Biography

Michael Fletcher was born in Tetbury, Gloucestershire on the 22nd June 1944 but grew up in South West London. He attended Latymer Upper School Hammersmith leaving when he was seventeen in 1961. For a year he worked in a variety of jobs, as a shop assistant, in an office and as a petrol pump attendant. During this time he also attended evening classes three nights a week at Putney School of Art. The following year he was accepted onto a four year course at Chelsea Art School studying painting. There was a considerable number of part time tutors teaching at Chelsea but Patrick Caulfield and Ken Kiff  stood out as particularly important influences . While at Chelsea in 1965 he had a piece of work accepted in The Young Contemporaries Annual Exhibition and subsequent Arts Councils Travelling Exhibition.

On leaving Chelsea in 1966 he taught in a Comprehensive school, but after a year he obtained a part time  teaching post at Putney School of Art. He continued part time teaching mainly at Putney until 1990 with occasional Teaching at Chelsea Art School,Sir John Cass School of Art and Morley College.

Throughout this time he also continued with his own work, exhibiting as a non member with the London group on several occasions and in other group shows including the Whitechapel Open and Camden Arts Centre also two one person shows at Jon Holts Gallery London.

In 1990 he became Head of Putney School of Art a post he held until taking early retirement in 1996.  Also in 1990 with his wife Julia Vezza he began regular visits to Frinton in North East Essex where his wife had spent her teenage years and frequent visits to Ronda in Southern Spain where they had bought a small cottage in the country, . On taking early retirement he continued with some part time teaching at Putney and also at Central Saint Martins . After this he and his wife were able to spend several months each year painting in Spain. In 1997 he began regularly showing work at The Attendi Gallery in West London, with a one person show there in 2002.

Ronda had always attracted foreign artists since David Bomberg had discovered it in the nineteen thirties and Fletcher became a founder member in 2000 of La Fuente ( The Spring) a group of international artists working in Andalusia, who organised several exhibitions in Ronda.

From 2005 until 2009 in both London and Spain he worked on a series of paintings of The Fourteen Stations of The Cross. These have been exhibited at Easter at The Oasis Gallery Frinton in 2017, St Marys Church Wivenhoe  2018 and St Marys Church, Bayswater 2020.

In 2009 he and Julia Vezza moved from London to Wivenhoe, Essex, still making occasional visits to Spain although eventually selling the house there. He joined the Colchester Art Society in 2010 and has exhibited  with them regularly each year.  He has served on the General Committee and the Selection Committee. He has also organised the making of several video portraits of Art Society members.

Apart from being represented in group shows at Walton on The Naze Tower,The Sentinel Gallery Wivenhoe ,Flatford Mill, Suffolk and The Essex Open at The Beecroft Gallery, Southend. He has shared an exhibition with Julia Vezza at The Wivenhoe Gallery in 2011 and with Ian Hay at The Minories in 2018.

Statement

This, the first version of Fire on The Beach, was painted in 2015, a second larger version followed in 2017/2018. The image was suggested by seeing the charred remains of a small wooden boat on a beach in Norfolk some months before. Its what I see as one of my little landscape dramas, there could be a poignant story there, maybe not, we will never know. I normally always need some subject matter to start from no matter how vague.

I chose a bright sunny day as a backdrop ,a dark day seemed a little too obvious. I liked the contrast between the warm dry sand in the foreground and the damp grey sand beyond the breakwater and the opportunity of using stronger colours on the wooden piles of the breakwater. The blue strip at the top of the painting both hopefully holds the composition down from the top and suggests a strip of sky reflected on the sea.

I used no drawings or photographs to work from, a lot of the decisions were memory, luck and intuition.