Though he began as a representational painter with formalist leanings, in the nineteen-fifties Bryan Wynter came to be identified as one of the leading post-war British artists working in a style of painterly abstraction. Wynter was an important member of the St Ives Group and an early member of the Penwith Society of Artists, an exhibiting society founded in 1948 by Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. Wolf Country was painted at a time of confident maturity in Wynter’s career and its distinctive patterning, mixing panels of opaque colour with free-wheeling brushwork of translucent white paint, is characteristic of the artist’s work at this time. The use of ‘squircles’ – round-edged squares – is a motif of special significance in Wynter’s work. This form is readily in evidence in Wolf Country (fig. 1). The motif suggests an organic adaptation of the geometrical forms conventional to modernist art. Wynter’s practice of painting and over-painting the form further suggests an open-ended, improvisatory engagement with the natural world beyond the studio – the form is not fixed but, rather, caught in a process of being realised. The squircle motif occurs repeatedly in his work of the late nineteen-fifties and is seen in his outstanding artistic achievements of the period, including Mineral World (1957, Arts Council Collection) (fig. 2). Like the contemporaneous Mineral World painting, Wolf Country brings together discrete formal patterning, of a kind unique to Wynter, with an open-ended process of accretion. In building a complicated web of shape and colour over the picture surface, the artist hinted to comparable forms of complexity found in the natural phenomena which inspired him – the spontaneous movement of water, the layout of pebbles of a riverbed, the ascendency of certain stars in the night sky, and so on. In the case of Wolf Country, the artist evokes an idea of wild animals and untamed thickets.