Reaching a new watershed

Watershed, the one-word title painter Jenny Ryrie has given to her exhibition in the Belgrave Gallery, St Ives, has two distinct meanings. While it can refer to the line of separation between waters flowing to different rivers, basins or seas, it can also allude to a turning point in affairs, a crucial time or occurrence. In the event, it could hardly be more apt as the paintings that make up Watershed relate to the artist’s exploration of Cornwall’s rivers and seas, and to the fact that, despite being rooted in particular places, they also represent a change of direction for her. She admits that, although landscape has been the starting point, her actual act of painting has peeled off in other directions.

An artist who shares her time between Cheshire and Cornwall, Jenny Ryrie was born in Lincolnshire, and comes from a dynasty of 18th century watercolour artists, among them William Evans of Eton (1798-1877). She studied in Edinburgh where she was tutored by Elizabeth Blackadder and gained her MA in fine art. One of the most respected artists in the north west, she set up the Professional Artists in Cheshire, now known as the Cheshire Artist Network, and has been artist-in-residence at Hay-on-Wye for the Guardian Literature Festival. An associate member of the Penwith Society of Arts, she is also a member of Royal Birmingham Society of Artists.

A specialist in watercolour, this solo show provides her with the opportunity to present a broad body of themed works.

It was in the spring of this year that she began tracing the streams and rivers that find their way from the central ridge of high ground, the spine of Cornwall, down to the salt waters of the north and south coasts. Using water colours, gouache, acrylics and charcoal, she made sketches of the River Fowey as it makes its way from Bodmin Moor via a series of cascades to Golitha Falls through woods to near Lerryn and then past Golant.

“Near Tintagel, standing with my sketchbook by the shallow pools of St Nectan’s Glen, I could look up at the River Trevillet as it pours in a magical sixty foot high waterfall over and through late Devonian slate, then down through Rocky Valley to open at the bay near Bossiney. Through the summer and autumn I’ve looked at the north coast, from Constantine Bay and Treyarnon to Godrevy and St Ives Bay, and then on to Cape Cornwall and Porthcurno and, turning the corner, as it were, to Kynance Cove and the Lizard and along the south coast to Roseland on to Hemmick. The Gribben and Lansallos Cove.”

Renowned for the way she pushes the boundaries of expression in her compositions, using a wide variety of techniques to produce lyrical works in which she explores the energies of the landscape and sensations related to ideas and emotions, in such watercolours as Sea Meditation, Across The Bay, Luminious Sea, Clodgy Point and Edge: Cape Cornwall, the properties of fluidity and translucency and the medium itself, seem to become a literal manifestation of the flowing waters, not forgetting the ever changing light of the skies above.

An artist who regards St Ives as