Opened by Sir Geoffrey Holland and sponsored by fine art auctioneer David Lay, the exhibition Different Ways Of Seeing features work by a trio of painters who not only saw things differently from one another but also from most other artists.
The display at Penlee House Gallery in Penzance begins with Bryan Pearce's Penzance Harbour (All Round). A painting purchased three years ago with help from the Art Fund, the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the Friends of Penlee House, it could hardly be a better sample of this St Ives artist's work.
A Cornish-born painter, because of his health problems he was blessed with caring parents and with their help he eventually found salvation, not to mention national and international acclaim, in his art.
From his personal visions of the harbours in St Ives and Newlyn to his views of Zennor and Cape Cornwall, the mix of constancy, simplicity and sincerity is astonishing.
When looking at his paintings it is worth remembering the comment made by author and art critic Mel Gooding when considering his exhibition at Tate St Ives: "Bryan Pearce has created these scenes as the setting for visual pleasures and for the celebration of the holiness of the heart's emotion. We are invited to enter them imaginatively with a joy that matches his own."
In her chapter on Joan Gillchrest, who lived and worked in Mousehole, gallery director Gill Mitchell says: "Time with her was well spent. She was full of warmth, compassion, opinions and most of all humour. Just look at any of her paintings and you will see these qualities."
She could not be more accurate in her assessment of an artist whose paintings, from Having A Good Time At St Ives and Teatime At Mousehole to I Wish I Was Still Fishing Today and It's By Someone Called Picasso, illuminate the follies and frailties of us all. When she died at her home in Mousehole three years ago in her 90th year, it was said that not only had a light been extinguished within Penwith's art scene but also that a great deal of laughter also vanished.
The inspiration and ideas for her compositions sprang from her acute observations of those around her and, while her interpretations of the local scene did not always suit everyone, few could resist the variety and vitality, colour and charm, not to mention courage and daring, of her statements.
As idiosyncratic as her compositions may be, her comments on the built-in contradictions and contrast within the human condition are as irresistible as the laughter she loved so much.
Laughter, of course, also plays quite an important part in the life and work of Manchester-born Fred Yates. As gallery director John Martin tells us in his essay on the artist, he shared an ambition, one of the few he ever had, with the French painter Jean Dubuffet, who once said: "It's the man in the street I'm after, whom I feel closest to, with whom I want to make friends and enter into confidence and connivance, and he is the one I want to please and enchant by means of my work."
With such pieces as The Heaven Boat and Our Father Who Art In Heaven, View Of St Michael's Mount and Penzance Harbour, he certainly achieved that.
He once confessed: "After 65 years I don't really know what life is about. After 65 years I don't really know what art is about either. Thank goodness, it just comes."
Something of a dreamer, it took him a while before he was able to realise his chief ambition, that of being able to live and work as a full-time painter.
"Outdoors, I allowed myself to get carried away by the smells and colours of the countryside or seashore," he said. "Indoors, I am carried away more by life in a soapbox serial where I can pleasantly dream and paint a real picture. If I paint a circus I am for a moment an acrobat. If I paint a street scene I am a woman scrubbing the door step. But in all these subjects I feel myself drawing on the colours I have experienced outdoors."
One who worked for many years in his native Manchester, like the celebrated L S Lowry, so he filled his paintings with people. However, unlike those of Lowry, Yates' people carry no sense of isolation, of being alone in a crowd, but are happy. Lightly and brightly dressed, shining like hundreds and thousands on a decorated cake, they are out to enjoy themselves.
An artist who had an infectious great sense of good humour, any one of his paintings could perhaps best be described as being a Lowry with laughs.
Three artists who went their own ways, whose visions were as delightful as they were different, their stories are told both in the fully illustrated book, Different Ways Of Seeing, by Janet Axten, John Martin and Gill Mitchell, published by Sansom & Company at £18.50, and in the exhibition of the same title which can be seen in Penlee House Gallery & Museum until November 12.
article copyright THE CORNISHMAN