Two books about Ben Nicholson

 There is a Ben Nicholson on show at the moment in Tate St Ives.

This is what prompted me to read more about him and I found two very different books in the library.

Sarah Jane Checkland wrote ‘Ben Nicholson - the Vicious Circles of his Life and Art’ published 2000.
The title tells her approach and in fact the only photographs included are of people not of the artist’s art.
The author has done extensive research and tells us as much as she can cram in a gossipy journalistic amusing way. 
Ben had a sad childhood and was sent to boarding school.He did not do well at art school.
He was asthmatic so unfit for service in WW1. He married three times and had various lovers, creating triangular relationships that caused Winifred and Barbara a lot of pain, but as the author points out he avoided triangles in his abstract works.
He and Barbara Hepworth formed the Penwith  Society in St Ives which broke away from the St Ives Society in order to promote abstract art.
There are many interesting details about Ben’s life and how abstraction became more popular after WW2, aided by Munnings’ reactionary speech 1949 at the Royal Academy denouncing it as rubbish,  which was  broadcast on the radio. 
By 1950 Nicholson’s work was a global success. He married his third wife, Felicitas Vogler and lived in Switzerland before returning to England.
He was involved  in Christian Science, had some Adlerian psychotherapy sessions, and gave credence to psychic beliefs and astrology.
Overall we get a complex picture of a man who was not very likeable although several women loved him intensely.

In contrast Virginia Button’s ‘Ben Nicholson’2007, in the Tate’s series on British artists, has many coloured photographs of Ben’s work and a narrative stripped back like one of his carefully crafted surfaces. 
Button is far more interested in art than is Checkland, whilst referring to the latter’s book, and gives us more to think about in analysing how Nicholson’s work developed and issues such as truth to materials, political and spiritual connections and how his work fits into art history. Ben responded to Japanese aesthetics and the author finds in his pictures ,which combine references to visually observed landscape and still life combined with abstract form and composition , ’poignant visual poetry. ‘

For clarity and artistic perspective on Ben Nicholson’s work read Virginia Button: for gossip and a critical account of his life it’s Checkland.
In this case the covers sum up the difference.

I saw a retrospective exhibition of Ben Nicholson some years back which showed how clearly he was affected by the work of others, changing his own in response. I thought the period when he was first in love with Barbara Hepworth was the most interesting when his personal life motivated figurative imagery expressed within abstract language - the time from which comes he picture I saw in Tate St Ives.

Huw Marshall , a Scottish artist in Penzance.

 Huw Marshall, an artist from Scotland who lives in Penzance

Huw had a week’s exhibition at Redwing Gallery in Penzance in May 2026 and he agreed to be interviewed by me soon after this in his studio there.

 

I have seen some of his large paintings - very striking, expressionist, full of movement and contrasts of colour and tone, showing figures dancing or moving.

The problem is because I know some details of his life I am expecting certain things and I can’t now tell what would be conveyed if I did not know what I do. 

Does the artist want us to react without knowing - I think so - I think he hesitates to be explicit and uses his art as a therapeutic help - as he says to keep himself sane - in the face of sorrow and protecting his audience from feelings to which he alludes in poetic oblique ways.

Huw told me he has a subject in mind for a new work,  ‘ the distance between two people when one of them is dead’ - a subject I know something about from my own life.

Huw Marshall is from Scotland but has lived in Penzance for years, devoting his time to painting since he retired from being a GP.
His life as a doctor was devoted to helping people and people are his subject.
He knows enough of anatomy to be able to draw figures from his imagination convincingly and he used to go to life classes.

Huw is not concerned with his art career, not expecting or pursuing wide sales or fame or thinking that these would help him, but having a studio at Redwing Gallery provides a safe although austere space for him and he can mix with people there and drink excellent coffee. It’s a community interest company run to help art and music, green issues and veganism flourish and has become the hub where many interesting groups and individuals meet. 

Artists Huw admires include Breughel, Bosch, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, artists of  the First World War  and the living Glaswegian artist of the war in Bosnia- Peter Howson.

