The
Charles
Tunnicliffe Society
Established
2005
"To
promote greater awareness of the life and work
of Charles Frederick Tunnicliffe OBE, RA 1901-1979"
Composition
Drawings
Charles Tunnicliffe explored ideas
for a painting by creating
composition sketches. He kept these pieces of
artwork in what is best
described as personal scrapbooks, pasting several images onto
each page to create a visual record of his
compositions.
These composition drawings
were often very small, ranging from as
little as 5cm x 7cm up to 20 cm x 20cm, but the
majority were perhaps less than the size of
a postcard.
His composition ideas were drawn/painted on any scraps of paper that
came to hand, including the backs of
letters, spare pieces of tracing and graph
paper, pastel paper, tissue paper, greaseproof
paper and sometimes pages from his
sketchbooks.
This work was never intended
for sale, but in 1986, seven years
after his death his death, the collection
of several hundred composition drawings was
split
up and sold by "Bunny Bird Fine Art" in
association with "The Tryon
and Moorland Gallery".
Since then Charles Tunnicliffe's
composition drawings have become
valued pieces of artwork in their own
right, sought after by collectors of his work and
appreciated for their freshness and
spontaneity - it can be interesting to compare composition
drawings with Tunnicliffe's
final paintings.
The following images are a small
selection of Charles Tunnicliffe's
composition drawings. (For display purposes on this
website page the images are larger than
the originals)