Bruce Yardley

Bruce Yardley, born 1962, has been a full-time professional painter for twenty-five years, with over forty one-man shows to his name, mainly at UK galleries, but also at galleries in the US, Canada and New Zealand. He is the son of the well-known watercolourist John Yardley, who was a popular exhibitor here at Wykeham Gallery in the 1980s and 1990s, though in contrast to his father, Bruce paints exclusively in oil.

Bruce Yardley’s paintings fall firmly within the English tradition of tonally sensitive Impressionism. His principal concern, like that of the original French Impressionists, is with light, and over the years he has evolved an expressive and painterly style to capture the wonderfully varied effects of light in all its forms, a style that avoids the deadening hand of descriptive detail. The influence of Monet, Sickert and Whistler is readily apparent, and Bruce discusses these men and other inspirations in his recently published book, Painting like the Impressionists.

Bruce's subject matter covers a broad theatre: cityscapes of Europe and New York in sunshine and rain, interiors and still life. Unsurprisingly for a disciple of Monet, Sickert and Whistler, Bruce has a special fondness for Venice, where the ‘envelope of light’ (the phrase is Monet’s) is so distinctive.