On the wall is a large 12 x 5 foot composition in grey tones based loosely on the Last Supper but with many figures which he refers to with humour as ‘Last orders at the Bowling Club Social’. This has poured out spontaneously in a few days, carried out with 6 inch brushes. It’s not finished yet.

In his recent show there was a similar sized one of three angels, using a limited palette, showing them as strong, interlocking, vivid but calming.
Asked if he believes in angels Huw says he does, as a something that looks after him, whilst he also has a scientific non religious outlook.

He is an artist of paradoxical contrasts who works from the heart and makes a rather wild and strange impression, original and worth seeking out.

His beloved female partner was murdered a few years ago and the tragic intensity of that I think vibrates within Huw’s work.

Newlyn Society of Artists at Tremenheere until April 19th. 2026

 The Newlyn Art Society has its April show at Tremenheere- selected by film critic Mark Kermode, ‘Eye of the Lens’. No theme was set. Open daily 10.30 t0 4.30 with free admission until April 19th

 

I arrived frazzled by tense driving on narrow roads but on leaving after an hour examining the probably 100 exhibits by almost as many artists I somehow felt more equal to the road challenges and coped with getting lost with equanimity so maybe the art had left me somehow slightly braver.

It’s quite hard work taking in such variety although the artists’ statements can help where works baffle. I would have liked cvs or brief biographies also and a photo of the artist.

 

One of the people who use video gets a whole room for their evocative installation using toys and objects from their childhood - Mike Thorpe. Two vases, one with tulips standing up and the other with them collapsed as they decay seemed a metaphor for our brief lives à la Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam- ‘the flower that blooms today tomorrow dies’  - preceded in the poem by ‘one thing is certain and the rest is lies’. The artist’s mother had died when they made this. The sounds of a child’s xylophone add to the solemn sadness and permeate the rest of the show.

Janet McKeown gets her own video screen to show badgers and rabbits on a night recording video with a soundtrack on headphones of busy human chatter contrasting with nature’s quiet woodland activity.

 

The other, silent, video contributions are unfortunately put together on a loop, at least with the times given and with seating but it seems likely most visitors won’t last  out to see them especially as some move at a glacial pace.. The drawn animation by Karen Lorens stands out as it’s fast paced and amusing.

A photo of Ken Turner by Patrick Shanahan also impresses in its precise recording of the artist, now a phenomenon himself as he is aged 99, and Ken has a powerful anguished painting of sorrow upstairs ‘weeping world’.

 

What an odd building the gallery is with no internal staircase so you have to walk up the slope and round to see the upper floor.

I found Phil Booth’s 3d work ‘Lion Hunt - Golden Horse’ baffling but so well made.

The small figures contrasting Stone Age with Tin Can age confronting one another were clearer - but then the title corrects my interpretation as it’s called ‘Bal Maidens and the Tinnie Boys’ by Julia Giles.

 

I liked the way Sally Tripptree had assembled small painted elements into a whole by stitching.

 

‘New year morning ‘by Stuart Ross was wonderfully clear but impossible to photograph without my reflection in the glass. It shows the moon in a clear blue sky.

Many of the NSA artists I am not aware of exhibiting anywhere else, which is where cvs could help, but it makes me think how studded Cornwall and possibly most of the world is with artists, addicted to making art which rarely sells but piles up, often unseen even. 

Later that evening there was art on tv from cave walls in France made 33,000 years ago. No one really knows why those artists made theirs. Their drawings were just as good, as vivid and somehow necessary as what we do now.

Knausgaard 'School of Night'

 The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard.  2025

 

 

I really like Knausgaard’s writing - the simple way it flows, the inclusion of all sorts of cultural references, the surprises in the plots, the introspection and the convincing detail. Not the lack of chapters.

This one is all about a narcissistic man, who deceives himself and  behaves badly.
It’s hard to believe that in the undescribed gap of 20 years he has found a woman who agreed to marry him and have a child.
I believed that he feels close to his little boy and also that he simultaneously and dangerously wants some distance from him.
He lacks insight and foresight but has somehow found great success in life.

