Life
Graham Ovenden was born in New Alresford into a Fabian household, attended Itchen Grammar School (1954–59) and was taught music privately by Albert Ketèlbey. He was a student at the Royal College of Music, before taking up painting around 1962.
He was tutored by Lord David Cecil and Sir John Betjeman. He attended the Southampton School of Art, and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1968. One of his most important teachers was James Sellars, an expert on Samuel Palmer.
He moved to Cornwall in 1973 with painter Annie Ovenden and their family. Since then he has been constructing a neo-Gothic building, "Barley Splatt" near Bodmin in Cornwall.
Ovenden was a founder of the Brotherhood of Ruralists in 1975, along with Graham Arnold, Ann Arnold, Sir Peter Blake, David Inshaw, Annie Ovenden and Jann Haworth. The Brotherhood is still extant, although three members have left; in 2005 it had a major London exhibition at the Leicester Galleries. They were given the name "Ruralists" by writer Laurie Lee.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“One idea is enough to organize a life and project it
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“Whoever takes a view of the life of man ... will find it so beset and hemm’d in with obligations of one kind or other, as to leave little room to suspect, that man can live to himself: and so closely has our creator link’d us together ... that we find this bond of mutual dependence ... is too strong to be broke.”
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“We are all conceived in close prison; in our mothers’ wombs, we are close prisoners all; when we are born, we are born but to the liberty of the house; prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)