Geoff Hunt PPRSMA

Geoff is maybe better known as a marine artist, and his earliest memory is of drawing square-rigged sailing ships. Having mis-spent his later school years studying the sciences, subjects for which he has huge respect but no natural aptitude whatever, he then took an arts direction and studied graphic design at Kingston and Epsom Schools of art. A career in advertising and design eventually led him (via hundreds of book cover illustrations) to 'proper' painting, and back to ships. Geoff was elected to the Royal Society of Marine Artists in 1988 and served in various capacities before a term as President from 2003 to 2008.

He is mainly a studio-based artist but his increasing anxiety to get out of the studio and to go painting outdoors led to kind invitations from Trevor and Bert to paint with the Wappers. He was immensely proud to be elected to membership of the Group in 2003. Geoff became Chairman in 2017.

His own basic plein-air painting philosophy is to rush the job without adequate preparation and rely on luck, rage and sometimes self-harm to pull him through. This technique served him badly when he painted oils outdoors and has done even worse since 2013, when he switched to using watercolour. The story of the struggle he had with the maddening and difficult but occasionally brilliantly rewarding medium of watercolour was the subject of his monthly diary in The Artist magazine which ran throughout 2014 and 2015. He thinks the one essential requirement for painting outdoors, above all in watercolour, is inexhaustible optimism ( this time I'll really get it right! ) coupled with a good umbrella.

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