CARN BOSAVERN: Indebted to Wallis

David Haughton's "Carn Bosavern the first"
(oil on canvas on board, circa 1948)

Carn Bosavern cottages from a c19th engraving

Carn Bosavern on the edge of St Just-in-Penwith is both a place and two rows of dwellings. From here everything that is the great Atlantic is quite close by. When the wind is in the right direction you can hear the sea at your very backdoor, as if the roaring waves had sent their sound from secretive Porth Nanven right up through Cot Valley.

The granite outcrop that is the Carn overlooks a network of small farm fields, Tom Thumb’s Stone (with its suggestion of human sacrifice), Cot Valley, Kelynack, and the land’s end culminating just beyond Britain’s final hill, Chapel Carn Brea (which sports Land’s End’s solstice beacon). On a clear day the lighthouses of the Longships and Wolf Rock are in clear view, as will be the Scilly Isles if the light is right. Betwixt and between lies submerged the mythical lands of Lyonnesse.

The longest section of Carn Bosavern, that is, the longer of the two rows of cottages with their backs to the Carn, face the town looking down across rooftops, to the parish church and to Botallack and Pendeen. From this vantage point one might assume the town practically unchanged since David Haughton’s day. The Atlantic Ocean forms an unchanging backdrop.

The discovery of the small grey granite town of St Just whilst on a bicycling trip with Kit Barker, was for David Haughton a revelation. "It wasn't just finding a new place," David told me, "it wasn't just like finding a girl that you know is important to you, something else happened. It was what is called a mystical or religious experience. Which is quite unlike anything else in the world. It was as if the whole place had become a kind of living being and that the universe was totally harmonious. I can't honestly describe it, and I couldn't describe it then. One can just mouth words which have no meaning... And then I went into the town and... all I can say is that I knew there were certain boundaries beyond which this thing didn't work... it was in fact one of those experiences that really do change people's lives."

"I had to start all over again, I had to start measuring," David continued, "there was no longer any freedom, and I made a drawing out of which I made a painting, which was irregularly shaped hardboard and I put some canvas over it. I was to that extent indebted to Wallis for the eccentric shape, but in fact it exactly fitted the image. I then went on from there, always drawn back to the place..."

The row of cottages known as Carn Bosavern here seen  as

the minor details at the top of a detailed drawing made from the

 vicinity of St Just's parish church looking back towards the Carn
(detail: "St Just Rooftop" David Haughton, drawing 1958) 

...................................................................................................................................

Teaching ART...

              David Haughton teaching at the Central School of Art in the 60s.

Pear Drops...

Unbeknown to many, David is part of the history of St Just. His paintings record a St Just before modern changes and they therefore have a story to tell. Indeed, my next door neighbour on the Carn could remember as a child watching David setting up his easel amongst the disorder of the old goose pens and hen runs at the rear of the cottages. He could recall how David shared out boiled sweets to all the local children who came to appease their curiosity. The artist sketching Carn Bosavern with a pocket full of pencils and sweets!
All those years later at the Central School of Art (now Central St Martins) David would still in the late 1970s and early 1980s produce a crumpled white paper sweet bag from his pocket and offer you a pear drop - his favourites!

CARN BOSAVERN

... I never imagined I would "live" in a David Haughton drawing. Yet, I did for a while, until I gave up my cottage in St Just for an apartment in Penzance. And for several years the drawing that had been a gift to me from David, that had moved with me from London to Nottingham, to Cheltenham, to Tewkesbury and finally to Cornwall, hung in the very cottage that it portrayed, one in the long row of old miners’ cottages known as Carn Bosavern in St Just-in-Penwith.
Carn Bosavern is both a place and two rows of dwellings. From here everything that is the great Atlantic is quite close by. When the wind is in the right direction you can hear the sea at your very backdoor, as if the roaring waves had sent their sound from secretive Porth Nanven right up through Cot Valley.
The longest section of Carn Bosavern, that is, the longer of the two rows of cottages with their backs to the Carn, face the town looking down across rooftops, to the parish church and to Botallack and Pendeen. From this vantage point one might assume the town practically unchanged since Haughton’s day. The Atlantic Ocean forms an unchanging backdrop.

