All At Sea

We have a beautiful exhibition on show in our upstairs gallery and at the National Maritime Museum until 6th February.
Six of our artists, Heseltine, Hoskin, Jones, Lindsay, Tozer and Wimperis have explored Cornwall's relationship with the sea and discussed, in paint, what it means to them.

From the cluttered workshops and boat yards to empty fish markets and working quaysides Sarah Wimperis has chosen the working face of Cornwall.  Andrew Tozer has gazed across the bay and described the beautiful sparkling light and the shapes of sails, which so often grace his work, giving us a Tozeresque splash of salt water.

Al Lindsay has applied his slightly retro vision to talk about quaysides and harbours with perfect colours and graphic shapes.

Robert Jones, who worked as a fisherman years ago, has gone back to his roots and taken us on a trip out to sea where little boats are buffeted beneath endless skies.

Amanda Hoskin allows us to drift through summer flowers on Cornwall's clifftops, or glimpse the twinkling lights of home from out at sea.

Miles Heseltine has gone out onto the cliff tops with enormous sheets of paper and exposed the soul of Cornwall's granite heart in powerful gestural charcoal drawings that must be seen to be truly appreciated.

It makes for a facinating exhibition, full of contrasts and tasting salty and of the sea.  All of the work can be viewed on our website.

Contemporary Impressionism Continues

A SARAH WIMPERIS PREVIEW...
With a lively exhibition featuring John Raynes, Simon Stooks and Alasdair Lindsay.  Three contemporary impressionists, very different styles but all three locked into the tradition of Impressionism, they take the world around them and make it their own, offering up a personal vision of what is there.
Simon Stooks paintings, with their energetic and painterly personality being calmed down by a soft and gentle palette.  They sit on the walls like very excited children bursting to tell you something very, very important.

There are fields, baking dry underneath a Provencal sun, of twisted vines, or overblown sunflowers, with earth colours that have grabbed the sky and kissed it into the ground.  Wonderfully calm beach scenes, the hubbub of summer holiday makers lost amongst the bleached out colours of midday. John Raynes brings us back to Cornwall with his masterful handling of line and colour, he is the best artist I know for capturing the shadows of boats in water. 

His boats float, the water in the harbours is barely contained by the pictures frame.  Light floods in and out of his paintings, waves crash and spume and with each painting you can smell the iodine fresh scent of the sea.

Alasdair Lindsay bursts into the back of the gallery with his paintings shouting "I was there and this is what I saw"  The colours are vibrant and funny and glorious.  He seems to be able to look and look and pull out of a landscape all of the elements that were important.  A post here a rooftop there, a colour reflected in a stone and the hint of a well known landmark.

As well as the colourful smaller paintings there is a truly magnificent painting of Falmouth at night, it is beautiful, the colours are calm and stunning and the little flicks of light on the boats chink like the song of rigging lines against masts that is part of Falmouth's soundtrack.

 The exhibition is a good one, go and have a look for yourself, it officially opens on Saturday 9th July and continues until Wednesday 20th.  There are catalogue paintings available to purchase now and further exhibition paintings should be on line by today.

Private View. Markey. Lindsay. Heseltine

Markey.Lindsay.Heseltine opened on Friday 5th November with a number of art world 'movers and shakers' rating it as one of our most interesting yet. As we hoped, the three artist's works looked strong together - from Lindsay's linear style, to Heseltine's Rothko-esque virtual abstracts, and with Markey's jewel-like watercolours and nocturnes in between. This show has been designed to take Beside The Wave further in terms of the range of landscape work we represent, and to add to the critical debate about what is great in contemporary landscape painting. The exhibition continues until November 18th for anyone able to make it in person.
At what was a very lively opening, our "ace blog reporter" has made a little film to give you an impression of the show...enjoy!

Visiting Alasdair Lindsay's Studio

Step inside a small terrace house in Hayle and you have stepped into one of Alasdair Lindsay's paintings.  The colours are the colours of the late fifties and the early sixties. 

Soft teal, muted pink and ochre are shot with an earthy orange.  Angle poise lamps peer over beautiful retro cups on top of fifties style place mats.  Moulded orange chairs sit around the table and an astonishing collection of vintage surf boards are stacked where most people keep their books. 

Alasdair is a self confessed hoarder and collector, he says he gets it from his grandmother.  he finds his treasures at car boot sales and junk shops.

His studio is in a sturdy shed at the bottom of his garden.  Having a very young family he finds a studio at home useful as he can fit work around the schedule imposed by small children.  He usually paints while his eldest daughter is at school. 

He works from sketches done on location and sketchbooks full of his distinctive linear sketches are stacked in his studio.  He prefers to use these and memory as the basis for a painting.

He says he finds actually starting a painting the most difficult part  Beginning with a coloured ground, this is his way of breaking the ice, he then uses masking tape to make lines and patterns on the colour to break it up.  This forms the commencement of a long process of thin glazes of colour, masking out shapes, more painting and finally a kind of "editing" where he thins out the painting, taking away shapes and elements until he is satisfied with the composition that remains.

Alasdair's paintings are very carefully considered, at first glance they appear to be very neat flat planes of colour but look closer and you can see the interesting brush work and thin layers going to make up a pallet that is strongly represented by the objects he surrounds himself with. 

While working he listens to LP records played on a record player beside the easel. 

On the shelf sits a toy batman boat beside a Dynamo label maker and a lovely old lamp.   

Another shed is literally stuffed with a forest of angle poise lamps and surf boards, he tells me that he sorted out his studio before my visit.  These are usually all around him while he paints.  

It is no wonder that his paintings contain the lines and colours of another era.  That, combined with the unusual viewpoints that he depicts, seems to  bestow a serenity onto the paintings, lifting the mundane, and often overlooked, up onto an altogether higher level.  As if the paintings are taking the viewer back to a carefree time, an era when we had time to stop and stare at the patterns made by a crane or a shadow of a boat, or when the shapes of some dried grasses reminded us of our childhood curtains. 

Alasdair Lindsay has made a world of his own through his paintings and one that he is generous enough to share.