Just a few recent photographs from February to April- the onset of Spring.
Category: West Cornwall (and local history)
Even on an overcast day, walking along Lambeth Walk is a pleasure. Just along from the slumbering elegance of the St Ives Arts Club are the reinforced portholes of the Porthminster Gallery. Currently among the many interesting and varied pieces on display here are the intriguing ceramic tiles of the Austrian artist Regina Heinz. http://www.porthminstergallery.co.uk/ The sea has always drenched over Lambeth Walk in Spring Tides, but dull or in the early Spring sunshine, the turnstones are a welcome sight. They seem to have appeared during the time that the seagulls have become more aggressive when swooping indiscriminately down to snatch the lunches or suppers of unwitting and hapless tourists. The turnstones are currently abundant and closely related to sandpipers.
Currently the Tate Gallery in St Ives is closed although, of course, the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden is open. Details are available at http://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-st-ives/admission-opening-times. A worthy alternative to the Tate Gallery is the Penwith Gallery where at http://www.penwithgallery.com/about/ it is stated that,”In 1960, the present site, then a pilchard-packing factory, was acquired and converted into a gallery, with artists’ studios above. In 1970 adjacent property became available, and the artist members, assisted by Barbara Hepworth, sought funds to create the present group of galleries, studios and workshops. To take on the task of maintaining its buildings and workshops, to arrange the programme of exhibitions and execute the gallery business the Penwith Galleries Ltd. was created.” Just opposite the Ropewalk where, of course, rope was manufactured, it was here that Troika pottery had it’s workshop and showroom.
The current exhibition runs until April 19th and visitors are likely to find it various with many works to catch the eye. There are the well-known and established favourites like Antony Frost, John Piper and Noel Betowski (whose work from a previous exhibition is shown on the clip above) as well as painters who have recently joined such as Jessica Cooper;mentioned previously on this blog. In addition to the paintings both pottery and sculpture are on display in this well-lit environment.
Two works caught my attention and set off trains of thought. The first was a small work by John Emanuel, who moved to St Ives in 1964 (his work is often to be seen at the charming Belgrave Gallery just off Fore Street-http://www.belgravestives.co.uk/) and is a delightful classical head. Hearing the sound of the sea in the distance might prompt us to these lines of Homer from “The King of Asine” in the Illiad:-
And the poet lingers, looking at the stones, and asks himself
does there really exist
among these ruined lines, edges, points, hollows, and curves
does there really exist
here where one meets the path of rain, wind, and ruin
does there exist the movement of the face, shape of the
tenderness
of those who’ve shrunk so strangely in our lives,
those who remained the shadow of waves and thoughts with
the sea’s boundlessness
(http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181850)
The second work attracted my attention because it reminded me of the abstract expressionism of Adolph Gottleib. I have often noticed the attractive prints of Jason Lilley – http://jasonlilley.co.uk/gallery_cornwall_artist_jason_lilley.html However, the similarity with Gottlieb may be judged from the accompanying images below. 
“Louise was born in 1984 in London she studied at Falmouth school of art in Cornwall graduating in 2007. She was immediately picked up by SAATCHI/channel 4 collaboration ‘Sensations’. She exhibited internationally living in Cornwall, London and Paris for a while. After a residency in Iceland and living with Nuns in a convent in central London she settled in Berlin in 2013 where she currently lives and works.”
The above is a quotation from the artist’s personal statement. Louise has lived in a number of interesting environments. I couldn’t help smiling, when she described how when homeless in London, she wrote around to numerous agencies and the only supportive assistance she received was from the convent. She is currently based In Berlin and has it happens in the long Sonnenallee – a location in East Berlin made famous by Thomas Brussig in his ironic and witty novel, which has now been made into a film and performed as a play at BTZ.
Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee
Currently, Louise Thomas has just completed a three month placement at Porthmeor Studios where her work has focussed largely upon an historical approach to the coastal landscape including ships and shipwrecks. About her work, Louise has written,”I construct magical realist narratives through collages, sculpture and painting. The enviroments or events depicted show contrast between real and magical elements. These elements are visible through my different methods of production and placement of resources. I find inspiration from a wide range of source material, from films I have made of abandoned interior spaces, to specific walking routes, to archive material of paintings hanging in museums. I perform extensive research and careful study of the subject matter, building a pool of scenarios to work from.”
“Through construction of models and collages I develop my ideas for painting. From the initial source material I make collages and if necessary bring in images from holiday brochures or photocopies from unique archives. I will research historic events, sourcing restoration records from museums or libraries. I usually end up with stage sets to play out scenarios. The models can be in clay, paper, plaster and other site specific materials. I work my way through various stages, addressing ideas of scale, colour, atmosphere until I find a valid reason to develop a painting. The historic elements run alongside fictional narrative I have developed; for example flooding the space, rebuilding it, imagining it thousand years from now or highlghting natural phenomenon.”
I watched and thoroughly enjoyed but was also saddened by this brilliant film viewed as a DVD last night. I visited Vienna in October last year including the Belvedere. The first posters I saw going down into the U-bahn in Munich. Although the places and the actors too were sort of familiar as was the historical context, for instance from reading Eva Menase http://www.goethe.de/ins/au/lp/prj/bkm/rev/aut/men/enindex.htm and George Klaar http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/george-clare-memoirist-who-recalled-life-in-nazi-vienna-and-postwar-berlin-1726060.html
The Jewish life in Vienna was so evocatively and poignantly rendered that it brought tears to my eyes. The music was interesting too for obvious reasons and the director’s commentary equally moving. Hence it was particularly interesting to discover in the Penwith Gallery to discover the work of Albert Reuss, who not only was in Vienna at this time but ended his life in Truro having lived in Mousehole nearby. Further info at http://www.artistsandart.org/2010/01/albert-reuss-1889-1976-austrian-artist.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/albert-reuss
The film is also useful for people learning German as the Untertitel in English are so klein!!!
(This article also provides an opportunity to refer to my friend, Susan Soyinka on her family and researches at https://susansoyinka.wordpress.com/)
Robert Therrien’s work is being displayed at the Exchange Gallery, Penzance until 26th September 2015. Working in Los Angeles, this 68 year old artist is displaying his work in collaboration with ARTIST ROOMS, an organisation which is a venture of both the Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland of con temporary art, which is international, that is on tour currently.
ARTIST ROOMS is travelling with this exhibition and showing at 17 museums and galleries across the U.K. An artist’s biography can be found at http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/robert-therrien-2312 and details about ARTIST ROOMS and this artist is at http://www.artistrooms.org/roberttherrien with a short explanatory video clip.
Further images may be seen at http://artnet.com/artists/robert-therrien/
Jessica’s own website is at http://www.jessicacooper.co.uk/
Further information on Jessica and her work may be seen at http://www.edgarmodern.com/Artist-Info.cfm?ArtistsID=188&Collection=&info=CV&ppage=6
Alone on stage, ennervating the audience mostly with the voice and a glance or a gesture has a singularly dramatic effect. This is what the Falmouth theatre-studies graduate, Jak Stringer achieved with her performance of “Walks with Wilkie” at the now well-established literary festival in Penzance in mid-June last year. The venue in the Acorn, once a Victorian chapel added an extra ambience to the subject, Wilkie Collins the eccentric friend of Charles Dickens and author of classics like “The Moonstone” and “The Woman in White”. Less remembered are his plays and less for his travel writings in Cornwall by means of which he initially gained fame. Curmudgeonly in some respects and daring in others, Jak Stringer has fell for him hook, line and sinker.
