley had a solo exhibition at the Dryden Street Gallery, Covent Garden in London 1989, and exhibited two paintings at the Visions exhibition at the Royal College of Art in 1990, curated by Aiden Shingler. However, he still struggled to make a living from his art.

Final work and death

Charnley was frustrated by his apparent lack of success in the art market, and what recognition he received was outweighed by the day to day problems of his illness and the heavy medication he was prescribed to counter it. These factors contributed to his decision early in 1991 to paint a series of self portraits chronicling his experience as he reduced his medication. The journalist and CEO of SANE, Marjorie Wallace, encouraged Charnley to keep a diary of his progress. Charnley made the diary an integral part of the portraits using the text to explain the imagery he was using and to describe his existential state. The Self Portrait Series consists of seventeen paintings with the last one left incomplete before his suicide. Marjorie Wallace's article on Charnley's Self Portraits was published in the Telegraph Magazine in December 1991. He may have been partially influenced by Louis Wain's 'Kaleidoscope Cats', held in the collection of Bethlem Museum of the Mind, are thought to chart the progress of Wain's mental disorder. In July 1991, he took his own life, leaving the final portrait unfinished.

Afterlife

Charnley's 'Self Portrait Series' was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in 1995. In 2015, his work formed the subject of the inaugural temporary exhibition at the newly-reopened Bethlem Museum of the Mind.

Exhibitions