Retrospective show highlights artist’s unmistakable atmosphere
Artist Michael Praed has drawn on his deep roots in Cornwall over his 60-year career. Martin Holman visited his Retrospective Exhibition at the Penwith Gallery in St Ives
THE vertical seams and cross cuts at Geevor and South Crofty mines were too dark and narrow to sketch in, but painter Michael Praed knew the right people to ask about exploring underground.
The results were indelible impressions of an aspect of Cornwall few encounter today.
Natural light penetrated only so far into the shafts, so this artist empowered his faculties of touch and imagination to create images that are perhaps the most dramatic for visitors to his 60-year retrospective at the Penwith Gallery in St Ives.
They highlight Praed’s achievement in translating experiences beyond the visual – like time, texture and space – into paint and related media.
Best known for his translucent treatments of open country and shoreline, the show’s revelation is his interpretation of sharply drilled angles and glistening mineral seams in jagged streaks.
“I’ve drawn everywhere in Cornwall,” he said. Above ground he walked the landscape and shoreline of the county, sketching the places, colours and forms he carefully observed. Above all, he absorbed the effects of air, land and sea, the climate’s sudden shifts of temperature and transient coloration of light.
Water, sky, boats and harbour walls predominate in his imagery.
Praed grew up in Penzance and his family’s heritage was connected with the sea. His son, Nicky, also a painter and an engineer, has captained netters out of Newlyn.
Asked why he choose to be an artist, Praed’s answer is immediate. “From an early age, I never wanted to do anything else.”
Like all parents, his own had reservations about an art career.
Figures he met inspired him by their example. His drawing master at Lescudjack School was Alexander Mackenzie, a leading figure among the post-war artists in St Ives.
Mackenzie worked in the abstract modernist spirit. The bold structure of his landscape paintings came noticeably to influence Praed’s approach. Ben Nicholson’s linear style, although more precise that Praed’s handling, also began to impress him in his 20s.
Abstraction is most powerful in Praed’s compositions of the land, above and below surface. Colour and space are expressive, while lines stand out as restful or energetic rhythms like varied tempos in music.
At Penzance School of Art in the late 1950s, his tutor John Tunnard also had a lasting impact. Painter, textile designer and jazz drummer, Tunnard’s sensibility combined markedly whimsical elements with the quiet romantic overview. Praed has incorporated this mood into his perspective on coastline, rock cliffs and harbour scenery.
His approach generates an unmistakable atmosphere. Often a high viewpoint looks down onto a scene that does not exist in reality, asserting the work’s prime identity as “a made thing” rather than a detailed representation.
Drawing is integral to every picture. Traces of initial ideas in a soft, brown conté crayon or in pencil are never entirely lost beneath subsequent painting. Sometimes these lines are reinforced over the oil or in stake-like accents overlayed in black.
Praed prefers oil to acrylic, a synthetic medium he never uses. Oil enables him to build luminosity into a composition while the wood panels he always works on allow him to scratch and sand the oil paint into a texture, and to scrape away passages to reshape them.
Occasionally features appear in his work that identify a particular location, such as the blocky harbourside buildings at Mousehole or the stacked granite headland and veins of black tourmaline at Tol-Pedn-Penwith.
His most emblematic compositions, however, are distinguished by generalised evocations of the region that move beyond precise topographical detail. Their enduring physical characteristics make them recognisably Cornish.
Whether above ground or below, Praed typically highlights the shapes and material textures of surroundings he has known, studied and lived in throughout his life.
As a result his paintings and drawings have evolved a subtle, almost tactile visual shorthand. Its hallmark is the tense balance between line and colour.
Praed taught art for almost 30 years at Lescudjack, taking over from Mackenzie, and then at Humphry Davy School.
“I loved teaching,” he said, “introducing children to a range of materials. I made work to demonstrate techniques that developed my own involvement with abstract design.”
He turned full-time to painting in 1993, working first in a studio high above Newlyn before relocating more inland. Reflecting on the opportunities his work has offered him, he recalls “all the friends and local people who have given their support over the years”.
A well-travelled artist, he is rooted in Cornwall.
The exhibition is being held at the Penwith Gallery in St Ives until May 11, and spans his entire professional career, with works from as early as 1970 up to the present day.