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Anne & Jerry Hicks
Jerry Hicks MBE, RWA, Slade Diploma, ATD
Painter, author, sportsman, environmentalist, teacher and lecturer.
Jerry Hicks trained at the Slade School of Art where he studied under Schwabe, Polunin, Coldstream, Freud, Townsend, Piper and Bird. He later studied with Walter Bayes in Lancaster during war service. He settled in Bristol in 1951 and took early retirement from teaching in order to concentrate on his art work.
His paintings have been derived mainly from the human figure in movement over brief and extended periods. Judo a favourite sport of his is often a recurrent feature. Other subjects are Roger Bannister breaking the four minute mile barrier, the Supper at Emmaus, Watergate and everyday domestic activity.
The Futurists were an early influence but most work in this genre has become more fluid. The Mediterranean light of Ile Ste Marguerite has inspired many of his landscapes. Small outdoor studies in oil and pastel have provided the basis of larger studio oils. Portraits mainly in oil include domestic studies and many formal and informal commissions of individuals and groups such as Lord Methuen and Captain Ackroyd VC.
Since moving to Bristol he has exhibited every year but one at the annual RWA Exhibition. He has been an invited artist at the Mall Galleries in 1986 (where he won first prize) and at the Dorchester Galleries, Arnolfini, the Thornbury Festival and has featured in the Ile Ste Marguerite Annual Exhibition from 1988 to 2000. He had a one man show at London’s King Street Gallery in 1978
Murals and stage design in partnership with his wife Anne have included prize winning designs for Bristol Art Centre and several other theatrical ventures. Jerry Hicks has been known for a number of three dimensional and painted mural works in the Bristol area.
In 1994 he was awarded the MBE and in 1997 received the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Award for Painting of great British Achievement. His involvement in the preservation and planning of Bristol city has made him an active and longstanding member of the Civic Society of which he has been a past Chairman. He started a five year term as Vice President of the RWA in 1997.
Anne Hicks RWA, Slade Diploma
Painter, author, environmentalist, teacher and lecturer
Anne Hicks studied at the Slade School of Art after the Second World War under the tutelage of Schwabe, Coldstream and Freud. She has taught at Morley College, London and was a Visiting Lecturer at Bower Ashton in Bristol as well as the Bristol School of Architecture.
She exhibits in Bristol and was a co-organiser with her husband the artist Jerry Hicks, also a member of the RWA, of the first independent art exhibition at the Building Centre, Colston Avenue in 1957/8.
Her work has also been shown at Bristol University, Thornbury Festival, the Gulbenkian Exhibition at Arnolfini Gallery and since 1988 at the annual exhibition at Ile Ste Marguerite Cannes, in France.
Each RWA Annual Members Show has included an example of her work.
She has also produced conceptual design for the SS Great Britain moored in Bristol’s floating harbour which were exhibited on the ship.
Anne Hicks cites the many influences on her work as being, ‘ A great fondness for the City of Bristol and in particular its floating harbour (water reflections, weather fluctuations), and a Mediterranean Island (water, dappled light and the camouflage of light and shade) have strongly influenced my work, especially in the painting of the wild - even in domestic conditions of portraiture and the figure out of doors.
The wild cats feature predominantly in free studio work (anatomically understood from early studies at London and Bristol Zoo) and finally painted from the imagination’.