As the protagonist, Kristian, is a photography student there is a lot included about this medium and his progress with it.
Along the way  there are many references to Christopher Marlowe and to Faust and a sense of karma.
He meets a strange character called Hans who I expected to lure him into something evil but it’s more complicated  and inexplicable than that.

We do not find out why Kristian is the way he is, alienated from his family, unempathic  towards  the women he meets, old fashioned in his stereotyped views.
It’s unusual for an author  to try to inhabit such an unpleasant character but despite disliking  Kristian I still wanted to read on and find out what fate had in store for him.
It’s shocking to be alongside him, realising how little one knows what others are really thinking.

Like Mephistopheles the author gives and takes away and we the readers, having entrusted hours to the story, are held willynilly in its grasp until we emerge battered by fate.

Wild Thing - a life of Gauguin by Sue Prideaux

 ‘Wild Thing - a life of Paul Gauguin'  by Sue Prideaux, 2024

 

 

Another book on Gauguin, this time covering his whole life and evidently using extensive new research.
It’s also vividly written - a page turner of art history- and has a lot of illustrations.
Sue Prideaux is good at evoking the era and context in which Gauguin lived - whether the decadence of modernised Paris or the colonial impositions on Tahitian culture.

She brings her own insights, such as how Gauguin admired Manet’s ‘Olympe’ and shocked the art world in Paris with his South Seas versions of female nudes and black versions of Christian stories which the Pope had declared forbidden blasphemy.

I hadn’t realised that a stock market crash left stockbroker Gauguin needing to find and fail at other jobs, or that he long wanted to be reconciled with Mette his wife and their children and that he was faithful to her for a long time and unlike Van Gogh did not visit brothels.

It was also a long time before Gauguin became a success as a painter. However Theo Van Gogh, so strangely unable to sell Vincent’s pictures, sold one of Gauguin’s for 300 Francs 1988, which my googling tells me would be £3,000 in today’s money.

It seems his wife Mette was a prominent entertainer of avant garde friends in Denmark. Also Gauguin had a circle of cultural friends in Paris such as Strindberg, and at that time there was great interest in Norway and in symbolism.

The author emphasizes Gauguin’s support of women's rights and his lack of racism and  his practical helping of Polynesian folk against the inequities of colonial rule. He was very interested in the  culture of the islands, where French missionaries were in conflict with a very different attitude to sexual conduct. Gauguin was provided by his local neighbours with offers of their young daughters, with several of whom he formed relationships and had children. The age of consent was both in France and in her colonies only 13
It’s rather a confused picture Prideaux gives where native cannibalism and infanticide  is hinted at and for all the talk of freedom there was an expectation that young women would be sexually available to much older men they scarcely knew, whilst at the same time they were able to leave them and unmarried pregnancy and abortion were accepted.
Gauguin had a lot of health problems, some stemming from injuries during a fight in France, but was not syphylitic - three teeth found of his after he died having been extensively examined by scientists.

Prideaux writes carefully about Gauguin’s art, getting the reader to look again at long known paintings such as one of women on a bench which was in my classroom at my girls’ grammar school in the sixties but turns out to be of prostitutes.

 

Gauguin frequently clashed with the French authorities, wrote articles for a satirical political magazine  and was arrested at the end of his life for libelling an official. He was by now much wealthier and had had built a house he entitled ‘The house of pleasure.’ 

 Gauguin evolved from devoted family man and establishment member however rebellious  at heart to being the wild man in the tropical jungle with a string of pubescent lovers. A great story with the topical problem of predatory male figure in a society that allowed this, and with subject matter he made his own - of a sort of mythic shangrila in which he lived an all too difficult life living on tinned food and sending out his colourful visions of life in a distant place to sell in the western art market. 

