Trip to Cornwall

I've been pretty busy in August, and as well as Northern Ireland and a weekend in the Peak District, I've also been down to Cornwall, to take photos for a show that will take place next spring in Bristol at the Lime Tree Gallery.

It's always wonderful to go to Cornwall, but the weather varied from frustratingly foggy...

...to blazing sunshine...

 

I also tramped around the countryside with my Ordinance Survey map.  Here's Lanyon Quoit...

...and this is nearby Men an Tol.

It's a good 15 minutes of walking from the road, and I was expecting something huge - instead, it's the size of a large polo mint (well, the hole is about about 18" across).  When my 12 year old son saw the photo, he laughed for ages - "It says LOL!!" he said.  Ah, the texting generation.  Unfortunately, that's exactly what it looks like....

I also visited places that were favourites of Peter Lanyon and Barbara Hepworth.  This is Trevalgan Hill near St Ives...

It's a place where you have a sweeping panoramic view of the sea almost 360 degrees round, and out across the pattern of the fields.  It is topped with the rounded rock formations that you find scattered over this part of the county.

Here's Hepworth's sculptural response to the scene, with its curving wings expressing the view across the landscape, and the sense of being enfolded in the landscape, in a feminine, nurturing form.

Barbara Hepworth, Curved Form (Trevalgan) 1956

She wrote  ‘the cliffs divide as they touch the sea facing west. At this point, facing the setting sun across the Atlantic, where sky and sea blend with hills and rocks, the forms seem to enfold the watcher and lift him towards the sky.’

Here's Peter Lanyon's painting of the same scene.

 Peter Lanyon, Coast (1953)

 Peter Lanyon, Headland (1948)

In Lanyon's paintings, it is as if we are seeing both a conventional landscape and a cross-section of the earth at the same time, so you can read the space in different ways.  

Also, Lanyon depicts not just the landscape, but its sense of history, and its economic and social past.  Cornwall is of course littered not only with neolithic monuments, but industrial ones, in the form of the chimneys of the tin mines punctuating the landscape.  

This perhaps most famously comes together in his painting St Just (a village on the coast which was the scene of a tragic tin mine disaster).

 Peter Lanyon, St Just (Oil on canvas, 1953)

Again, there's multiple layers of meaning and viewpoint going on here. 

Lanyon's technique, which was common to the St Ives painters at the time, was to paint on a white textured ground, which then had thin glazes of colour painted on top.  These were scraped and rubbed down, revealing the texture and colours below, creating veils of paint, revealing and hiding, creating an almost sculptural surface.

The subject of the painting is a real landscape, but one with an aerial view (gliding was one of Lanyon's hobbies, despite having vertigo).  You can see the fields and the coastline.  But it's also about the mineshaft which runs down the centre of the painting, thrusting out into the sea. which collapsed killing the tin miners.  The colours are raw and earthy, the paint surface energetic and reworked.  It's about landscape and labour, natural and man-made, land meeting sea, male and female, it's about the edge of the things, about being totally submersed in the something very elemental.  It's also about sacrifice, as it can be taken to look like a crucifix.

During my time in Cornwall, I also went to classes in St Ives School of Painting, which was fantastic.  It was great to work in the famous Porthmeor studios, listening to the sound of the sea.  

There are some absolutely wonderful classes going on there, including Lanyon's Landscapes, which consists of a trip to Little Trevalgan and then working in the studio with mixed media collage and  paint.  There's masses of other stuff - expressive printmaking,  elemental painting, and introductions to painters such as Sandra Blow and Ben Nicholson....  Wish I could have gone to more classes!!

Find out more about the classes here.

The Sculpture Show, part 2

You can't have a show about 20th century sculpture without having work by Barbara Hepworth - which is fortunate, because she's one of my favourite artists.  I've been to see her work at the new Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park,  and several times to her inspiring studio in St Ives.

Her work is very feminine, very nurturing - not surprising, because she had four children, including triplets with fellow artist Ben Nicholson - and very rooted in the landscape, referring not only to her native Yorkshire but also to her adopted Cornwall.  

Don't mistake feminine for namby pamby - this is work of sensuous strength and vitality, and forms a complete contrast to the rooms later in the exhibition of hard-edged male militaristic or machine aesthetic art.

This is Curved Form (Oracle) 1960.

Made of carved guarea wood, the tactile fluid form is smooth and natural on the outside and more textured and painted on the inside.  It is sensuous and mysterious, suggesting perhaps a seed-pod, nurture, reproduction and ripeness.  

This is Wave of 1943.

Again carved in wood and painted, is contains strings, and so suggests a musical instrument or aeolian harp.  This gives a sound dimension to it, almost as if you listen very closely, you can hear it, like putting your ear to a seashell.  The sculpture is meant to be a view of the sea, encapsulating many viewpoints of a landscape in one (rather like a Peter Lanyon painting).  'The horizon of the sea is enfolded by the arms of the land to the left and right' (wrote Hepworth), with a great sweeping gesture held by the tension of the strings.

(Not all of her sculptures are of wood, nor are they small - there are many epicly-sized public sculptures and Wakefiled has the most amazing plasters.)

The next room contained Epstein and Gill, not their best examples.  It included a great clunky ugly alabaster by Epstein. 

However, the 'Geometry of Fear - 1950s Britain' was a very interesting room.  Elizabeth Frink's small bronze birds from 1959 aren't pretty, delicate things.

 

These are disjointed, fractured forms, menacing and militaristic, like something out of Star Wars.  They are the bronze version of Ted Hughes' poem Hawk Roosting (published around the same time these sculptures were made).  Both creative forms, poem and sculpture, are born out of a post-war Britain that has itself been taken apart and brutalised, and is trying to find itself again.

Similarly, Kenneth Armitage's 1957 figure on its side, with its stick-like legs, has literally been knocked sideways and can't stand on its own two feet.

In the room also are Eduardo Paolozzi's assemblages - large forms created out of make-do-and-mend recycled scraps and objects.  

 Eduardo Paolozzi St Sebastian 1957 bronze

It's as if they are self-made figures, trying to piece themselves back together and find themselves again, and to create a new world order out of the chaos in which they find themselves.  They are rather touching in their rag-bag appearance, and almost heroic, as these are figures that are, indeed, putting themselves back on their feet.

Overall the exhibition is a very deft piece of curating, the Geometry of Fear room especially (although it would be wrong to think that all post-WW2 sculpture consisted of the fractured forms suggested displayed in that room - just look at what Hepworth was doing in the same era).  

However, it is a difficult thing to make sense of such a big subject, but by making good use of the layout of the gallery, it manages to tell a cohesively thought-provoking, if not exhaustive, story.