Saturday, March 02, 2013

Trip, day two

628
William Scott: Still life with garlic 1947
Over many years we have made the journey to Cornwall in general and St Ives in particular many times, usually in late Autumn, or Winter.  St Ives has become a more frequent destination since an outpost of the Tate gallery was built.
Once we have eventually found our way there, (the route they send us on has apparently become longer and more circuitous every time we go) I love arrival at the car park, which stands on the hillside above the gallery.  St Ives is a precipitous rock packed with dwellings, with beautiful views of the sea: a peninsula with two bites of bays - the Atlantic and surfers on one side, and the estuary and harbour on the other.
The car park is edged by a cemetery and church and the sea beyond on one side - with the crammed in houses on the others.
The Tate gallery was built on the site of an old gas holder, now replaced with the most beautiful cylinder of glass above an amphitheater entrance.  Here is an article about the building.
Our first destination, as ever, to the cafe on the top, 
with spectacular views.  Below is the view across to the harbour on the other side.
The exhibitions on at present are concerned with still life: the work of William Scott (whose huge biography by Norbert Lynton I am reading at present), and a photographer: Peter Fraser.  At first I was irritated to find that the latter's photographs were in rooms through which we had to walk to follow the Scott paintings; but then I enjoyed having the questions about still lifes brought up for us to mull over.  The Tate has quite a few paintings by Scott, known mostly for his still life subjects of pans, mugs, mackerel. and forks, etc., which I fell in love with at first sight in a commercial gallery in Edinburgh in my early teens (early 60s) - but I now am very much drawn to his figurative work also.  This painting of his wife is in the exhibition:

William Scott: Seated nude 1939
After the exhibitions, and before the cold drove us to return to the cafe we strolled around the town and the harbour where the tide was out.



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2 comments:

June said...

Splendid tour -- thanks. I am not familiar with either artist but shall have to investigate them.

St Ives and your photos remind me a bit of the crammed mountainside we are living on now, only instead of an ocean, we have a desert down below. I haven't found the cemetery yet.

3:31 AM
Olga said...

June, I'm afraid that William Scott is not much known outside the UK, and was overshadowed by the appearance of the Pop artists in the '60s even here.

I think that although you use the word crammed, that the scales within which you find yourselves are somewhat LARGER - but I guess being crammed can also be largely in the mind.

12:55 PM

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