Galleries - September 2012

strongly (the gallery was created by Janet Leach who ran the historic Leach pottery after the death of her husband Bernard) and work by the always idiosyncratic John Maltby (a Leach associate for many years) was beingunpacked when I visited. From September 8 the gallery downstairs concentrates on the present Lead Potter, Jack Doherty's, tantalisingwork – it's porcelain but you'd be forgiven for thinkingotherwise – while upstairs painter Matthew Lanyon has a solo show. Unlike many St Ives galleries Wills Lane makes a point of showingart and applied art from both within and beyond the Cornish borders; most notable perhaps is Suffolk based Maggi Hambling. As former director of the Contemporary Art Society gallerist Petronilla Silver knows her stuff and there is nothing here that one wouldn't fight to own. Championingwork using digital technology Wills Lane has recently sold ceramics in this field by Katie Bunnell and metalwork by Drummond Masterton to public collections. Sounds too grand for a visit? Not at all – a divine porcelain beaker by Mick Arnold, for instance, can be sourced here for £15. 12. GALLERIES SEPTEMBER 12 M atthew Lanyon ‘Midsummer Night’ at New Craftsman. W ilhelmina Barns-Graham ‘Untitled 1994’ at Belgrave St Ives. A nthony Bryant ‘Green Turned Holly Pots’ at Wills Lane Gallery. Tessa Newcomb ‘His Tulips’ at Yew Tree Gallery FESTIVAL ST IVES Art shows during the Cornish town’s September festival At Yew Tree Gallery , a short trip along the coast, 'Pastorale' celebrates the season. The fecundity of gardens and allotments, their inhabitants, oddities and quiet magic is home territory for another Suffolk artist, Tessa Newcomb. Her irresistible paintings (some of which feature in her new book 'The Adorable Plot') are shown together with those of Laurel Keeley. Keeley's ceramics, also here, are well known for strongly coloured surface decoration that suggests landscape and journeys – her paintings have developed as a natural progression of this. Nordic inspired tableware by Katrin Moye and jewellery by Duibhne Gough complete the picture. Pip Palmer In St Ives, as holidaymakers ebb away they are replaced by an incoming tide of musicians, writers and poets all down for the September festival. Galleries can breath again. In this her centenary year, Belgrave St Ives celebrates one of the late greats of the St Ives milieu, Wilhelmina Barns- Graham. Scottish by birth, her initial training was in the lyrical Colourist tradition; when she came to St Ives in 1940 she met something entirely different – abstraction. Imbued in European thinking and determinedly making St Ives a new centre for modernism, Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo were a compelling influence as they emphatically redefined the direction of art; for Barns- Graham, soon at the centre of the maelstrom, the effect was profound. The exhibition (concentrating on St Ives) illustrates her discerning eye, her searching nature and her eventual resolution of the colour-form conundrum. Until November 10 New Craftsman Gallery celebrates its 50th birthday with work by the many St Ives artists who have exhibited there – Barns-Graham included. Ceramics feature