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.

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

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Rock Theme, St Just  1953

Rock Theme, St Just 1953 is an oil painting in a landscape format that combines a representational landscape setting (St Just in West Penwith, Cornwall) with an abstract configuration of planes and colours that appears to describe a large structure made of stone. This structure dominates the composition; only a narrow upper portion of the canvas sets the scene within the landscape of the coast in West Cornwall. The horizon line is very high, both the sky and sea are painted in lighter and darker shades of a chalky grey respectively, and a thin strip of headland (green fields with a stony cliff surface) delineates the shape of the land. If the foreground of the work describes St Just, the distance might denote Cape Cornwall, a prominent, low headland situated to the north-west.

Bryan Wynter, Green Confluence  1974

Karl Weschke, Pillar of Smoke  1964

Weschke arrived in Britain as a German prisoner of war and for the last forty years has lived 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 has drawn 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, August 2004