Maremma is a coastal area of central Italy which borders the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is unclear if or when Wynter
visited the country, but landscape was the key inspiration in his work and this painting is Mediterranean in its
ebullient colouring, particularly in comparison to the earthier, Nordic mood of his other work from the period
such as Mars Ascends (1956, Tate Collection). Where those works rely on a palette of brown and grey,
Maremma is structured around two strikingly contrasted areas divided on a vertical axis, with predominant
areas of lilac-purple on the left-hand side and orange-yellow on the right. Wynter’s approach to making
abstract art was accretive, and this colour contrast was not the fulfilment of a predetermined scheme but an

organic result, arrived at over a lengthy period spent painting and re-painting the surface. This was a process

of enrichment, wholly unplanned, and the final appearance of a work like Maremma is the result of well-
practised improvisation.

The all-over pattern of working and the consequent absence of focus points was a defining characteristic of
Wynter’s work between 1956 and 1964. Nevertheless, in spite of his improvisatory approach, his finished
works at that time always had an integrity and sense of completeness which derived from a traditional,
essentially pictorial idea of painting, which predated the Second World War. After all, like his fellow painterly
contemporaries Alan Davie and Peter Lanyon, he had studied at art school before the Second World War and
retained a debt to the representational manner of Neo-Romanticism which he himself practised for a time.
Despite the integrated completeness of Wynter’s work, his use of carefully controlled painterly surface effects
are a decidedly advanced artistic development. Most notable in Maremma is the mixing together of
transparent and opaque brushwork, with saturated zones of colour intermingling with luscious sweeps of
thinned oil paint. Where the paint has been thinned, it behaves as a glaze, layered over earlier stages of the
work which remain visible. The integration of these intentional pentimenti are one of the salient aspects of
Wynter’s art, and they attest to his technical ability as a painter of international importance during this period.
Indeed, the improvisatory approach which he adopted is comparable to the New York School’s habit of
‘action painting’, as described by Harold Rosenberg, though these developments were altogether unknown
in the UK at the time. Along with other Cornwall-based abstract painters, Wynter can be credited with
originating a painterly practice which was no less advanced at the time than any being used in France or the
United States.

*

Between 1945 and 1964, Wynter lived near Zennor in a desolate, windswept property. The village waxed
large in the imagination of many artists working in Cornwall. It was evoked by a wide range of artists in the
middle decades of the twentieth century, including Borlase Smart, Adrian Stokes, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham,
Peter Lanyon, and Barbara Hepworth. Wynter’s house was called Carn and, without electricity or a telephone
connection, it kept Wynter and his family far-removed from the bourgeois comforts of nearby St Ives or
Penzance.
This difference of lifestyle illustrates how Wynter chose to stand apart from his contemporaries – the likes of
Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon, who also cultivated a style of painterly abstraction
in the post-war years. These artists are often roped together in one of the best-established myths in modern
British art history: ‘the St Ives Group’. It was more of a milieu than a formal group. Aside from the catholic
exhibiting outlet of the Penwith Society of Arts, their work was only shown together in a few rare moments –
at a touring Canadian exhibition of 1955 and ‘56, Six Painters from Cornwall, and at the Waddington
Galleries in 1959, ’60 and ’65. The selection of artists was never consistent, with Lanyon excluded altogether
and the Canadian show omitting Wynter.
Wynter was also rare among his painterly peers as the recipient of a solo exhibition at Galerie Charles
Lienhard – a distinguished, Zurich-based dealer of contemporary art. Lienhard also showed Hilton, William
Scott and Ben Nicholson, among certain other select British artists of the period. Wynter’s show was held in
1962, shortly after the Museum of Modern Art in New York had pounced on his painting Meeting Place – a
work exhibited at his previous solo exhibition in London, held in 1959. In these years, Wynter’s reputation
reached far beyond the confines of his Cornish existence, and it was during these years, at the height of his
creative powers, that he executed Maremma – a monumental painting which stands alongside the
contemporary work of Americans like Jackson Pollock and French