John Raynes

John Raynes stretches his own canvas as he thinks the basic materials with which he makes his work should be of the best quality.  The stretcher frames are made of hard wood and the canvas is fine primed linen.  This short film is John in his studio stretching a canvas.

The Studio of Benjamin Warner

I just found the artist J.M. Whistler! He is alive and well and living in Cornwall. He is 177 years old, given up being a dandy and working hard but there must be some kind of alchemy going on. Perhaps a painting in the attic because he doesn't look much over 40, and his mother was painting the front door!

It actually took me ages to find Benjamin Warners studio. I followed tracks, talked to farmers and was directed across fields, went along lanes and ran away with some gypsies.  However, when I finally got there,  my journey had not been in vain.  An old farm building houses his studio, we go in through what could be a tractor shed, he has plans for that bit, a bigger space for bigger paintings. Then through another door which opens into a long room which is very clean and neat.  It is a new studio for Benjamin and I suspect will soon have the scars of vigorous painting written large all over it for , as I look around,  I am intrigued to see that everything has a patina. 

The old Apple computer in the corner is covered in paint, the same spotty paint design covers all the books on the book shelves.

A huge collection of music arranged into big black folders has similar markings.  Two pots look as if they are hewn from granite hold some brushes soaking in turps, upon closer inspection they once were old earthenware jars.

A vast collection of brushes lie in waiting and two sheets of heavy glass are clean and waiting to be used as pallets.

Paintings rest against the walls, like  frames  from a dream film,  half remembered upon waking.  The misty evocative scenes, seascape, landscape, townscape, seem to come from another age until you realise that there is a crane, or boat with an outboard, or a skyline that you recognise.  Somehow, the images created appear to have been excavated, wrought out of a long memory, a find of sorts from an archaeological dig. 

I like this feeling of time travel and ask some silly questions, a bit like a teen magazine reporter:

What's your favourite colour? "Dark" 

When is your favourite time of day "Evening or first light" 

Who are your favourite painters, "Whistler, for his pallet and his technique, not his portraits.  Turner, his later work, his experimental work"

How do you do these paintings?  The technique can't be explained easily.  He spends a long time learning his subject, being there, absorbing the effects of light, feeling the changes in temperature, the nuances of mist and fog.  Making notes, and sketches, finding out when the light is right for what he wants, when the falling night has taken away just enough detail to render a familiar  scene almost on the edge of being abstract.  Then with this knowledge he wrestles the painting out.  Painting on, scraping back, glazing in and rubbing out, massaging the paint onto the canvas staining the picture into another existence.

Benjamin paints for a while as I take some pictures, I feel privileged to have had a slight insight into how these timeless paintings are made.  They are beautiful, woven, deep and dark, full of mystery and suspense.  They feel like "real" paintings, made by a "real" artist.  Paintings out of time.  Now to find that portrait in the attic!

Interview by Sarah Wimperis.

A Meeting With Amanda Hoskin.

Amanda Hoskin works in a large, light wooden building at the bottom of a garden in Par. Inside it is warm and bright, white walls and cupboards and paintings in various stages of completion.

The first thing to catch my eye was a collection of tiny canvasses with, what appeared to be, butterflies stuck to them.  These exquisite little works of art are made using Amanda's characteristic painterly style, collage and wonderful colour sense, a little gold leaf, and butterflies that she has painted onto fine ivorine, cut out and then collaged into the work.

They are so beautifully painted that I had to look very closely to make sure that they were actually made and not pinned. 

I am to include this disclaimer: "No butterflies have been harmed in the creating of this exhibition" 

I wanted to know why she has chosen gardens as the subject for this next exhibition:  Not wanting to be type cast as "that artist who paints the Cornish coast", she decided to explore gardens.  There is a wealth of wonderful gardens in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.  She admits to being initially worried that this would result in a lot of green paintings but as soon as she began to explore the subject she became hooked.

Naturally butterflies have flown into the picture.  They are beautiful but rather more importantly, she reminds me, is the vital role that these jewel like creatures play, along with bees, in our survival on this planet. Which is why the entire proceeds from the sale of one exhibition painting are to be donated to the British Butterfly Conservation Society. 

With the same energy and passion that was evident in her coastal walk and the resulting paintings, Amanda has quite literally gone down the garden path.  She has spent hours in gardens, public gardens, tiny back gardens, allotments and orchards absorbing the scents, sounds and textures, making small paintings, working her sketchbooks and gathering information.