Some six miles from Land’s End far-flung St Just is a place of contrasts, and as a town known for its isolation and desolation, for newcomers at least, an acquired taste. John Halkes has written, “St Just polarises attitudes. It is, perhaps to do with its uncompromising position, architecture and climate. Either one loves it for its emptiness, bleakness and mystery – or one is irked by its cold and windswept uncertainty.”

In the drawing no.20 Carn Bosavern is mostly obscured by the little cottage you can see in the foreground, which is actually at the end of the garden of no.20. It is impossible to find where David sat to draw this quite detailed rendering as today it is quite overgrown with gorse and brambles.

St Just - in - Penwith

St Just as it appears in a 19th century engraving:

St Just from Bosvargus Hill

"I had to start measuring..."

"I could see that my enthusisms or this experience was not based on nothing, but had a very solid foundation in the fact that the place was unusual and perfect in a certain way... I had to start all over again, I had to start measuring, there was no longer any freedom..."

David Haughton on St Just: from a recorded interview with Stephen Prince

ST JUST INTRIGUES...

"The excitement of St Just gripped David Haughton back in the late forties. He has spent the best part of thirty years painting and drawing there. Even when he left West Cornwall in 1951, to teach in London, he returned each year to work. Countless students who have been privy to his company on these visits have also been transformed by his insight and enthusiasm." 

John Halkes, 1979

-from the catalogue
DAVID HAUGHTON Paintings, drawings, prints 1948 - 1979

(Newlyn Art Gallery Sept/Oct 1979).

Discovering St Just...

David Haughton: St Just  

‘The turning point in my life occurred when I first discovered the town
of St Just. What happened to me on that spring day was inexplicable,
but it was an experience that has, I believe, happened to a good many
people. The mystics have found it impossible to describe in detail, and
they use very generalized terms. But once one has experienced anything
... of that nature it is impossible to forget it. And unless one is quite unworthy
of one’s human dignity one must live by it for the rest of one’s life. I have
no idea what caused it, whether it really was the divine and transcendent
visitation that it so clearly seemed to be or merely a freak of one’s chemistry.
But I do know that it was all important and utterly beautiful, a trance that
went beyond logic but never against it, and that I was at home and everything
was mine, loving and tender, the landscape and houses a living thing.’

David Haughton, a letter to Norman Levine

West Penwith...

David Haughton: Zennor

“So many artists and writers have sworn and stood by Cornwall because not every place in our over-populated and over-urbanised country is by any means so powerful for personal change, and few places offer such an artistic challenge: how to presentits nature, and one’s own interaction with it, as an expressive form.”

Peter Redgrove – Cornwall in Verse

DAVID HAUGHTON (1924-1991)

David Haughton: St Just Houses (oil 16 x 22in.)

INVITATION

OPEN INVITATION: SPREAD THE WORD

Can you help? - I have determined to make a concerted effort to fulfil a long held ambition: to put artist David Haughton back onto the art historical map!
David first visited West Cornwall in 1947 at the invitation of Bryan Wynter. ‘Discovering’ St Just-in-Penwith on a bicycle ride with Kit Barker was a turning point for David and the town became his life-long genius loci.
I envisage a small book celebrating the valuable accomplishment of David’s masterful draughtsmanship and inspired technique, and I would like to invite all who knew David, particularly past students at the Central School of Art, to contribute recollections of David, his teaching, and his field trips to St Just and Kelynack.
If you were taught by David and/or accompanied him on visits to St Just, and would like to contribute please put pen to paper and drop me a line (or two or three or….). Artist Noel Betowski has contributed a lovely piece. Let’s make this happen! I look forward to hearing from you.
Kind Regards
Stephen Prince

http://www.stephenprince.co.uk/

stephenprince.artist@yahoo.co.uk