Jak Stringer, who has also received rave reviews from the NME as a musical impresario, shows herself to be an assured and energetic performer. In the year previous to this performance she retraced the footsteps of Wilkie Collins, bringing the stories from his somewhat forgotten classic, ”Rambles beyond Railways subtitled ‘Notes on Cornwall taken a-foot’, to life on the Acorn stage. This she does with verve and alacrity. Jak displays a range of emotions; at first sounding like a naive and almost, but not-quite, over-enthusiastic primary school teacher and rising to the eeriness of a Macbeth Witch into her recollection of an ancient lynching or parochial haunting. She poses Wilkie’s dilemmas from the 1850s-“Did the people of Looe consume their rats?”and “What made the women of Saltash clean the boots of strangers for sixpennyworth of beer?” and dauntingly examines the evidence for his finding a tavern filled with babies at the Lizard.
Creeping around the stage and sometimes not averse to a little appropriate melodrama, this performance was a continuous pleasure to watch-not least because Stringer varied the tempo and maintained a narrative pace throughout. She also used humour. She also showed her initial pleasure at receiving Collin’s bound volumes through the post. These she waived invitingly at the audience. In fact she used few props, none more effective than her woollen shawl sometimes drawn around her to convey poverty or want, at others spread to show joy at the reception which Collin’s work eventually received.
St Ives-based multi media artist Mary Fletcher has co-ordinated an interesting exhibition in The Redwing Gallery, Penzance on behalf of volunteers at the venue. This runs until the end of January and has already received positive reviews such as that by the well-known local poet and commentator, Frank Ruhrmund. Writing in the Cornishman
at http://www.westbriton.co.uk/Volunteers-thanked-gallery-assistance/story-25852842-detail/story.html, he states about the exhibition and the co-ordinator herself, “A gallery renowned for its support and promotion of outsider art, it is not all that surprising that Mary Fletcher should feel at home there. It is only two years since, for the first time in her long career, that she has been able to enjoy a working space outside of her house, at White’s Old Workshops in Porthmeor Road, St Ives. Many will recall her solo show held last year in the St Ives Arts Club Arts which celebrated her first year in her new working space.”
The relaxed atmosphere in The Redwing owes something to its bohemian ambience and partly due to its secluded location. The comfortable seating, bookstands and available refreshments all add to the effect. Here, Peter Fox and Ros Williams, co-directors of the Redwing Gallery, have created a space which is primarily concerned with outsider art. The current exhibition certainly adds to the general comfortable charm of the space. Mary Fletcher’s lyrical canvases remind me of an excellent and memorable exhibition by Litz Pisk who had worked at the Old Vic Theatre School (b.1909 in Vienna) many years ago at Newlyn Art Gallery. Interestingly, a student of Max Reinhardt, Pisk designed for Brecht and Weil’s first
production. http://www.baacorsham.co.uk/mparkin/p65.htm and also her film work for Isodora is at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0685496/ Mary Fletcher’s paintings too look a little like dancing musical characters against a colourful background grid.
There are also a number of interesting sculptures and small figurines in the exhibition which are also worthy of attention.
Once again, Vaughan Warren, educated at the Royal Academy Schools (The RA Schools was founded in 1769, and remains independent to this day. This independence enables the Schools to offer the only three-year postgraduate programme in Europe.) has turned in a range of varied and intriguing work. Two of his pictures, I found particularly appealing, although it is worth remarking that all his paintings, like his self-portrait in the manner of Cezanne, benefit from his wide knowledge of art history. The first portrays a sleeping head surmounted delicately above a breast in a transport of lovely colours. This evocative duo puts one in mind of those lovely lines from W.H.Auden:-
“Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephermeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.”
