Brian Rice

(b. 1936)

Brian Rice is a British painter and printmaker associated with British Pop Art and later landscape-based abstraction. Born in Yeovil, Somerset, he grew up in Tintinhull and Montacute and studied at Yeovil School of Art, where he became friends with the artist Derek Boshier. During the 1960s Rice emerged as part of the dynamic London art scene, producing boldly coloured abstract paintings and prints that reflected the visual energy of the period. In the mid-1970s Rice left London and moved to a sheep farm near Eggardon Hill in Dorset, stepping back from exhibiting for a time while teaching part-time at Brighton College of Art. Living and working in the landscape led to a renewed fascination with archaeology, ancient sites, and traces of human habitation. Discoveries made on his land, including Bronze Age remains and an eighteenth-century Donyatt pottery dish depicting a Green Man, inspired a major shift in his work towards landscape, symbolism, and archaeology. Rice returned to exhibiting in the 1990s with solo exhibitions including Art and Archaeology at Somerset County Museum in 1998. In later years his work revisited the vibrant colour and abstraction of his earlier paintings.