12 Facts About William Gear

William Gear RA RBSA was a Scottish painter, most notable for his abstract compositions.

William Gear attended Buckhaven High School where he won the Dux Arts Medal.

William Gear first exhibited in 1934 with the Royal Scottish Academy and Society of Scottish Artists, and his postgraduate scholarship included history of art studies with Professor David Talbot Rice at the University of Edinburgh.

William Gear met Merlyn Evans in Durban, en route to his first posting in the Middle East.

William Gear subsequently served in Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Cyprus, before participating in the Allied invasion of Italy, where in Siena and Florence he held his first solo exhibitions in 1944.

Between 1947 and 1950 William Gear lived and worked in Paris, where he met Eduardo Paolozzi, Alan Davie, Stephen Gilbert and many of the leading post-war generation of Parisian artists including Atlan, Da Silva, De Stael, Dubuffet, Hartung, Mathieu, Pignon, Poliakoff, Schoffer, Singier, Soulages and Zadkine.

In 1950 William Gear moved with his family to England, and in response to an Arts Council invitation to produce a work for its "Sixty Paintings for '51" exhibition, he painted "Autumn Landscape", now in the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle.

William Gear was amongst the pioneers in Britain to produce prints using the silk screen technique.

William Gear moved to Littlebourne in Kent, was elected a member of the London Group, and began receiving commissions for fabric and wallpaper designs, producing about 100 over the following nine years.

William Gear was curator of the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne from 1958 to 1964, and then head of the Faculty of Fine Art at Birmingham College of Art, a post from which he retired in 1975.

William Gear became a member of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in 1966, and was Guest Lecturer at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the University of Western Australia, Perth.

In 1967 William Gear received the David Cargill Award from the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, was appointed to the Fine Art Panel of the National Council for Diplomas in Art and Design in 1968, elected FRSA in 1971, and awarded the Lorne Fellowship in 1975.