BIOGRAPHY

Maurice Cockrill (1935-2013) was born in Durham, England. He studied at the Wrexham Art School and University of Reading between 1960 sand 1964.

He lectured at the Liverpool College of Art and the Liverpool Polytechnic from 1967 to 1980. During the years 1985 to 1988 Cockrill was a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art and the Central School of Art. He was also a part-time lecturer at the Saint Martins School of Art.

Cockrill’s practice evolved over his lifetime from landscape and figurative painting to complete abstraction, thus proving hard to categorise his artwork.

Although his work is difficult to define within any one movement by observing his practice overall a progression emerges and a deep understanding of art history comes to the fore.

Cockrill studied the works of the old masters, the modernist painters and his contemporaries all of which is revealed through his meditations in paint. His earliest paintings involve the techniques of Pop Art and Photorealism. He then embarked on a series of figurative work during the 1980’s that leaned towards a more expressionistic style. In the 1990’s Cockrill revealed a renewed interest in landscape painting and investigated the styles of the English Neo-Romantics.

From the mid 1990’s his work became more abstract, he sought to express the emotional connections to landscape and memory resulting in conceptualised renditions of his homeland. From these works Cockrill developed a personal symbology that drove

Throughout his career Cockill was preoccupied with organic forms, in particular water and rivers.