In Tywardreath, local Cornishwoman Hilary Bunting shows her work in a newly opened gallery in Tywardreath. She originally trained as an Interior Architect, which involves demolishing walls and re-arranging houses, rather than simply designing colour schemes and textures, but she is self-taught in her painting technique. She uses oil paints with some plastic paints to achieve very textured paintings, and uses a palette knife, never a brush. She works on canvas for flexibility, as well as heavy paper.
Fascinated with skyscapes and landscapes, Hilary finds her inspiration out of doors, gets a sense of the place, which she photographs, and returns to the gallery where she works. The results are artworks which require to be touched, as the depth of paint and variety of textural effects seek sensory explanation. There are dark skies in subdued and gloomy tones, as of an impending storm, through to brilliant pieces, full of light, and with the brightest flowers in the foreground. Some of these flower colours are so mouth-watering it is almost tempting to lick the canvas.
Hilary builds up the layers of paint, working from the top of the canvas on the sky, and using a technique with her pallette knife that results in an almost patchwork effect of squares produced by the blade's movement. She then creates the raised, near three-dimensional effect of the flowers, before finally executing the spiky grasses. To achieve this, she uses precise and positive scrapes of the blade, to make sharp, clean lines, incised through the thick paint, before it dries.
Just a few miles away, in Golant, at her home overlooking the Fowey River,
Barbara McMillan works in a separate studio filled with her paintings,
so she is not easily accessible for interested art lovers. The studio
door opens onto an exciting blast of colour which is almost overwhelming
in its intensity and energy. Barbara works in pastels and oils, and to
a very large scale. She would love to create a mural, given the space.
She works to commission in a variety of styles, and has particularly enjoyed
painting backdrops for theatre productions. Her studio is filled with
paper and canvases which support huge, bold designs, in powerful combinations
of a range of hot colours, often set off by blue or violet, and in vivid
greens.
Barabara's inspiration comes directly from nature and she responds immediately to the natural environment, by always working outside, and finishing her work back in the studio. Her favourite subjects are the vigorous, thrusting, highly-coloured blooms and foliage found in the Phillipines where she sometimes visits. She loves the strongly defined shapes, whether curving, sculpted, or striking. The strength, height and life-force of these tropical plants convey to Barbara an energy which she aims to reproduce on canvas.
The process of creating her artwork in situ leaves her exhausted – or when working outdoors in Cornwall in winter, absolutely frozen – so she also photographs the setting, or the subject, to retain some sense of the vibrancy she experiences, until the piece is finished.
Ann Foster lives in Tywardreath and works from a room in her home. She
works from flower gardens, her own, those of friends, and those open to
the public. Her paintings depict a profusion of flowers, in tiny detail.
She sells these as finished works but they are also used as a basis for
her textile work. To create a multi-textured and layered piece of art,
Ann first makes up a silk 'paper', using silk fibres and adding
fragments of coloured silk thread, petals, and any other small pieces
that she selects. This mixture is pressed between mesh and left to dry.
She will hand-embroider the piece of silk 'mat', perhaps add
small pieces of fabric, beads, pieces of wool, or some fine hand-needlework,
something like a piece of cross-stitch, but in smaller detail. Ultimately
feminine and delicate, the results are exquisite pieces of work which
have a translucent quality, which comes from the gauzy sheer silk fibre,
and which have a closely detailed, gaily-coloured foreground.
Ann's husband, Tony Foster, is well known internationally as a traveller and artist. He treks to uninhabited places, sometimes travelling by canoe, carrying the minimum of gear, and using local porters. The Grand Canyon and Mount Everest inspire him and he creates huge watercolours on the spot. He has recently returned from a month in Tibet, painting the East and North faces, having made it his mission to paint Everest from all vantage points.
His paintings are about six feet wide and he takes great rolls of paper with him. In marked contrast, his paint box measures only 3 x 2 inches, and contains a small selection of colour blocks; he uses no white. He completes a third of the work on site, makes copious notes and colour references, then completes the painting in his studio at home in Tywardreath.
Tony's quest is to capture the essence of the place by living and working in the mountains. He gathers bits of moss, bones, leaves, shells and other mementoes of the environment where he's been, such as stones or feathers, which hold an energy of their own and contribute to the integrity of the work. Some of these are incorporated into the finished painting, inside the frame.
He sells most of his work in the USA and his next major solo exhibition "Searching for a Bigger Subject," is in The Bankside Gallery at The Royal Watercolour Society in London.
Keith Bunt is more accessible because he works at The Riverside Studio
for two days a week, as well as at his home, and can be found working
on his latest canvases by anyone who calls there. He shares the Riverside
exhibition space with a variety of other artists where we called in to
see him at work, and to discuss his paintings. He has used water colour
in the past but now concentrates on oil, squeezing the paint onto the
canvas, then using a brush to work the paint.
Starting with an idea for a painting, Keith says he has many sleepless nights thinking how best to approach the subject. When he first begins, although he has an idea of how he intends to approach the piece, it evolves as he is working on the canvas. Keith combines thick paint, a bold use of colour, and strong, positive brush strokes to create pieces of art with a powerful solidity and presence. One piece of particular interest to me is worked almost entirely in white; it is a shimmering, dazzling piece of work which captures that brief moment before one's pupils have adjusted to bright light, and before the eyes have focussed, and is a luminous impression of early light and sunshine.
Keith is currently working on a set of large abstract works which will
depict four stages of mining in Cornwall; using browns, blacks and deep
shades of blue, the first conveys a sense of activity and industry; the
fourth and last will demonstrate the opposite; empty seams, inactivity
and stillness. The scale of pieces varies from these very large canvases
to the very small, some of these smaller pieces, for example, being impressions
of a sailing boat in a river. All the works are framed simply, in white,
which allows the fresh vibrancy of the colour to resonate out of each
frame.