Jon Denis Harwood Catleugh was an architect, designer, painter, collector and ceramic historian. After being wounded in the D-Day Landings, he continued his pre-war studies and qualified as an architect in 1949. He worked as an architect and designer and was active in the London art world in the 1950s. He exhibited with Gimpel Fils in British Abstract Art in 1951 and had two solo exhibitions in 1953 and 1954 of his abstract collages and 'drip' paintings. After seeing the work of Jackson Pollock in Venice in 1949, Catleugh became fascinated by the possibilities of the 'drip and pour' technique. He eliminated his own colour mixtures and worked straight from the paint manufacturer's tin. The result is a rhythmic and polychromatic 'network of trails which loop and lose themselves in an indecipherable complexity'.

In 1956, Catleugh took part in This Is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery, a multidisciplinary collaboration of architects, artists, musicians and graphic designers; and in 1951 he designed the sets for Picasso's play Desire Caught by the Tail at the Watergate Theatre. He also designed furniture and textiles for the Furniture Makers Guild and David Whitehead, and in 1988 exhibited alongside the artist/architect John Milnes-Smith with England & Co in the exhibition Reflections of the Fifties.

BIOGRAPHY   
 

Space Time Painting c 1951
22 x 18 inches
Oil on canvas

Configuration in Time 1952
22.5 x 26.25 inches
Oil on board with collaged painted wood