Ken Turner solo show Penzance 2026

 Ken Turner is 100 years old, still painting, and celebrating his birthday with a solo show at Penzance’s Wharfside Gallery, 10-7 Tuesday to Sunday, 23 July to 4 August 2026.

If you google there are very few artists alive and working at this age and that in itself made me approach the show with awe akin to seeing Keith Richard perform, and he and Mick Jagger are a mere 82 years old.

It’s a large room full of big square paintings in a vigorous expressionist style that convey emotion - anguish, rage or excitement.

‘My Ride Over a Tesla Car’, 2025, is one of the most memorable as it’s linked to Ken Turner’s performance, actually driving in a Sherman tank over a Tesla car with FASCISM as its number plate,  as a protest against Musk and all he stands for. What a wild and genius idea.

You can watch this and many of Ken Turner’s  previous performances on video there and headphones are provided. 

There are also available to buy two books Ken has written.
The breadth, inventiveness, humour, outrage and variety are inspirational. Also the sheer sangfroid to keep going, keep caring about the state of the world, and the craziness of the art world, despite the seeming indifference of people who are  passive as Ken tries again and again to provoke them.

 

‘Grief of the World’ is a quietly grim picture of endurance with a face rather like Ken’s own.

 

‘Nature is Crying Out’ is a wonderfully complex composition carried out with such panache and vivid sense of design that it holds your attention.

Well here’s a happy birthday to Ken Turner.

An exhibition I leave feeling encouraged to continue.



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`Penlee Gallery, Penzance The Branfield collection

Penlee House in Penzance have an exhibition of works from the private collection of Pep and John Branfield Open now and until January 13th 2024. The art is to be sold at auction in February so this is a good opportunity to see it together. The first room has the oldest paintings. There is a Stanhope Forbes horse which I thought might be done using a photograph from the way it is framed - something rarely mentioned in discussing Newlyn painters. There is what looks like an abstract composition by Thomas Cooper Gotch but is a study for his ‘Lantern Parade’ Further on in the back gallery there is a small David Haughton, ‘Carn Bosavern’ of which he said the drawing of St Just was the hardest to do drawing of any for him. Was this because it’s hard to keep track of a row of houses observed with their great similarities but interesting differences? I liked very much the elegant pots by Peter Swanson. There is a Bryan Pearce of men bowling that does not employ his all round perspective. I wondered if the collector got his explanation of strange symbolism in a Patrick Hayman directly from the painter? Not all the pictures strike me as the artists’ finest work but perhaps the collectors tried to find affordable examples to make a comprehensive collection. The last pictures are by the living Kurt Jackson and there is a stunning large brown one of a vast scene, ‘Carnsew’. My favourite was Willy Barns-Graham’s ‘Gurnard’s Head’ with its wintry look and lively tree amongst buildings but I gathered the attendant would also make a bid for it.

Montol, Penzance 2022

Montol in Penzance 2022 

On the eve of the winter solstice hundreds of people are out on the streets of Penzance, many wearing masks and elaborate headdresses, some with coats of coloured tatters. There are a number of processions with music and dance and flaming torches.The band has drums and violins and a trombone and the tunes repeat and repeat. There are horse skulls attached to dancing figures. 

In between times everyone repairs to one of the many pubs, emerging again for another slow progress around, glimpsing half familiar figures, losing touch and regaining it. 

Although it started to rain I didn’t notice it under my wide hat for some time, mesmerised by the repetitive rhythm, the variety of costumes, the lulling within a safe and friendly atmosphere, unusual in a huge crowd.

 It’s all inclusive, those who dressed specially and those that didn’t, those that live here and visitors. 

 It’s to do with the solstice, the end of the darkest shortest day of the year, the oldest celebrations imaginable recreated, continued since people first lived here, the promise of spring, the sunrise to come, the reason Christmas was put at this time, when something is needed to carry us through the winter again, when crowds gather at Stonehenge hoping for sunlight despite the grey morning.

 All part of something - indistinct but alive and shared.

