Bryan Charnley was born on 20 September 1949 at Stockton on Tees.  With his twin brother, he grew up in London, Chiselhurst and Cranfield, where his father was a senior lecturer. In 1967, at the age of 17, Bryan suffered a nervous breakdown, but took up a place at the Leicester School of Art in 1968. He gained a place at the Central School of Art and Design in Holborn in 1969, but was unable to complete the course, due to another breakdown. In 1971 he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After seven years of varying treatments, electro-convulsive therapy, hospitalisation and a number of jobs, he returned to painting. He wrote: ‘On release, I found myself in a fairly desperate state emotionally to which, eventually, I responded by taking up painting and soon went full-time. … I gradually began to work more from my imagination and address myself to an interior life.’ Initially, he did not link his work to his condition, but in 1982, he began to use what he termed his inner upheavals as a source of inspiration. ‘My work’ he wrote ‘springs out of the necessity to make something positive out of the impossible situation I find myself in.’ In 1978 he moved to Bedford and began painting. His initial works were representational and included large flower paintings. From around 1983 onwards, Charnley’s work began to address his inner life, dreams and mental states, particularly the nature of his schizophrenia. He also began to explore ways of representing his experience of the world. In many ways this is the primary function of the artist, to find a way of making the personal insight into a universal image. Charnley used a visual language where imagery is employed to describe feelings, thus allowing multi-layered levels of meaning to develop, as in poetry. The images are accessible, coherent and evocative, with a high degree of organisation evident in the finished work. It was of particular importance to him that he was understood, because while schizophrenia is outside of normal experience, the sufferer is in no way insulated from feeling. In an ‘Artist’s statement’ to accompany his pictures, he wrote in 1988: ‘Sigmund Freud, commenting on his work on the mind, said that wherever he had been, an artist or poet had been there before him. I hope, to some extent, my work might exist in a similar way. I try to avoid being too direct about the privations suffered as a schizophrene and try instead for more oblique poetic metaphors, as I feel the truth can be more nearly approached this way. My work is also a much needed form of exorcism. Apart from my pictures, I regard my illness as completely negative, involving the sufferer in a vicious downward spiral. Current medical practice attempts to suppress both the patient and his symptoms, convenient but evasive. My paintings stand as an attempt to penetrate this wall of silence and I hope they can throw some light on a condition which has largely eluded medical science.’ Charnley had a solo exhibition at the Dryden Street Gallery, Covent Garden in London 1989 and exhibited two paintings at the ‘Visions’ exhibition at the RCA in 1990. However, the scant recognition he received was outweighed by the day-to-day problems of his illness and the heavy medication he was prescribed to counter it. His ultimate creative act was the series of paintings he produced between April and July 1991. They represented a deliberate attempt at self-investigation in order to experience his schizophrenia in its fullest form. As he experimented with the dosages of three different drugs controlling his behaviour, he kept a careful record of his medication, state of mind and the effect on the technique, composition and symbolism of his painting. The 17 portraits he produced graphically portrayed the suffering that accompanies mental illness. He intended his work to show the common humanity of the sufferer and how the artist can transform the most negative situations into the basis for creative inspiration. He committed suicide in July 1991. Subsequently the ‘Self Portrait Series’ was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in 1992. Charnley’s painting Morning Flight (1983) depicted him at home asleep, alongside a large window, with the sky outside filled with geese in flight. The painting was used as the front cover for the June 2008 edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry. Today, the work may be found in the Guttman MacClay Collection of the Bethlem Royal Hospital, along with three other of his paintings. The website dedicated to Bryan Charnley’s life and work may be found at: www.bryancharnley.info