William Gear RA was a British abstract painter. He explored using different mediums from of  oil to watercolour and gouache. Gear was born in Fife, Scotland, on 2nd August 1915. He was the son of Janet Gear and Porteous Gear, a coal miner. Gear studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1932 – 6, gaining a postgraduate scholarship that enabled him to study art at Edinburgh University from 1936 -7. During his education Gear won a travelling scholarship which enabled him to visit Italy, Greece, and the Balkans and to study in Paris with Fernand Leger.

During the Second World War Gear served as an officer in the Royal Corps of Signals. After the war he settled in Paris where he met many of the leading post-war Parisian artists. After meeting Appel, Constant, Corneille and Jorn, he joined the COBRA group, Europe’s most important avant-garde movement of the mid – twentieth century.

The COBRA painters emphasised spontaneity – an image, they felt, should appear on the canvas as naturally and quickly as a sudden change of weather in the world beyond the window. And it ought to be as impersonal as a thunderstorm. William Gear exhibited with the group in Amsterdam and Copenhagen in 1949; however, beyond his association with COBRA he had a long and successful career in his own right. He became a Senior Royal Academician in 1995 and his work is held in many major public and private collections around the world.