Alfred Munnings at Penlee, Penzance

Alfred Munnings at Penlee House, Penzance, Cornwall, UK 2019 , 15 June - 7 Sept.

Alfred Munnings (1878 - 1959) is known for his reactionary speech as President of London's Royal Academy, 1949, in which he dismissed Picasso and Matisse as worthless.


His own work shows great powers of observation and is executed with a lively panache. His caricature of himself shows him full of verve as he attacks a canvas with outstretched brush.

He was inspired to live in Cornwall by Laura Knight's painting of 1909. 'The Beach' and he fitted into the Newlyn painters' convivial scene. He had sight in only one eye following a boyhood injury and therefore was rejected for WW1 service although he later became a Canadian war artist depicting horses in action.


Horses were Munnings' speciality. It jars now to see a trio of hunting scenes and Penlee try to minimise this by a caption saying that Munnings once had an exhausted fox set free. In a jolly Christmas cartoon he showed a fox standing on a stool joining in dinner as an equal hunter with the two human huntsman.


My favourite work was a painting of a blue stockinged young Phyllis Crocker looking very modern and pensive, seated on rocks with dark hills behind her.


There is a lovely illustrated poem showing a woman riding,with the words, 'My many cares I then forget In wide and peaceful eventide.'
I can't help but see this as a sad allusion to his having married a wife who tried to kill herself on their honeymoon and subsequently fell for his friend, Captain Gilbert Evans, who left to serve overseas. She then succeeded in suicide. Munnings magnaminously gave his bravura painting of her on horseback to her lover. Later he married again, choosing another woman who looked very well on a horse.


The exhibition includes works by other painters of the Newlyn artists' colony plus letters written by Munnings. Thus his work is placed in context and he comes to life as a person, excelling in his painterly realism whilst unable to comprehend the way modern art was developing in France.


Then as now there were many competent and worthwhile arists who leave us interesting observations without aspiring to be avant-garde ground breakers.

Hope and Sewing

‘Skirts of Hope' - Sewing with Purpose.

I hadn't sewn anything for about fifty years but I was drawn somehow to this group via a Facebook

post from 'Doing what we can'.

The idea about the skirts came from some post WW2 activity that women began in Belgium.

This recent incarnation of it is in Penzance, Cornwall, UK. So far all women, a dozen or so meet

in a hall or this time in the open air bandstand in the attractive Morrab gardens.

Three hours sitting in a circle sewing, using appliqué or embroidery, everyone absorbed in making

something meaningful and personal. Some are using inspiring quotations, some utilise fabric that

has significant memories for them.

Whilst working one or two women have brought poetry by themselves or poets they admire, to read

to everyone, which is enjoyable. Otherwise there is all sorts of companionable chat.

One woman has come prepared to tell us about an organisation she is involved in, the

Extinction Rebellion movement that recently held large demonstrations in London to raise

awareness of the crisis of climate change. It seems a town nearby has 150 members and regular

meetings at which 40 are likely to attend. One of their objectives is to use a technique used in

Ireland which resulted in abortions being legalised. This is 'citizens' assemblies'. It's not quite clear

how these are selected. It sounds as if the climate change concerns are provoking a new wave of

involvement in communities.

The whole event is peaceable but despite its hippy look, or maybe even because of it, also

teetering on the edge of rebellious action.

The previous meeting had tea and cake and also a more spiritual dip into a guided fantasy started

with a Buddhist brass bowl sound produced by an implement passed round it's rim. This time some

cards are randomly selected and read out, all emphasising love and hope.

There's no discussion of what happens or the way it's done, it's like a tradition has been

established by core members and the rest of us fit in with it.

A future exhibition of the 'Skirts of Hope' is mooted.

Two policemen arrive, a very rare sight normally, to check us out. Maybe they were out to enforce

the ban on drinking alcohol in the gardens, which I noticed being cheerfully disregarded by two

young men with bottles of beer as I came in. We joke about having dangerous needles and pins

and scissors.

So, are these sorts of gatherings of mostly women meeting all over the world to engage in

therapeutic slow decorative sewing with political and social intent to improve the world?

It's a fascinating phenomenon.

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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