Penlee House, Penzance Jan21-April 16 'Through the Lens' and 'Face to Face'

 Penlee House   Harry Paul ‘Through the Lens.’ & ‘Face to Face: Portraits from Penlee’s Collection.’
Jan 21 -  April 16 2026

These two shows contrasting one man’s photography with portraits by many artists make me think of many questions about the two forms of art.
I started with the paintings - some of whose creators will have referred to photographs. Portraits take time and skill, often conversation takes place between artist and sitter. They may have informative backgrounds. Some are of named people whereas others have titles denying them even a name. One of the newest acquisitions, by Leonard Fuller, of a young woman, looking as fresh as if it was done yesterday rather than in 1930, is entitled ‘The Silver Jacket’.

 

 

 Another is called, ‘An old Jew’, by Opie, 1779, but thought to be of Rabbi Abraham Hart. Another is ‘Maroon and Gold’ by Ruth Simpson.
Walter Langley uses his picture of Grace Kelynack, an old lady,1883, to bring us a poetic title that makes us think, ‘Time moveth not, our being ‘tis that moves’ from a verse by Henry Kirke White.
Most controversial is Dod Proctor’s naked adolescent girl, displayed alarmingly as if for sale and labelled ‘little sister’, 1933. Presumably this was not objected to then in a different era, although even on grounds of being severely badly proportioned it might have been criticised. It’s rather an embarrassing shock within the show.

We can learn much about the social history of the times from both the paintings and the black and white photos of Harry Paul, 1914-1957. 

 Some of the equipment used is displayed. I overheard visitors exclaiming as they found  images of people they knew.
Here the spontaneity of quickly taken photos, which can catch a moment of interaction, maybe a smile, shows the new medium off well. 

 

Compare a stiffly posed painted  ‘’woman mending nets’ by Ralph Todd, probably 1920’s, with the 1950’s photograph of net mending -   Philip Paynter of St Ives. However Fred Millard not only paints a finely observed woman threading a needle, 1885, but combines this with the philosophical title, ‘The thread of life runs smooth as yet’. Maybe he used a camera to help him catch the detail, then probably needing to use his eye to record the colours.

So we see here that although no one asks if art is photography, photography is surely an art.

Emilija Skarnulyte at Tate St Ives December 6, 2025 - April 12 2026

 

Emilija Skarnulyte {pronounced Scorn you Lee two} is the new artist 

at Tate St Ives

 until April 12 2026.
She is from Lithuania but has been working from a Porthmeor studio in St Ives recently.

 

 

 

The first room of her show has a video on a large screen of her blind grandmother slowly feeling around the bases of some enormous Soviet era statues which are in a park near her home. The soundtrack is of soft sounds and the ceiling is hung with aromatic herbs from Lithuania.
I sat on the bench to watch it and found it rather beautiful and thought provoking. The poem about blind men feeling an elephant and each reporting it to be something different came to mind.
The woman’s blindness was probably caused by nuclear fallout from Chernobyl. On her radio she listens to an old fable about a fisherman and a princess.

The larger gallery has some glass objects and a two sided video made in Cornwall which features the ancient stone men- an- tol.
However, these are insignificant within the huge installation of four curved screens and the back wall, on which are showing enormous projections of all sorts of images from nature. The sound is often a low sort of overwhelming roaring and there is very little seating unless you fetch a chair from the side or bag one of a few provided upholstered loungers at one end. 

 

 

I felt concerned for the staff confined in semi darkness with this booming in their ears, but was assured by a very helpful and knowledgeable young woman that they only spend an hour at a time in there.

There are four curved screens but all show the same thing.

I found it all as domineering as the soviet statues.

It also struck me as a good idea for a discotech - reminding me of the 60’s when people were stoned and moving shapes from oil trapped inside slides were moving on the walls. 
I watched as visitors seemingly bemused gave it all a few minutes of their time.

Reeling from the immersion, I staggered out gladly into daylight and the marvellous rushing waves on Porthmeor beach just opposite the gallery.

So, the first part I understood, it felt thought out and meaningful.

The second part was an unpleasant experience and not entirely clear  - the uncontrollable forces of nature versus the insignificance of humanity?

 

 

I include the artist's statement and gallery note.