St Ives had some great stuff and the
highlights for me were:
i) The Leach Pottery, which housed the
original workshops where the father of the British pottery movement, Bernard
Leach, produced work and essentially founded a movement linking British arts
and crafts to the millennia-old Japanese pottery industry.
ii) The Hepworth Museum and Studio (above), where the
Wakefield-born sculptor worked in St Ives, and the attached and quite intimate
gardens, which displayed quite a lot of her work.
iii) The beaches, the scenery and the
coastal walks. Quite lovely.
iv) The Tate, which was much less
impressive than either of its London counterparts but still quite inspiring in
a much more small-scale and provincial way.
V) A seal. I saw one of these quite close
up swimming among the rocks. It was totally unexpected and really wonderful.
This one small but amazing thing was probably my highlight of the entire
holiday.
We also ventured into Penzance to visit
Penlee House, which is another art gallery with an attached museum and gardens.
The exhibition on here featured a painter called Leonard Fuller, who was one of
the fathers of the St Ives art community. He was a portrait painter trained at
the Royal Academy, who saw action in World War One, then came to St Ives and
set up an art school with his wife and a former Army colleague.
Hugely influential in the local area, he
then broke away from the more traditional school he set up to form a school
more allied with modernisn, which included Barbara Hepworth among its members.
Fuller lived into the 1970s and continued to contribute to both schools and was
awarded a major award for his contribution to the arts alongside Hepworth.
Penzance itself was a bit grim, although
most holiday places probably look a bit shit out of season and in the rain.
The exhibition at the Penlee, though, was well worth the visit.
