David Haughton @ Penlee House

David Haughton @ Penlee House

David Haughton

(1924–1991)

Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penlee Park, Penzance

Due to planned maintenance work within the galleries at Penlee the DAVID HAUGHTON exhibition has been postponed until January 2018. 

This gives the team at Penlee extra time to gather interest and promises of loans, and for this blog to find its way to even more Haughton enthusiasts and collectors.

If this includes you, please do not hesitate to email me at stephenprince.artist@yahoo.co.uk

(www.stephenprince.co.uk)

In the meantime David will be represented by one work in the forthcoming exhibition at Penlee which begins on 12 September 2015. 

THE BIGGER PICTURE showcases an assortment of diverse paintings from the St Ives region produced between the 1920s and early 1960s. David's work "St Just" (1958) will hang beside works by Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Cedric Morris, Adrian Ryan, John Wells, and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.

John Wells: Abstraction

St Ives harbour

Tom Early: Rusty Boiler, Pendeen

Alan Lowndes: Fishing Boat

The Bigger Picture, unusual for Penlee House in that it focuses principally on those artists associated with St Ives, reads like a veritable role-call of the artistic activity of the time. David's associate from his sojourn in West Penwith, Kit Barker, will be featured along side works by Roger Hilton, Patrick Hayman, Alexander Mackenzie, and Paul Feiler.  Add to this the likes of Alfred Wallis, Mary Jewels, Christopher Wood, Jack Pender, Alan Lowndes, and Tom Early, the show looks set to be the must-see exhibition this autumn in West Cornwall!

Mary Jewels 'Cornish Landscape'

The Bigger Picture

at Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance runs from 12 September until 21 November 2015

Opening times

Mon to Sat (closed Sundays)

Summer Hours 

From 1 April to 31 October

10.00am - 5.00pm

(last admission 4.30pm)

Winter Hours

From 1 November to 31 March:

10.00am - 4.30pm

(last admission 4.00pm)

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Pursuing the Intangible

David Haughton: Pursuing the Intangible

 

If you are lucky to be in St Just on a clear blue and sun filled day with the sea glittering in the distance, (early May is a good time) you will see how the light bounces off the pavement and the granite walls bringing a clarity to the eye and a stillness, on quiet days, to the scene that somehow almost wraps around you.

This was the experience of David Haughton visiting St Just for the first time, by bicycle from Nancledra with his friend and fellow painter Kit Barker. It was in the spring of 1948 and his 'discovery' of St Just was for David a "turning point", one he could only explain in terms of the "divine" and of transcendence. The experience was akin to what mystics have found, "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." (from a letter, DH to Norman Levine)

 

Since that spring day St Just became the source of almost all of David's work and preoccupied him for the next forty three years.

David was a slow, painstaking painter. "I like a surface that shows that it is closely worked, every inch considered, the medium loved and respected." If that fateful discovery of St Just was as David alternatively considered, "merely a freak of one's chemistry," one can see how the clarity and detail he found amongst St Just's  rows of cottages and long empty back streets, affected his abiding taste for "stillness, harmony and order".

 

David knew too well, "To attempt the marriage of so intangible a thing as atmosphere with an absolute watertight construction is no easy job." Was he attempting the impossible? Thankfully enough examples of David's drawings and painting have survived to give us a tantalizing insight into the strivings of one man and his pursuit of the intangible. A pursuit that returned him again and again to the streets of St Just-in-Penwith.

Stephen Prince

 

DH quotations from Norman Levine: David Haughton's St Just
(The Painter & Sculptor Summer 1961 (Vol.4))

 

 

Promises of David Haughton original works for the planned DAVID HAUGHTON exhibition at Penlee House Gallery & Museum, (from 14 January to 18 March 2017) are gradually filling a substantial file at Penlee House in Penzance. The interest in, and the enthusiasm for this planned exhibition is most welcome, and gratefully received by myself, curator Katie Herbert, and director Louise Connell.

 

Please contact: stephenprince.artist@yahoo.co.uk

or Louise Connell at

Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Morrab Road, Penzance TR18 4HE

info@penleehouse.org.uk

 

 

--oOo--

 

 

Haughton /Crozier Remembered

Haughton /Crozier Remembered

Promises of David Haughton original works for the planned DAVID HAUGHTON exhibition at Penlee House Gallery & Museum, (from 14 January to 18 March 2017) are gradually filling a substantial file at Penlee House in Penzance. The interest in, and the enthusiasm for this planned exhibition is most welcome, and gratefully received by myself, curator Katie Herbert, and director Louise Connell.

David Haughton (C) the Estate of William Crozier

 Along with paintings, drawings and etchings, documentation is beginning to come to light which includes these most interesting photographs from the period in the Sixties (1965-68) when David was teaching at the Central School of Art alongside his good friend and fellow painter William Crozier.

David Haughton (C) the Estate of William Crozier

William Crozier was part of the artistic and literary world of 1950s Soho, and like David, a friend of 'the Roberts', Colquhoun and MacBryde. 

Wikipedia records;.

"Based in London throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Crozier exhibited his works in London, Glasgow, Dublin and all over Europe. As many artists of the 1960s did, Crozier combined painting with teaching, first at Bath Academy of Art, (with Howard Hodgkin, Gillian Ayres and Terry Frost), then at the Central School of Art and Design (with William Turnbull and Cecil Collins), at the Studio School in New York and finally at Winchester School of Art where he led a strong centre for painting based on the European tradition. From the 1980s, Crozier's painting blossomed with a new freedom and confidence, the result of his giving up teaching and the stimulus provided by his studios in West Cork in Ireland, and in Hampshire in England. His abstract landscapes and still life painting used sumptuous colour to convey an emotional intensity. To the end of his life, he was endlessly concerned with the challenge of creating a new language in figurative painting."

William Crozier (5 May 1930 – 12 July 2011)

David Haughton (C) the Estate of William Crozier