About Donald Ayres

I was born in Bexhill-on-Sea in 1936 and spent my formative years during and after the war wandering the Sussex countryside and Downs, developing a love for both the sea and the landscape.

I left school to become an apprentice Diamond Setter working with one of the jewellers who had reset the crown jewels for the 1936 coronation and although I enjoyed the creativity of working with jewellery I could not bear being indoors all day. Out of desperation to see the world I joined the Royal Navy, travelling extensively for eight years.

In my late twenty's, after a few years in advertising, I suffered a fairly long illness. Short of money, my wife placed a few of my sketches in a local shop where, to our surprise, they sold instantly and a succession of people came knocking at the door. As I recovered, I spent more and more time sketching and painting and as my confidence grew I decided to move to Cornwall to set up as an artist full time.

Dissatisfied with the way art was being taught in the 1960s I looked instead to the techniques of the 'Old Masters' from which to draw inspiration.

With a great spiritual love of the countryside I have spent my entire artistic life travelling, painting and sketching the length and breadth of our wonderful country. Moving house as our family needs changed, we lived in Sussex (where I was born) Hampshire, Kent, Dorset, Devon, Cornwall, Wales and Scotland (where I ran my own gallery).

During this time I have exhibited across Britain, including Harrods in London, as well as in Europe and America. Approached by the Dyfed College of Art, for a few years I even taught wildlife painting on what was then the only course of its kind in the country.

After my wife died in 2003 I moved to Derbyshire, where I now live on the edge of the beautiful Peak District.

If you are interested, a more detailed account of my life and times will soon be downloadable in PDF format.( Watch this space.)  These are taken from my book, Donald Ayres' Exmoor.  My new book ' Exmoor Revisited '  was published in November 2006 - see links ( Halsgrove ). It is a hardback book in full colour and contains over 100 of my paintings, including several sequences of how some of them were painted.

 

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