Nat Young

Nathaniel "Nat" Young was born in Pontefract in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1940 and educated at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School in Wakefield. He studied medicine at Guy's Hospital and was a General Practitioner in Colchester from 1970 until 1998.

His first interest in art was as a collector of ‘scraps’of early English watercolours. He moved to East Anglia in the early 1970s, took an art class in Colchester and began drawing, sketching and painting East Anglian scenes in watercolour. Over the years the work evolved through water colour, gouache, collage, ink and acrylic and now settled in oil painting, and the subjects widened from urban to landscape scenes.

He works from sketches, memory and feeling, and pursues a dynamic aggressive approach. The results lean towards abstract impressionism while holding on to a sense of place. Alongside East Anglia he painted the Tarn region of France, Pembrokeshire especially the Preseli hills, and the Yorkshire Dales

He has had one person shows at the David Wood Gallery in Dedham and at the Digby and Hayletts galleries in Colchester, and in 2007 a major solo exhibition at the Minories, accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with a foreword by Ronald Blythe. His painting Light through Woodland, West Bergholt is in the permanent collection of Colchester Art Society, of which he is a member and a former Chairman. He was for a number of years the Arts correspondent of the Essex County Standard, writing a column called Nat's Arts and About. He continued to interview arty folk for Colne Radio 106.6FM He was a Lay Chaplain at Colchester General Hospital for about twenty years. Nat published a book during lockdown called Musings, the art of Nat Young. There is also a video of Nat talking about his painting in which he was invited to participate in the film.