Sea Breezes, at the Porthminster Gallery, in St Ives, is a collection of contemporary paintings and ceramics by leading British artists, inspired by the Cornish coast.
Details from Summer Glow, by Martyn Perryman
It’s described by the gallery as a “visual and textural celebration of the serene bays and rocky coastline for which St Ives and west Cornwall are famous”.
The sweeping canvases, bold strokes, and colours of Andrew Bird’s captivating abstracted acrylic paintings work in a magical dialogue with the meditative and calming sea horizon vista works by Martyn Perryman, which recall the intense, indescribable blue and rising hypnotic light over St Ives Bay.
Jenny Hirst’s spontaneous and atmospheric paintings evoke fleeting impressions of the wild, windswept, rocky shorelines of West Penwith’s ‘hidden’ places. Jenny expresses the coast’s changing moods through dramatic light and shadow on water, with sweeping sands disappearing and re-appearing with the ebb and flow of the tide.
Tideline, by Craig Underhill
Having relocated to the St Ives area permanently in 2020, Craig Underhill’s exploration and ‘discovery’ of the dramatic and beautiful coast of west Cornwall has inspired this stunning new collection of his distinctive hand-built ceramics. Using surface mark-making, slips, underglaze colours and glazes on to hand-built ceramic slab forms, Craig, who is in demand among international collectors, creates works which are painterly, playful, and elemental.
Paul Wearing’s hand-built sculptural vessels are inspired by our inter-connectedness with nature’s seasons and cycles. In this new collection, the rhythms of the sea and coast are evident. Working with grogged stoneware clay and, by contrast, porcelain, Paul mostly uses coiling techniques to build his vessels, but also incorporates some press-moulding and slab-building methods. He renders the surfaces with brushed layers of slips and glazes that are reactive in oxidised firing, to bring disruption through blistering, cratering, and crackling to the surfaces.
Sea Breezes runs until 31st August.