She returns to the studio and paints in oils, on paper, wood or canvas. Whatever suits the painting, she is, I think, an instinctive painter.  Using pallet knives, her fingers and brushes, but brushes as tools to "stab the canvas" rather than to paint with, she weaves the colours. A huge collection of very well used, sturdy paint filled brushes sit on the window sill next to a big pallet and a lot of paint.

As we talk she begins to work the sky on the easel painting.  Mixing paint with a pallet knife and applying it to the painting she then begins to use her fingers, coaxing the soft greys into the right kind of light, she almost looks as if she is conducting the weather, there does seem to be a tiny bit of magic going on.

Amanda's paintings are many layered, skies are first filled with delicate layers of subtle tones, worked and smoothed with quick fine fingers. Then paint is applied with the brush-tools, flicked, smeared and splattered, layer upon layer until a dense undergrowth of colour and texture is created.  Paper, words and precious gold leaf are often employed, all working together to recreate the gardens and landscapes that now seem to contain dreams and memories as well as trees and flowers.

Her sketchbooks are works of art in their own right, valuable note books, filled with drawings and beautiful little paintings, colour studies and experiments, seed packets, textures from a magazine, sweet wrappers and labels, words and thoughts, finger painting, watercolours and oils mixed and mingled into a delightful inspirational cake. 
These are what inform her paintings.  It is these paintings which must be seen to be appreciated, I can honestly say that if you like Amanda's paintings in the catalogue or on the web site you are going to love them when you see them in real life.  They are richly textured, deeply layered, beautifully considered and an honest, heartfelt response to a place and a time.

Amanda's paintings are feminine, soft and beautiful.  They are a testament to the natural world, Cornwall and the isles of Scilly.  They look lovely but there is also an undercurrent, like a hidden message, someone telling you in a half remembered dream: "Don't mess with this beautiful world, treasure it, layer it with gold and precious colours and lay it out, without a word, for everyone to see."   That is just what she has done.

Meeting Andrew Tozer

Imagine an artist; he is sitting beneath a growling grey sky, absorbed by the cloud shapes, the changes in the light, the nuances of colour on a wet road,  unperturbed by the imminent rain.  In your mind's eye he returns to a garret and feverishly commutes the day from sketches and plein air studies into a larger painting. 

He could be Monet or any one of the Impressionist artists of the nineteenth century.  He isn't because he is sitting next to you on the beach, or parked up in his car, watching your world and painting it.

Andrew Tozer lives and breathes art.  He is the embodiment of a tradition that demands skills like drawing and an understanding of form and tone.    He is an artist born out of time.  Gone is the aggressive attitude of the past decade of young British artists, nowhere to be heard is the response "it is art because I say it is" and the only blank canvasses you will find in his studio are ones waiting to be painted upon.

Andrew constantly challenges himself, questioning whether he will be able to capture that fleeting moment, the wind on the water, the movement of masts in the rain.  He works hard for his art and his studio is testament to that.  It is a garret, an attic room in his home, reached by a perilous ladder from his children's bedroom, it is as unassuming as a studio as Andrew is as an artist.  He paints because he has to.  He has a need to absorb and record, more excited by a grey rainy day than by brilliant sunshine and blue skies.  Distracted by rain caught in headlamps while driving at night.  His pallet is of a few carefully chosen colours, a lot of greys at the moment although I suspect that is because it is winter.  

His paintings are so deeply rooted in the moment his working pallet reflects that.  Also because he is so practised at plein air painting not only is he able to absorb and reproduce a fleeting moment of light but also he seems to be able to do the same with the emotional response.  His boats clink in the breeze, the water moves, the rain is wet and children play on the beach, it seems hugely possible to hear their distant voices.

He grew up in Cornwall wandering across beaches, through woodlands and along creeks as a child of farming family with a mother who is also an artist.  The passion for painting Cornwall is an easy marriage, this is where he is at home and where his natural responses began and continue.

After moving to London to study illustration he quickly realised that he was a painter rather than an illustrator although the training in the craft of drawing and composition is evident in every single painting he does.  He is a keeper of sketchbooks and it is possible to evidence his paintings right back to the first quick sketches.

His book shelves are bulging with sketchbooks full of his own drawings and books of all shapes and sizes full of the work of artists that he admires.  His influences are many, Fred Cuming, Joaquin Sorolla, William Nicholson, Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, all of them recorders of the everyday, masters of light and lion tamers of paint.

Andrew is an artist who believes in learning, learning how to see, learning how to speak visually and never resting, never relying on the fact that he is already a master of what he does but constantly reaching further. His work is much admired and collected although, when I was talking with him, his most treasured compliments were from a group of young art students and some primary school children.  "We really like your work"  And indeed, we do!

