Newlyn Society of Artists 'Drawing' at Tremenheere May 2018

Newlyn Society of Artists ‘Drawing’ at Tremenheere May 2018

I love going to an art exhibition especially if it’s free, there’s plenty of parking and there’s tea and cake available afterwards. Tremenheere has these factors in its favour although tea stops an hour before the show closes so I was lucky to get any.This time difference is of course traditional.

Unlike going to time based entertainments, at an art show you can spend as little or long a time on each of the contributions as you please and are not trapped while something you don’t like goes on and on.

So, I was very glad I went upstairs first and demolished metaphorically the pencil drawings of taps, the casts of tea spoon holding boxes and the shapes made of car body type sheets of metal. They were beauifully executed by Michelle Olson and Jack Davies but I wasn’t in the mood for them. 

Downstairs there were a lot of works drawn in many ways and media. There wasn’t much really political or narrative.  Quite a lot based on landscape, gestural marks, lots of black on white. If you knew some of the artists you could spot whose was whose.

A video was showing with each artist talking briefly about their use of drawing and I caught Suzannah Clemence explaining sometimes she drew to remember and sometimes to forget, which was interesting.

As you go in you are invited to take a stick with a pastel attached and draw on a large piece of paper hanging down. It was a bit frustatrating as there was no hard surface behind the paper and no way to draw satisfyingly but people were participating.

This is a gallery that allows work on paper to be pinned to the wall with no protection for its surface, making it seem so vulneraable if anyone should want to deface it or should even cough on it or have a child who might make a grubby mark with their hand. One such work was marked sold for £1600. It was Pippa Young’s ‘Judgement Day’ a very detailed portrayal of three RA judges, Grayson Perry, Cornelia Parker and a third one I don’t recognize, on a large sheet of paper.

I liked some of the works and as an exhibition it served to wake me up visually, to make me notice the world around me more, the exit signs and the loo signs, the flowers outside, the blueness of the distant sea.

Tremenheere somehow repells me as the most middle class place I can think of whilst I still like going there. A child of about 7 was letting their yellow dumper truck run across tables in the cafe outside area so that it repeatedlly crashed onto the stone chippings on the ground. I wanted their parents to stop them doing this, to tell them it would break, to require them to take care of it. Maybe they were too busy conversing intelligently to notice.

I heard that Ken Turner was so annoyed that his piece about refugees was refused that he has left the society. He was annoyed that they invited him to do a performance at the opening of a show for which his drawing had been rejected.

As always it would interest me to see the rejections, maybe on a slide show, or why not put the work closer together and get more in? Why were two artists given lots of space upstairs whilst the others were hung, some in academy style proximity and some more conventionally spaced?

Outside I noticed a rather chi chi use of placing things in threes, three pots, three cylindrical posts with acrylic tops and three huge pebble structures. A bit gardeners’ world.

Anyway it seems the Newlyn Society are alive and, if not kicking, drawing quite a bit.

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