Gill Watkiss
special collection
GILL WATKISS studied at the Walthamstow School of Art before coming to live in Newlyn, Cornwall in 1959. A decade later, in 1969, she moved to a house at Cape Cornwall, St. Just and says that this move was a major turning point in her career.
Up till then she describes her life as having been an artistic desert. But on her arrival in St. Just she would walk to the playing fields and begin to paint. She continued to paint St. Just and its inhabitants for the next eight years.
It was at this moment in her career that people first began to sit up and take notice of her work. Before the move to Cornwall she had been focusing on still lives in London and her work had received little interest. The paintings during her time in St. Just were stimulated by its wind blown streets and cottages and the vitality and life of its community. It is still a dominating force in her approach to painting West Penwith today.
Gill Watkiss has exhibited her work widely, though West Cornwall is her natural territory. Whether she paints bridal processions across Cornish town centres in stormy weather or family outings to Cape Cornwall, Porthleven or some other instantly recognisable locality, Gill Watkiss captures the atmosphere, the people and the drama of daily life in the Atlantic west of Britain. Her work can be found in private collections throughout Britain, Europe and in many far flung corners of the world. A Gill Watkiss painting evokes instantly vivid memories of some otherwise obscure localities in Cornwall - Drym, Porthgwarra, Germoe, Cape Cornwall, Marazion, Tregerest and Lonkey Moor to name but a few - forever captured in a time frame by this artist.
ARTIST'S PROFILE by Edward Krcma:
There is a sense of both intense familiarity and a curious distance in the art of Gill Watkiss. Her paintings depict scenes in Penwith, the western edge of Cornwall, using distinctive landmarks and architecture to anchor her work in the real and the geographically specific. This specificity is bolstered by the inclusion of place names in the titles of her work. Despite this insistence on specific location, Gill Watkiss veers away from naturalism, her forms being neither realistic in physical terms nor limited to naturalistic accuracy. Rather, her work is charged with psychology and expression, courting an emotional response.
She is as concerned with human activity as she is with the landscapes in which they walk, relax, and relate. It is perhaps her treatment of Penwith society that has made her so popular in this area. However, these paintings are not altogether comforting. Employing expressive distortions of form and scale, as well as intensification of colour, Gill Watkiss imbues her work with a psychological potency that often manifests itself as an intangible malaise, somewhat reminiscent of the troubled work of such northern Expressionist painters as Munch and Kirchner. The figures populate dark, often ominous landscapes, with skies unsettled and forms that are at once troubled yet full of empathy with the human condition surrounding them.
The populating figures are often numerous, yet they rarely interact; as in a snapshot they stare blankly back at the beholder. They connect through formal rhythms, yet rarely seem aware of each other's company. Thus we are struck at once by the intimacy and familiarity of these scenes and at the same time by the distorted and emotionally laden lens through which they are seen.
© Great Atlantic Publications and Ed Krcma, December 2000.
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