One who, as chairman of the trustees at Newlyn Art Gallery, is renowned for his outspoken opinions on matters relating to local art and artists, unafraid to nail his colours to the mast, as it were, he has been concerned especially about the recent developments at the gallery and with the fact that the works of so few local artists are shown there. Bearing this in mind, it seems a shame that a show such as this could not be berthed there. However, Newlyn Art Gallery's loss is Badcock's Gallery's gain. The fourth solo show Jeremy Le Grice has enjoyed in this gallery during the past eight years, while his previous exhibitions here have all been highly successful, there is no doubting the fact that, as claimed, this one "confirms his reputation as one of the most rigorously self-renewing and serious artists now working in Cornwall".An artist who took his first steps toward what has since become a long and distinguished career in art when a schoolboy at Eton, where he came under the influence of none other than the infamous Wilfred Blunt, he later studied at the Guildhall School of Art, spent a year in St Ives at Peter Lanyon's famed St Peter's Loft School, and then followed all this with "the icing on the cake", a four-year stint at the Slade in London. A professional painter for just over half a century, it was in the autumn of 1956 that he "began to paint alone" and started showing his work in Newlyn and St Ives. One who has since exhibited extensively in this country and abroad, to quote the eminent art critic William Packer, "he has always been his own man. . .Year after year he returns to the themes he has seen and felt most strongly about in Cornwall, his work is therefore as Cornish as can be. He uses his eye idiosyncratically and makes paintings beautifully". Neither strictly representational nor a totally abstract artist, giant-like he bestrides the gap between them with paintings that are as gutsy as they are ground-breaking.

Each contained within an ebony-coloured frame, all made by himself, and featuring everything from a tiny punt to a four-masted vessel, his 100-and-more small paintings - average size some two dozen square inches - are not boat portraits as such but unplanned, unpredictable, boat-shaped responses to all that he sees from his studio window and might be read as metaphors for all that he feels about Newlyn in particular and life in general. Paintings that, as he says, "provide a sidelong glance into one aspect of the evolution in my work", he regards them as being "the painterly equivalent to the maquettes that sculptors produce, Moore, Degas, Rodin especially, all fingers, thumbs, wax and clay. It's their physical nature I like and the direct connection with the unconscious".

For good measure, he is also showing half a dozen of his larger works plus a group of eight paintings entitled Elegy for PZ 291. An octet of bold black boat shapes, it commemorates the Elizabeth Ann which, as he points out, was "a particularly magnificent 'beamer' decommissioned and torn apart in the harbour last autumn. She was part of the fast depleting fleet I think of as galleons. Within the next year or two these 'beamers' are due to be gone. No doubt they will come to be regarded then as extraordinary and beautiful as their predecessors, the luggers that also brought relative wealth to Newlyn in the hands of their expert crews".

Paintings that illustrate small is beautiful, that resonate with all the power, passion and profundity of a requiem, as salty and seaborne as they are seasoned and satisfying, Newlyn Boats are not to be missed.

? They can be seen in Badcock's Gallery, The Strand, 10.30am-5.30pm Monday-Friday, 11am-5.30pm Saturday, until April 22.

article copyright THE CORNISHMAN 

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