PORTHMEOR STUDIO 5 PAINTINGS | ELEANOR LOUISE BUTT
NICHOLAS THOMPSON GALLERY AUGUST 19 - SEPTEMBER 6, 2020
EXHIBITION FOREWORD BY MICHAEL BIRD
The paintings in this exhibition began life in Porthmeor Studios, where the Atlantic meets the Napoleonic-era sea wall that has – so far – stopped the waves reclaiming the famous little port of St Ives. Or before then, really – before Eleanor Louise Butt made her 11,000-mile journey from Melbourne to Cornwall, when Porthmeor was still a destination of the mind, a compass-point. Because, wherever artists travel, they bring with them – as natives of the inner landscape – at least as much imaginative territory as they discover. That’s no reason never to venture abroad, however. Ben Nicholson, one of Porthmeor Studio 5’s best-known previous occupants (the other was Patrick Heron, to whom he handed it on), believed that an artist will always find the influences they need. Porthmeor – the place, the space, the history – was somewhere that Butt sensed would have meaning for her work. I think she was right.
There’s the huge studio itself, clad floor-to-ceiling in white planks and panels like the hold of a modernist ark, with its vast cinematic skylight. Underneath are cellars where fishermen clatter and swear as they did when the sea wall was built. But the studio space has never been used by anyone but artists. Over the past few years, since the building was saved at renovated, it has become a palimpsest of practice. By the door hangs a tiny sculpture fashioned from a twist of citron rind. A note pencilled by Nicholson on the wall, maybe seventy years ago, has been carefully not painted over. On one level, it must be daunting, setting up in a place where many artists have worked before you. But perhaps, too, the experience is like that of a pianist entering a rehearsal room. Why else would you be here?
And there’s the environment, of which the sky alone is present to the artist in Studio 5, but which draws the eye – the whole attention – as soon as you step outside. Porthmeor is the name of a beach (porth meaning cove and meor big in the old Cornish language), an arc of bright sand between two greenstone headlands. Westwards, the cliff path threads through gorse and boulders, defunct tin mines and moorland streams towards Land’s End.
Some of the paintings in this show I saw in their earliest stages in Porthmeor Studios seven or eight months ago. Butt spoke of her admiration for Heron and his abstract language of colour, and of Bonnard (whom Heron had championed in the unreceptive greyness of postwar Britain). And this made sense, especially of the yellows flowering here and there around the studio walls. One time – a twilit December day when groundswell, wind and rain were on full blast – we happened to meet on the coast path, not far from Clodgy Point (another earthy Cornish place-name), which has become the title of a painting.
This winter landscape, its colours and atmosphere, resonate through Butt’s new body of work – the shadowy bronze of last year’s bracken, the drenched greens, browns and greys of the cliffscape, yet underneath, beyond, the push and pulse of the sea-light. I think of these sensations as very specific to the place. Maybe they could be imagined. But on the evidence of these paintings, I’d say they were worth the travelling and the bringing home.
Michael Bird, St Ives, July 2020
Michael Bird is a British writer, art historian, and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Exeter