Across six decades and four disciplines, Simon Britton has pursued a single subject — how the human body moves, and how bodies relate to one another in the space around them.
Born in St Andrews in 1946, he trained at Edinburgh College of Art (1965–69) and Hornsey College of Art (1970–71). The drawing came first and has never stopped: vivid, fast life-studies in coloured pencil, conté and oil pastel that remain the root of everything else he makes.
In the 1970s that interest in movement spilled off the page and into performance. Working solo and with the theatre group Forkbeard Fantasy, Britton made pieces such as Walkwork — figures bound to shared timber “skis”, able to move only by moving together. The work toured Britain and Holland, from the Edinburgh Festival to the Roundhouse and Oval House in London, Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, and the Shaffy Theatre and Melkweg in Amsterdam.
Alongside the performances came constructions and sculpture — jointed wooden figures assembled from dowel, block and turned offcuts, each caught at the height of a movement — and the TRACKS paintings. He exhibited through the late 1970s and 1980s at Warwick, Leamington Spa, Southampton and Wolverhampton Art Gallery (a two-person show with the sculptor Bernard van Lierop, 1978), at the Ikon Gallery, and with the 79 Group and BAG.
Teaching & the studio
Teaching has run in parallel throughout. Britton taught art at Warwick School and across colleges and schools in Warwickshire and Coventry, and has led life-drawing classes at Coventry University since 1991. In 1989 he co-founded the Yellow Press silkscreen workshop, and in 1998 Studio Post 91a, both with Marta Firkowska; he took a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at Coventry University in 1998–99.
He still models portrait heads in clay directly from the sitter — see a recent studio session →
In his own words
This biography is a first draft assembled from Simon’s documents and CV. His own account — and a recent portrait photograph — will replace and expand it in the next version.
