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.

Newlyn Society at Tremenheere October 2021

Delpha Hudson

Pippa Young

 Newlyn Society of Artists. 'Past, Present, Future' at Tremenheere Gallery Oct 16 to Nov 7 ,2021

 NSA is an exclusive group in that artists have to apply to be chosen as members and then apply to be in each show subject to selection. 

This show had a theme of celebrating the history of the society with many members referencing particular artists from the past membership over 125 years.

 I happened to go when they were having a public discussion about the society and when I arrived they were discussing if the society could provide an online source and publicity for information that might include social community art. 

Art therapy was mentioned without anyone gasping in horror. 

When Mike Tooby, past director of Tate St Ives had interviewed me twenty years ago for something he said they threw away applications that mentioned art therapy but they fished mine out of the bin because they liked my drawings. 

Now there's an artist exhibiting in the Tate drawings done by himself as art therapy when he was a child in Kosovo. 

 So somehow what I took to be based in fear of being associated with mental illness has dissipated as the wheel turns. 

It's a diverse show with as usual most artists doing what they usually do but managing to fit it into the brief.

 Delpha Hudson had a picture with women and children in it and referenced Elizabeth Forbes. 

Winnie Lyn on the other hand showed some lumpy white objects as far from Terry Frost's work as could be imagined although she said inspired by it. 

Julia Giles had a similar motivation to Peter Lanyon in being influenced by her sensory memory of landscape.

 Kate Waters had chosen fellow mystical dreamer Ithell Colquhoun to ally with. Her painting was a smeary sexual looking image. 

Noel Betowski had chosen to show a painting that depicted complex patterns of folded paper and he had been inspired by two paintings with paper lanterns by Percy Gotch and George Sherwood Hunter. 

Pippa Young said in her statement that her inspiration was the act of creation in general and her image was a strange figure combining white and black body parts. 

Of course such a theme dangerously invites comparisons with the more famous past members' works, long known and loved and done with such skill and observation that many visitors admire rather than our present confusion of styles and media. 

There's bound to be something of interest and something to hate for most visitors in the 68 exhibits. 

The panel discussion came to an end. It suggested some new social awareness and political involvement with the local community, perhaps to revitalise this oh so middle class elite enclave where pictures cost thousands of pounds and membership is closely guarded.

 But were these suggestions coming mostly from academics and other non members involved with education etc?

 We will see.

Jesse Leroy-Smith at Tremenheere Gallery, Penzance, Cornwall, UK 2019

Jesse Leroy - Smith, exhibition at Tremeneere, near Penzance, Cornwall

24 May to 23 June 2019

As Jesse Leroy - Smith was giving a talk, I arrived half an hour earlier to take a view before hearing

his.

Bloodline

Bloody blue sky thinking

Chopin's vigil, we mash up.

Love bombing

Oh Solace

Palmer White at the entrance

The dearly departed

Th good son

Large paintings. They have images, heads, animals, lots of colour. It's about something, illness,

struggle, death, love, ceremonies? He can draw an attractive head

Why this ceaseless coming and going?

 but the pictures are not done to

look attractive. They are messy, exuberant, their meanings unclear.

The talk lasts an hour. 

Jesse Leroy -Smith can talk and tells us a lot about himself, his difficult last

7 years, separation from his partner, breakdown, reconciliation. He had a painful leg infection

caused by some combination of paint and glue, cured by antibiotics.

A teacher of art, he decided he needed some mentoring himself and allowed the critic Sacha

Caraddock, who he asked to take on this role, to edit, to suggest using a different format, doing a

frieze, not trying to cram everything into one work.

He keeps scrapbooks of images, went to Berlin and drew Greek sculpture on tracing paper,

changed from heavy wooden supports to canvas. He took a year off drinking, had therapy, returned

to his partner.

He uses music to help him work and considers a band is the epitome of collaboration.

He has worked with great energy, on various projects, exhibitions, performances, with various

people.

He worries about producing more and more stuff, the environmental impact. [Could work smaller I wonder?]

He tries to start each painting anew.

My first Impressions seem fairly accurate now I know more of the artist and how he works.

And what a lovely audience, mostly artists, some his students, an atmosphere of gentle interest, of

shared struggles, of intuitive understanding. Thoughtful questions.

I hear one comment that they are beautiful, another that they're pretentious.

I can't agree with either. To me these are genuine explorations, authentic struggles.

I know the students he mentors are often also using art as a personal therapeutic enquiry and

expression because I have seen their shows.

Now Jesse Leroy - Smith is more settled and happier it will be interesting to see what comes next.

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.

.

Lexis over Land:Towards a Feminist Geography, at Tremenheere, Penzance

'Lexis over Land:Towards a Feminist Geography'.

 Tremenheere Gallery, Penzance, 

19Nov to 31Dec 2017

Curated by Nina Royle with work by her plus Jasmine Garrett, Lucy Stein, Daisy Rickmansworth, Miriam Austin, Lotte Scott, Laura Wormell, Libita Clayton, and Annabel Lainchbury.

The title of the exhibition, using an unfamiliar word which means 'the vocabulary of a language', the understated grey catalogue, the fact that prices are only available if you enquire at the desk, numbers next to works rather than names of who made them,  all points to a serious intent. 

Having spoken briefly to the curator I gather the artists are all friends and I wonder if they were all at college together. There isn't any information of a curriculum vitae nature.

The 'feminist geography'  is of the romantic essentialist variety, seeing a spiritual or mystical something that women have and tying this in with reference to their bodies, pomegranates photographed held up in front of naked breasts, hands covered with earth, recalling  Ana Mendieta.

Unfortunately to my mind references are left to the cognoscenti to notice rather than being frankly  acknowledged. There are works supported on gardening gloves like Chris Offili's lumps of elephant dung,

and chunks  of charred wood in a row like Richard Long.

There is work made in situ on the floor using local materials, work unframed  held up with masking tape, latex, plants incorporated in installation and also painting and photography.

It's not easy to work out who did what. 

There's a saw outside, distressingly left out in the rain to rust. The man invigilating feels he can't make a decision to move it when it's mentioned to him.

I leave with my brain a little bit refreshed, looking about me at the rain on a plant, spotting an earth work thrown up by work on the railway opposite Sainsburys that I think is in the two large photos, St.Michael's Mount in the background, and taking some photos myself.

This is despite a bit of disappointment. No doubt these young artists are exploring what is new to them but rather old to me. They've done very well to secure an excellent gallery space and made a show that is refreshingly uncommercial. 

I resist the romantic female essentialism, I want something grittier, more of today, and maybe next time they show they will have developed more personal and more surprising things.