The second painting,energetic and interesting, executed in black, white and greys shows a view above St Just and looks down literally upon, in the distance, the Great Western Hunt in progress. As Wilde once remarked, ” The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable”. The unspeakable in this context means appalling, horrendous, wretched and indeed may remind one of another poem of Auden’s in quite another way:-
From Musée des Beaux Arts (1940)
“Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy
life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”
Kerry Harding’s soft and evocative canvases take the natural world around the North
Coast with it’s trees, hedges and seasonal variations as a starting point. Her website may be found at http://www.kerryharding.co.uk/. Kerry was very interesting on the topic of the famous Dresden artist, Gerhard Richter https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/ mentioning his process, his photographic work and his continuous experimentation using a wide variety of methods and sometimes controversial subject matter. She also mentioned his ability to work on different projects simultaneously. She worked very hard to create a welcoming atmosphere in her space- as she says on Twitter, “studio almost ready, tinsel and fairy lights then its done.” A lovely 
range of paintings that I found so interesting that I
came back to browse them for a second time. It was also informative to hear how some canvases were composed of many underpaintings-up to ten or more layers.
Kathryn Stevens, http://kathrynstevens.co.uk/, clearly rejoices in the freedom of working on a large scale. The billowing colours of her canvases express the joy of painting in bright colours. Some of them have a feathery and eloquent quality that puts one in mind of Georgia 
O’Keeffe (or perhaps Otto Gottlieb) but here we have an abstract expressionism with an upbeat and optimistic feel. She told me how she works freely, sometimes with music and chatted with the same exuberance that her work conveys. I was particularly taken by a study in
crimson, scarlet and white. She hails from St Ives and her paintings exhibit the wondrous light for which the town has become famous.
In short there was much to add cheer on a cold Sunday. It was good to see the Siobhan Purdy’s work again- which adorns the wall opposite as I write, the Mexican and Maya themed prints in the Apex space and to talk again with Naomi Singer whose glass works continue to thrive. Interesting too were the textile pieces by Zoe Wright.
Before returning to the Melting Pot once again, I went into see the illustration work of Esther Connon and was much taken by her story of The White Butterfly which can be seen on http://www.estherconnon.co.uk/stories.html?s=5. I wondered if it would be possible to animate some of this according to the methods of http://thepapercinema.com/ and this fascinating method may be seen both on videos on the papercinema site and on the community project in St Ives filmed earlier this year by my friend Alban. Altogether with the new building project at Krowji already under-way, great developments can be expected from this artistic phoenix rising from the ashes of the Grammar School at Redruth.
Click on Loop the Loop here:-http://stivestv.co.uk/category/art/
Getting to Krowji on a Sunday in December by public transport is a time-consuming business. Servicing the railway and circuitous bus routes turn a simple trip into an epic voyage. At least it affords time to see more new supermarkets, innovative centres in Pool and glimpses of neo-classical architecture in the grand manner. The upper stories of the façades remind one of the prosperity of this area in its heyday.
Upon arrival, the bohemian atmosphere in The Melting Pot Cafe, the warmth and the leek and potato soup help to revive after the lengthy journey. The wall of clocks and masques and surreal paraphernalia suggest that a cabaret is about to begin and indeed there is a pianist in cap and bells already upon the stage. This has a timeless and dreamy ambience quite unique and sui generis.
Moving around the crowded studios, there was a buzz which always seems stronger here where the art is being produced than visiting a gallery. I was particularly attracted to the work of Linda Crane -printmaking and painting but also small sculptures -including a small head which I thought reminiscent of Giacometti. The angular and elongated forms, the expressionist use of paint and the dramatic drawings were intriguing and attractive. My impression too was as though I felt a resonance both with Kokoschka and El Greco. Her work may be seen at http://www.sulisfineart.com/search/page/2?q=Linda+Crane and also at http://www.outsidein.org.uk/linda-crane where I was surprised to read of her work being in Penzance at the Redwing Gallery.
I think the fact that her atelier was empty increased my fascination with her display and her portfolio.I think my recent travels may also have influenced my susceptibilities. It is also interesting to research the influence of El Greco on Expressionism- as in the recent exhibition El Greco und die Moderne.(Dusseldorf 2012 http://www.smkp.de/en/exhibitions/archive/2012/el-greco.html)
penwithlit 