Exhibition

Little White Lines is the first exhibition from Sinclair Webster at Chichester’s Oxmarket Contemporary from September 28-October 11.

Sinclair, from Guildford, said: “Sometimes I have an Instagram Moment when I see something and afterwards, I try to reconstruct what it was that made me react. This could feature people, animals or landscapes.

“I start with a drawing, I am always drawing or doodling, so my pictures lie somewhere between graphic art and abstraction. I like to leave little white lines between the areas of colour which make up the shapes. I work up the colour areas with paint textures and brushwork so they are not flat.”

The exhibition will appeal, he says, to “anyone with whom my highly personal style of painting resonates. I have been surprised by different people who have bought my pictures, their backgrounds and ages. GDPR is a fig leaf used by galleries to keep their clients’ details to themselves. But some of them have got in touch anyway and it has been fun chatting with them.

“My parents met in Belgium when my father was recuperating from wounds received during the advance to relieve the paratroops at Arnhem. My mother is a Fleming. According to family lore I started painting by daubing the wall beside my cot. I never looked back.

“There were a couple of painters in my mother’s family and I was always given paints and pencils when visiting family or friends so I could be seen but not heard. Now I use canvases.”

He also has connections to Africa.

“My father had grown up on the RAF base at Ismailia in Egypt and found post-war Britain too cold so he took a job in Khartoum. I went to a Catholic Mission School which taught kids from all backgrounds and races. I learned English from an Italian nun and talked a mixture of English Flemish aka gibberish at home but when I started writing right to left my father decided I needed a proper education in England.

“I disagreed. I enjoyed running wild with the urchins who stole the indicators or windscreen wipers unless you paid them to ‘protect’ your car. We built camps in the acacia woods on the banks of the Nile. My dad never understood why we were never picked on, even when he found the pole we used to steal lemons for sale from peoples’ gardens hidden in our hedge.”

As a painter, Sinclair is self-taught: “At Worth School here in Sussex, I did art O and A levels along with academic subjects. The art master, Anthony Renouf, who had studied under Stanley Spencer, painted alongside us and I learned by watching what he did. I did not go to art school but read architecture and fine art at Cambridge.

“During my gap year I took part in group shows and had a solo at The New Stanley Gallery in Nairobi which was very favourably reviewed by the East African Standard. At Cambridge I had solos at Heffers Art Gallery and in my college and exhibited with The Footlights in a foyer Edinburgh. I also had a couple of solos at Studio Callebert and Gallerie Britanique in Flanders.

“Architecture took over as I had married and to earn a living. I found a niche which took me all over the world as a designer, and only in 2016 did I manage to return to painting full time.”