John lives and works on Widemouth Bay in North Cornwall.
He works in watercolour on paper and canvas, and also produces paper litho prints of a selection of his sketches
A keen surfer he finds watercolour particularly well suited to convey the power of the crashing surf and the ever-changing beauty of the Atlantic coastline.
“I am always trying to use it in different ways…thin, thick, with collage or with sand and raw pigment. Paintings are typically on Canvas, but some are on paper and therefore under glass. Colour is enormously important, and I hope all my pieces resonate in some colourful way. I always have several pieces on the go at any one time. Paintings are finished when they say something beyond the obvious”.
Corinne is a Krowji-studios based artist using a wide range of materials (including non art), to create works that tell a subtle story and allows the viewer to bring their own interpretation and emotions forward.
‘Mixed media allows me to build layers, destroying and repairing. Inspired by personal life experiences I try to convey and evoke emotive response both in my own work and within the viewer.’
Frederick George Davis is a contemporary artist. His colourful abstract artwork utilize everything from paint to textiles to create layered, vibrant pieces.
Jo is a mixed media textile artist and painter.
Her diverse pieces are rich in surface texture and often incorporate significant unusual materials.
‘I paint and make, always having several projects on the go at any one time. I work spontaneously and energetically trying to capture the ‘essence’ of my attention. I work with fabric,thread, latex, paper and acrylic. I value the waiting/drying time, the ‘in-between’ times of contemplation, reflection and anticipation.
Impermanence and fragility are significant themes which have held my attention for many years.
I have the privilege of living in West Penwith.’
Cornwall is a very special place for any painter, the light, which everyone talks about, seems to reverberate in the moist air blowing in from the Atlantic. It wraps itself around forms and penetrates shadows, often enriching them with unexpected colour.
But it also has a harsh quality, quite unlike the light usually experienced in the UK. Of course, it changes constantly, as do the tides, the weather, the coming and going of boats, animals and people, nothing in this landscape is static for more than a few minutes.
I enjoy the challenge of trying to record transitory events: shadow, reflections, birds, water. In this quite small area, further interest comes from the tremendous variety of different locations: the beaches, windswept moorlands with Cornish hedges, wild rocky cliffs and the busy harbours. All are favourite painting subjects.
Julie was born in Hertfordshire. She lives in St Ives and works from her studio nearby.
Her paintings have emerged from observations of natural forms and places she frequently visits surrounding her studio.
My work includes paintings, mosaics, jewellery and freestanding art using various mediums, often including found or repurposed items.
Although I love the beautiful wild county of Cornwall where I live, my true nature lies within the factories and boiler rooms of industry and the city. My abstract artwork is mostly inspired by engineering and the urban landscape.
I love to put shapes, textures and colours together in a way that I believe is beautiful and it makes me feel happy. I want people to see whatever they like in my work, to add their own interpretation.
Lynette has been a member and director of the St Ives Society of Artists for many years since moving from Sutton Coldfield more than 25 years ago to St Ives.
Her unique paintings are textured abstracts that are painted in acrylic/oil mixed media.
Working in her Penwith studio most days intuition plays a big part in Lynette’s work as she absorbs the colours and textures of her coastal surroundings.
The industrial workings of Bodmin Moor’s granite quarries and mineralogy frequently reoccur as a visual stimulus. Whereas I do not use metalliferous mining products directly as a visual reference in my work, there are quite a number of minerals that are, unearthed and scavenged from the spoil heaps of the county’s disused mines and Cornwall’s mining heritage. These references are made almost exclusively for their colour content, often in conjunction with the matrix of rock in which they are found. It is the natural relationships that frequently inform the compositions. These colours may well get modified in qualities of saturation and tone during the picture making process, but without direct observation of the specimens, the work would not have this as a starting point.
“Lar is a radical. He has that close look of enquiry. There is this decidedly intellectual streak to him – a rather scientific distance where he employs analytical resources to what he does. There are no vague responses-to-nature raptures. Like Descartes, he moves towards having distinct ideas. With his ‘direct observations from specimens in my collection’, he can be seen as a member of one of those learned societies that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a man who looks into the nature of things without his mind being hampered by bias or irrelevance. He is a binary figure, taking the objective world and imposing subjective meaning onto it. This gives his painting a strangely complete quality, as if the two most important things have been united in a comprehensive visual plan. He is a kind of Joseph Wright of Modernism.”
Michael Carter, extract from Portraits Of The Artists 2018