Not a Silver Dawn but a New Dawn in the Newlyn Art Scene according to the latest edition of the Spectator!
‘The street scenes in Newlyn lack nothing of subject for the painter,’ reported the young Frank Richards from the Cornish art colony in 1895; ‘paved with cobblestone, some of the narrow streets are occasionally strewn over with fishheads and entrails, so that one’s progress in going “up” or “down”-along is sometimes considerably facilitated by an alarmingly quick slide to an unexpected destination.’
While visitors no longer have to negotiate entrail-strewn streets, Newlyn remains a working harbour. Garfit leases the school building from local fish barons Stevenson, along with a harbour-front gallery named Bucca after the Cornish god of storms, where newcomers show alongside established local artists. It’s a promotional strategy rather than a money-making enterprise. ‘We almost want galleries to steal artists from us,’ says Garfit.
His sentiment is echoed by James Green, director of Newlyn Art Gallery (formerly the Passmore Edwards) and its sister gallery The Exchange in Penzance. This month saw the launch of Platform — a new series of solo shows by members of Newlyn Society of Artists — with Kate Walters’s exhibition The Secret Worth A Thousand(until 9 February). Although represented by Millennium gallery in St Ives, this is Walters’s first show in a public gallery and, in a reversal of the Cornish stereotype, it’s rooted in the land rather than the sea. Walters’s animal-human forms tap into primitive shamanistic beliefs in our common ancestry: ‘the secret’ that Goethe reckoned was ‘worth a thousand’. Beneath the earthy surface of her densely worked watercolours glows a prism of hues as radiant as a Turner ‘colour beginning’ — colour given full rein in photographs and films of the artist’s small garden that fill the downstairs gallery with birdsong.
Read the full story in the Spectator here.