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, Fife, in 1946, Simon studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art, where the human-anatomy courses run by Derek Clarke left a lasting mark and the lectures and work of the sculptor Michael Snowden were a particular inspiration. He went on to take his Art Teacher’s Certificate at Hornsey College of Art. 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 with his brothers’ theatre group Forkbeard Fantasy, Britton performed in shows on and off and introduced Walkwork — figures bound to shared timber “skis”, able to move only by moving together — and The Great British Square Dance. The work toured Britain and Holland, from the Edinburgh Festival to the Roundhouse and Oval House in London and the 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.

Teaching & the studio

Education and his own work have always run in parallel, nourishing one another. After a Craft, Design & Technology teaching certificate at Dudley College of Education, Britton taught art at Warwick School and art and CDT across Coventry’s secondary schools. He supervised a craft project for a NACRO scheme in Warwick for young offenders, and taught in community education — art for blind people and for people with learning difficulties — at venues across the city.

At home he set up The Yellow Press, a silkscreen printing venture, and later a studio with the painter Marta Firkowska. He has taught a life-drawing evening class at Coventry University and ran art courses for the University’s “New Learning in Later Life” scheme in the studio. He still runs a course there today with people who have stayed with him since those Later Life days — now lifelong friends. He continues to model portrait heads in clay directly from the sitter — the studio is next on this journey.

In his own words

“All my work arises from studying human form and movement — this is true even of what are apparently the most abstract of my works, which are symbolic reductions. For example, the triangle may be taken as a basic form within the human figure.”

“The drawings and paintings feature the human figure stationary and in movement, where the attitudes symbolise and embody the relationships. The dynamic constructions, which involve varying degrees of participation by people, show human beings constrained by social and technological frameworks. To free ourselves we must know our chains.”