Summer round-up | 31 July 2010

Cornwall is looking beautiful under summer sun and outdoor pursuits beckon, but St Ives provides the perfect alternative when the beach palls or rain threatens. Besides the Tate, there are a number of commercial galleries, and chief among them is Wills Lane, which offers a stimulating variety of fine and applied art. For the summer period I have selected a Critic’s Choice for the gallery (until 5 September); of 14 artists, some better-known than others: Maggi Hambling, David Inshaw and Colin Self rubbing shoulders with Tyrel Broadbent, Roland Collins and Nigel Ellis. Landscape is one theme, the sea another. Ceramic fish by Marcia Blakenham flee the marauding black-headed gulls evocatively drawn by Jason Gathorne-Hardy, Adrian Berg’s luxuriant landscapes swap tips on pattern with Stephen Chambers’s screenprints, and John Hubbard’s delicate watercolours of trees contrast with the lively impasto of Tory Lawrence’s north Cornish views. Victoria Achache’s colourful still-life paintings and Jo Welsh’s boxed tableaux bring further diversity. Etchings are another theme, with fine things from Self (birds and bee-keeping), Inshaw (cricket) and a complex surreal narrative from Welsh.

At Tate St Ives some of the best galleries have been given over to an appallingly slight piece of nursery nonsense by a Dutch artist called Lily van der Stokker (born 1954), but at least there’s a worthwhile selection from the Tate’s permanent collection in the other spaces. (There’s an admission charge for this Tate, so the visitor is entitled to some value for money.) The display is called Object: Gesture: Grid and is subtitled St Ives and the International Avant-garde (until 26 September), featuring such home-grown talents as Margaret Mellis, Peter Lanyon, Sandra Blow and Patrick Heron. It’s both exciting and thought-provoking to see these artists juxtaposed with the likes of Pollock, Hofmann, Rothko and de Kooning, but however revealing the conjunctions the show is incomplete without Roger Hilton.