His new and exciting exhibition will open with a private view on Thursday 27th January 6pm till 8pm and will continue until Saturday 5th February.  Don't miss it!

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.

Visiting Miles Heseltine's Studio

In the middle of Penzance, tucked in among the old pubs, houses and shops, is the building that once was the  telephone exchange.  We go in through the front doors, up echoing stairways, through empty hall ways and down a maze of corridors until we reach an unassuming door.  Miles finds the keys and opens up a studio that is truly a reflection of the passion and conviction that goes into his paintings. 

It is a tall light filled room with paintings in various stages up on the walls.  Drawings abound, all over the room, high up near the ceilings,  the gestural and passionate mark making is everywhere.  Dark charcoal lines, dashes and dots, black shapes describe a landscape, roof tops or a church spire, all of them half seen, as if the artist is aware of them but is looking beyond, or looking further.

There is a pallet on the floor with the blood of many paintings, reminiscent of a crime scene, evidence of a strongly emotional style of making work. 

There is also a camping stove and a kettle, matches spent and littering the floor.  Shelves of books about other artists are near a paint splattered sink.  In the other corner several battered boxes hold very old taxidermy subjects, a moth eaten otter and a strange water bird. 

There is nothing neat or pretty about this studio, it is about the work and about the strong ambition that Miles has for himself as an artist, a personal inner drive. He wants to destroy the wall between drawing and painting, they are to be the same.

He doesn't have a fixed routine, arriving to paint sometimes before dawn, working nonstop for several hours before allowing himself space from the work.  He has a process that he calls pruning where older canvasses are culled, scraped off and reused or destroyed. 

When working  in the landscape he uses large sheets of paper with charcoal, making the occasional little film, which he will later use as part of the process for a painting.  He can't work from photographs as he says they take over too much. 

Paintings start life on the floor, he walks around them, "Pollack style" and later they go up onto the walls for further work.  His response to the landscape is personal and meditational, something may have caught his eye, through a clouded window, against a hazy sun, shapes in a velvet night, branches in the snow, all are re written in the hieroglyphics of a secret language.

 

It is a deeply personal space, somewhere that it was a privilege to be allowed to see because Miles Heseltine is a private kind of man, quiet, almost shy, but one who obviously strips his soul bare to transcribe his response to the landscape around him in deep paint and raw canvas, torn through with the powerful, and all important, marks of drawing.

Visiting Andrew Giddens Studio

Arriving at Andrew Giddens studio is like walking through one of his paintings.  Across the beach with the headland bleached out by surf spray.  Up the winding cliff path, salt in the air and the sound of crashing waves. Through a gap in the hedge and into a modest shed perched high on the cliffs.

There is nothing fanciful about this studio, this is an honest and straightforward working space.  It is very peaceful and calm.  The windows are open allowing the sound of the surf far below to mingle with the sound of wild birds attracted by the abundant blackberries that graze the walls of the building.

There is a large easel  with a painting of Porthleven in progress.  Paint, in the soft greys and subtle yellows of his paintings,  covers everything,  

the old office chair could have been upholstered by Jackson Pollock.

There is a table laden with tubes of oil paint in various stages of use, some are split open to use the last scrapings, a pallet, which appears to be an old bread board has transformed into a grey, three dimensional landscape.  He uses Old Holland oil paint because the high pigment content makes them useful for glazing, Daler Rowney because of the buttery texture.  There are very few brushes as he says he forgets to clean them and so he prefers to paint with a knife and his fingers.

Sketchbooks lie open on the floor beside a comfortable arm chair with glimpses of vigorous drawings and new blank canvasses are stacked by the walls ready to be transformed into Andrews atmospheric paintings.

Andrew has worked here for four years, his working day starts at 8.30 and he paints until about 1pm.  Although he sometimes breaks this habit to give his three boys their maths or science lessons.  In the afternoon he has time with the boys, walking on the beach and exploring the stretch of coastline that is home to them. 

This family time seems to be one of the fundamental elements of Andrew as an artist as he explains more about his painting methods. 

The relationship that he has with a place is intimately bound together with memories and experiences.  Time spent with the important people in his life is wound, with paint, into the beauty of the scenes that he depicts.  He finds it almost impossible to paint somewhere until his children have run across the sand, or he has walked along the cliff paths and they have spent many happy hours exploring together.  He can paint places that he knew well in his childhood and places that he is discovering with his own children now.   

I suspect that if you wanted Andrew to paint your favourite beach you would have to take him on holiday with you for quite a few years!

There is nothing fanciful about Andrew as an artist, like his studio, he is honest and straightforward.  He paints what he sees and it seems as if he sees with his heart wide open.