Torrid Zone / Region

Wynter studied art at the Slade before moving to Cornwall in 1945, where he lived at the Carn, Zennor – an isolated cottage without running water or electricity. He taught at Bath Academy of Art from 1951 to 1956 until an inheritance allowed him to stop teaching and experiment more freely with his art, as well as with the creative potential of the (then legal) drug mescaline. It was around this time that he started to produce abstract works, influenced by the landscape around him and the erosion of the land by the elements. These paintings were subject to, in the artist’s own words, a ‘process of dynamic versus static elements’ that had ‘attended their development and brought about their final form’. His interest in Surrealism and psychoanalysis further fuelled his personal creative vision.

The torrid zone is the area between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The dry, hot climate characteristic of this region of the Earth is reflected in the strong, warm colours used in this work, while the vertical sense of movement and vibration looks forward to Wynter’s sculptural constructions of the 1960s, collectively called IMOOS (Images Moving Out Into Space). Stylistically, Torrid Zone / Region shows the influence both of tachisme, an expressive form of painting developed in Paris in the 1950s, as well as American Abstract Expressionism.