Click here for the arts in St Ives, Penzance and the Far West
Anyone who visits West Cornwall cannot fail to be inspired by Art.The place breathes creativity and the farther west you go down Cornwall's long, dwindling peninsula the more intense and pure the light becomes, the more vibrant the colours, the more your eyes light up...
West Cornwall creates beauty out of the earth and sky. The ancient peoples who used silver-grey granite to create their ceremonial stone circles, their burial chambers, their houses and their field walls, may not have been conscious artists, but from the natural materials they worked with they produced artefacts that were beautiful as well as functional. The landscape these people moved across was flooded with colour and light in plenty. It is this combination of aesthetically pleasing natural forms and brilliant colours that has made West Cornwall an artists' paradise and made St Ives internationally acclaimed in the Art world.
Talented painters who came to West Cornwall in the late 19th century had worked in France, where they learnt new techniques of painting out of doors using picturesque fishing villages and fisherfolk as their subjects. At the West Cornwall villages of Newlyn and St Ives, artists such as Stanhope Forbes, Elizabeth Forbes, Walter Langley and Harold Harvey found that the cobbled streets and rough-textured buildings, and the life of the fishing communities, were similar to those of Breton villages. The luminous light of West Cornwall was the bonus.
The collective work of these artists became known as the 'Newlyn School', a term that defines a distinctive style. At the same time Falmouth produced its own significant 19th century artists such as Henry Scott Tuke, while Truro can boast an even earlier nurturing of the great 18th century Cornish portrait painter John Opie, who was born at Harmony Cot between St Agnes and Perranporth.
At St Ives, during the mid-20th century, traditional styles of painting evolved into the exciting modernist inspired 'St Ives School'. The work of leading artists, such as Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron and Sir Terry Frost, put St Ives on the international art map. Importance seen at the Tate Gallery and the many galleries and working studios open through the year.The exquisite land and seascapes, the villages, and harbours, and the people of West Cornwall are, still, the inspiration of it all.