Christopher Bramham

Bramham is predominantly a landscape painter, although he has also painted interiors and still lives, and his landscape views are frequently of objects in the natural landscape seen close to rather than traditional landscape vistas. In this he has been described as Ruskinian for the way he probes "into nooks and crannies of the natural world". As this reviewer also notes, however, more contemporary comparisons can be made, and Bramham has been associated with the School of London artists, particularly Lucian Freud, and artists such as Peter Doig and Tony Bevan. His images are built up slowly, with layers of paint applied, according to the art critic Andrew Lambirth, almost in emulation of the speed at which a plant being depicted might grow. Yet, according to Jonathan Clark, this is not a result of the romanticisation of nature, rather it is that Bramham paints the things that are near by as subject matter is incidental to him. In this it is possible to see some connection with other painters associated with the School of London, as there is a comparison to be made between the coupling of the formalist interest in painting as a medium alongside a direct engagement with aspects of the real world in Bramham and artists such as Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. In this respect Bramham is essentially a realist painter. Bramham is also well regarded for his drawing skills, and exhibited alongside Paula Rego, Auerbach, Dennis Creffield and sixty other artists in the exhibition Drawing Inspiration: Contemporary British Drawing, held at the Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, in 2006.