Painter in oil and teacher, born Bournemouth, Hampshire, and christened John Morley Bury. Grew up in Holdenhurst and “made up my mind to be an artist while I was still at the village school.” After Bournemouth School he attended Bournemouth Municipal College Art, 1937–9, where his teacher Johnny Walker was a strong influence, then Reading University, 1939–40. Bury spent six years in the Army, with a tank regiment in the Western Desert, then as a prisoner of war in Italy and Germany, being freed by Russian troops and repatriated. After the war Bury returned to Reading University, where he met his wife, art historian Shirley Bury, also attending Regent Street Polytechnic and Goldsmiths’ College. He also attended evening classes in textiles at Central School of Arts and Crafts and a course of lectures at the Courtauld Institute.
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He taught part-time at Emanuel School, Wandsworth, from 1948–58, then part-time at Hornsey College of Art until retirement in 1984. Mixed shows included NEAC, 1950; LG and Daily Express Young Artists, both 1954; Vision and Reality, Wakefield City Art Gallery, 1957; 3 Artists, South London Art Gallery, 1961; Centaur Gallery, 1970; and The Forgotten Fifties, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, and tour, 1984. Bury also showed with AIA, Hampstead Artists’ Council, Heal’s Mansard Gallery and Everyman Foyer, Hampstead, where he had a series of solo exhibitions from 1960. Public collections include Victoria & Albert Museum, Salford Art Gallery, Nuffield Foundation and various education committees, plus Cambridge University and corporate collections including Staveley Industries, Lintas and Rank Xerox. Tate Gallery archive holds Bury’s self-portrait. Bury’s interest in figure subjects in the 1950s changed to landscape in the 1960s, landscapes “not real but a collection of seen ideas. Gradually texture of the paint became more important.” He wrote that “studies in the organisation of colour relationships and the optical qualities which create a sense of space” were important to him. Lived in London.
Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)
