ARTIST ROOMS: Sol LeWitt

Gillian Ayres CBE RA, Weddell  c.1973–4

As with most of Ayres’s work, the title Weddell was added once the painting was finished. It may derive from the sea of the same name, as the painting invokes an impression of the power and vastness of nature. Weddell is built up with heavily textured layers of paint, although the final layer appears thinly applied. Here Ayres presents paint as both a material act and a substance.

Gallery label, October 2019

Anthony Benjamin, Poem of the Ocean II  1960

Poem of the Ocean II is a large off-square canvas that has been broadly painted with sweeping brushstrokes; along the bottom edge is a sweeping concave area of purple, while the greater part of the painting is made up of an area of grey that has been applied in a succession of largely vertical strokes – in the centre of the painting is a flash of orange. In the mid to late 1950s Anthony Benjamin abandoned a realist style and the patronage of Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery in London when he moved to St Ives in Cornwall. There he bought a small cottage that had belonged to the artist Sven Berlin (1911–1999) and he developed an abstract expressionist style of painting heavily indebted to Peter Lanyon (1918–1964). Like Lanyon, his gestural paintings were inspired by the sea and landscape of Cornwall. Poem of the Ocean II is characteristic of these works and would be one of Benjamin’s last paintings in this idiom.

Ro Robertson, Interlude  2023

Peter Lanyon, Lost Mine  1959

The broad, gestural style of Lost Mine reflects the impact of American Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, whose work Lanyon first encountered in the early 1950s. Typically for Lanyon, however, its seeming abstraction is combined with a precise external source: a tin mine in his native Cornwall that had been flooded by the sea and abandoned. The colours are both representational and symbolic. The black stands for the mine shaft and seems to signify death, the blues are the sea and sky, the red signals life and danger.

Gallery label, June 2011

Ro Robertson, Porth I  2023

Ro Robertson, Porth II  2023

Patrick Heron, Horizontal Stripe Painting : November 1957 - January 1958  1957–8

Heron was a critic and painter who championed an approach to painting that assessed quality according to such formal values as the flatness of a composition and colour. Of his stripe paintings he wrote, ‘The reason why the stripes sufficed ... was precisely that they were so very uncomplicated as shapes ... the emptier the general format was, the more exclusive the concentration upon the experiences of colour itself.’ Heron resisted the total abandoning of subject matter and even such works as this have been seen in relation to landscape, the horizontal bands and colours perhaps suggesting the horizon at sunset.

Gallery label, February 2010

Bryan Wynter, Green Confluence  1974

Karl Weschke, Pillar of Smoke  1964

Weschke arrived in Britain as a German prisoner of war and went on to spend forty years living in Cornwall. This painting, based on the burning of the gorse on the moorland above the town of Zennor, shows smoke rising in a threatening, anthropomorphic mass. Painted at the height of the Vietnam War, it evokes the barbarism suffered by successive generations. Weschke drew on his own memories of the Second World War, when the landscape would smoke for days after battle, while his image also suggests the bombing of Dresden and the burning of bodies in the death camps.

Gallery label, March 2024