“Unlike the light, aerated surfaces of Matisse, Bramham’s paint is thick, resinous, sensuously clotted”

Sebastian Smee, Christopher Bramham – New Work

This Saturday’s FT alerted me to a new exhibition of works by Christopher Bramham opening today. “Will the London painters – Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, working directly from life on obsessively recurring motifs, leave any heirs?” the reviewer wondered, suggesting that Christopher Bramham might be a candidate.

Bramham certainly is obsessive about his subjects – his paintings are mostly of his studio and his garden in Cornwall, but you get a sense of real love of his environment and surroundings. Like the London painters, Bramham is liberal with his paint. As Sebastian Smee describes in the helpful and beautifully produced exhibition catalogue Bramham adopts a generous, tactile, sculptural Van Gogh type approach to the use of his thick, creamy paints. He uses colour very effectively – some 90% is Hammershøi grey – which has the effect of  bringing the whole painting together – the artist’s equivalent of the cook’s approach to harmonising a dish – see Leonardo da Vinci’s suggestion of serving mutton flavoured with the herbs on which the sheep were grazing.

Very tempting (if I had the dosh) are the lemon paintings – every lemon Bramham paints entices the watcher to squeeze and inhale. Just looking carefully at them has inspired me write this post describing an easy lemon pie…not even a sojourn in an oven required. Ideally I use McVitie’s Ginger Nuts for the base.

This is a very easy lemon pie.

Quick Christopher Bramham Inspired Lemon Tart

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Ingredients

• 120ml/½ cup condensed milk
• 300m//1¼ cups double cream
• 1 medium lemon, zest and juice
• 200g/7 oz ginger biscuits (put in a plastic bag and bash with a rolling pin)
• 3 walnuts of butter
• sugar coffee crystals, vanilla bean dusting powder, or demerara sugar

Instructions

1. Melt the butter in a medium saucepan and add the biscuit crumbs.
2. Press into a greased pie dish.
3. Whip the cream and add the condensed milk and the lemon juice.
4. Set in the fridge for two or three hours.
5. Garnish with the zest, and sprinkle with the sugar.