Many of Snee's pictures are recognisable as abstract landscapes, with trees, fields and hedgerows; many more as head and shoulders portraits. There are recurring motifs: columns that often morph into human figures, 'shell and skull' double-head portraits, homages to Picasso, portraits of Wyndham Lewis, railway pictures. Once he had found his true voice, Snee enjoyed a long high summer of creativity: twenty years of pictures that positively radiate joy and vibrancy, and bear

After his remarkably accomplished art-school work in the 1950s Snee went through a long period of experiment and discovery in the 1960s and early '70s, until in the 1980s and '90s he seemed to find his voice and settled into a prolific period of mature abstract painting. It was not an entirely straight path: he never stopped exploring, taking detours away from his main route, trying out new ideas and techniques, dropping some of them, and incorporating others into his core pr

Gordon Snee painted between 1950 and 2003. He rarely exhibited his work. It was only after his death in 2013 that his vast legacy of paintings, drawings, maquettes and other works came to light. They revealed that Gordon Snee is a master of form and colour, who should be considered alongside the finest British post-war abstract painters. Gordon Snee was born in 1931 in Burnley, Lancashire, into a working class family who worked in the cotton mills. The family moved to Gains