Sinclair Webster Art

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Sinclair grew up in Khartoum, where he first painted, Nairobi and Flanders. He has had solo exhibitions in Nairobi, in Ypres and Roeselare in Belgium, in Cambridge and in Edinburgh.

 

His first one-person exhibition, during a Gap Year, was curated by Roberta Fonville at The New Stanley Art Gallery in Nairobi and was well received by The East African Standard’s art critic. He went up to Cambridge to read Modern Languages but changed after Part 1 of hs tripos to reading architecture encourages by two contemporaries in his college who were also painting and sculpting. The interview withe Admissions Tutor at the School of Architecture took place over a roll of paintings he had cycled down there. While an architecture student he found time to exhibit at Heffers gallery and in Churchill and Trinity Hall. He exhibited with Footlights at a venue in Edinburgh where he managed to sell a painting to Schultz, the Peanuts cartoonist.

 

Encouraged by this and by his Belgian family he went on to have solo exhibitions at Studio Callebert and Gallerie Britanique in Flanders. Both shows were curated by Michel Wulbrecht from Callebert.

 

Then he fell in love, married and had to put painting on one side to help support family life.  His Masters degree work involved developing computerised simulations of activities and spaces in healthcare facilites. His external examiner offered him a job in his practice and Architecture paid while painting was uncertain at best, unless you became an art teacher. 

 

Architecture is a team discipline relying on many others to fulfil a project, whereas painting just relies on the dialogue between the image and the artist, with the pleasing reward of immediate results. After a 40 year career as the ideas man innovating in the design of healthcare facilities, Sinclair returned to painting and drawing full time in 2016. His first exhibition in London was in a winter group show at the Russell Gallery. Currently he participates in group shows whether locally in Surrey or in London. Most of his work features people, animals and landscapes with which he is familiar, whether in Africa, Sussex or Yorkshire, and some out of his religious beliefs and interest in European myths.