Jeffrey Harris - Paintings and Prints from Cornwall and Australia, 1968 - 2022

Paintings and Prints

Jeffrey Harris

The Australian works in this exhibition were made on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people.

We acknowledge the Kaurna as the traditional owners of the Adelaide plains, and we pay respect to Elders past and present. We recognize and respect their cultural heritage, beliefs and relationship to the land, sea, and community.

Jeffrey Harris Paintings and Prints from Cornwall and Australia 1968 – 2022

Exhibition Venues Crypt Gallery, St Ives / 26 June – 1 July / 10am– 5pm Penwith Gallery, St Ives / 27 June – 18 July / 10am– 5pm The Studio, Towednack / 4 – 18 July / 10am– 5pm Venue address details on inside back cover.

Higher Bussow Farm Towednack, St Ives Cornwall TR26 3BB

01736 794888

info@belgravestives.co.uk www.belgravestives.co.uk You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram: @belgravestives

Jeffrey Harris Paintings and Prints – Cornwall and Australia Jeffrey Harris came of age in St Ives, artistically speaking. In the 14 years he lived and worked there, from 1956 through to 1970, the young oil painter developed an agile and assured language of lyrical abstraction that, by degrees, began to incorporate still-life motifs and landscape elements as he became more embedded in the thriving artists’ community and its geographical location.

Now in his 90th year, and having resided in Adelaide since the early 1970s, Harris is returning to St Ives for a retrospective exhibition of paintings, reliefs and etchings that demonstrates his curiosity and range as an artist while underscoring his formal approach to pictorial composition.

Harris arrived in Cornwall in 1956 as the newly appointed art teacher of a secondary school in Hayle. He and his first wife, Margaret, lived in the adjacent village of Lelant, three miles from St Ives. Born in Leeds in 1932, Harris had obtained a Bachelor of Fine Art from Leeds College of Art, where he majored in painting and printmaking. Following two years in the army, he had returned to complete a Bachelor of Education, at the behest of his parents, a master tailor and a machinist, who worried their son’s calling wouldn’t keep food on the table.

Alas, Harris found teaching to be a fraught business and, after six months, he threw in the towel to focus on his art, taking on a series of odd jobs for income. Following the end of his first marriage, Harris gravitated towards St Ives, whose popularity as an artists’ colony stretched back to the 1870s and ’80s, when the new railway first brought visitors to the area.

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The seaside town was enjoying a burgeoning international reputation at the time thanks to the modernist-minded community of artists that had coalesced around Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, who moved there in 1939 with Naum Gabo (the Russian sculptor departed for the United States in 1946). Meanwhile, Bernard Leach was also a longtime resident, having established his pottery in St Ives with Japanese colleague Hamada Shoji back in 1920.

In 1958, Harris met the Tasmanian-born painter Gwen Leitch, who had travelled to London on a scholarship to study at the Central School of Art & Design, where she was taught by Patrick Heron and Roger Hilton. After graduating, she had relocated to St Ives at the suggestion of Heron, who employed her as his children’s nanny and encouraged her art practice.

Leitch worked out of 7 Porthmeor Studio, next door to Ben Nicholson and, later, Heron at No. 5. She was only the second woman artist, after Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, to have been awarded one of the prized Arts Council studios overlooking Porthmeor Beach. Leitch also had a part-time job at The Craftsmen’s Shop on Fore St, run by Bernard Leach’s son David and furniture maker Robin Nance, and knew the Leach family well.

The couple, who married in Penzance in 1959, would share Leitch’s Porthmeor Studio for the next 12 years, living first at Academy Place and later on Bowling Green Terrace. Active members of the Penwith Society of Arts, whose founders included Hepworth, Leach, Nicholson and Peter Lanyon, they

showed regularly at the Penwith Gallery in St Ives and beyond, with Harris also having solo exhibitions in London and Manchester.

With a growing family to support, Harris gave teaching another go and found that he enjoyed it, lecturing in painting and drawing part-time at Falmouth School of Art, an hour’s drive away, from 1966 to 1969. He also had work acquired by the Arts Council of Great Britain, Cornwall County Council, Leeds Art Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery and other institutions.

Harris and Leitch welcomed four children into their lives while living in St Ives, and in 1970 the family emigrated to Australia.

They spent two years in Hobart, where Harris taught at the Tasmanian School of Art, before settling in Adelaide in 1973.

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, both Harris and Leitch taught at the South Australian School of Art while raising Julia, Claire, Miranda and Christopher, maintaining their art practice and exhibiting. Following his early retirement in 1990, Harris was able to focus exclusively on his art.

When Leitch was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Harris nursed her, enabling his partner of 48 years to pass away at the family home in Rose Park in 2006.

Harris continues to work in his garden studio every day, and this retrospective, which spans more than half a century, reveals an artist of considerable versatility, able to move fluently between representational and abstract pictorial modes in a way that speaks to his years at Leeds College of Art.

For while a traditional, academic method of training prevailed when Harris was studying for his fine-art degree between 1948 and 1952, when he returned to Leeds for teacher training in 1954, he was surprised to discover that everything had been turned on its head.

“Harry Thubron and Tom Hudson had come down from Sunderland, thrown out all the anatomical casts, painted the whole place white and started teaching a course called Basic Design, which was informed by Bauhaus principles,” Harris says.

“It was exactly what I was looking for, because while I was in the army I had become interested in artists like Paul Klee, who taught at the Bauhaus for 10 years,” he says.

In St Ives: The Art and the Artists, Chris Stephens writes that the “pioneering” course in Leeds “aimed to teach students to use their imaginations and to learn essential formal grammar”, implicitly encouraging abstraction. While there, Harris attended lectures

by Victor Pasmore, who had sensationally ditched figurative art for Nicholson-inspired constructivism in the early 1950s.

“That’s where my first square paintings came from. Heron started painting squares around that time too. What is the essence of it?

If your support is shaped like a rectangle or a square, the easiest thing to paint is a square, because then you can control everything,” Harris says. (continued on page 6)

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Composition in Yellow / 1968 Oil on board 98 x 105 cm

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Green Squares (Night) / 1969 Oil on board 97 x 105 cm

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“Once you start putting curves in, where you are, you don’t know.

So this new approach to teaching laid the groundwork for everything that followed. It was a whole new way of thinking about form, space and the surface of a painting,” he says.

Writing in St Ives Revisited: Innovators and Followers, Peter Davies argues that Harris’s early “‘period’ style of mosaic-like squares and rectangles of thick paint” was a function of his Bauhausinfluenced training, several examples of which are included in this exhibition: Composition in Yellow 1968; Yellow Squares 1968; Green Squares (Night) 1969; and Red Squares, 1969.

Arguably taking their cue from the abstracted impasto landscapes of Nicolas de Staël as well as Bryan Wynter’s more densely layered fields of patterned colour, these paintings radiate chromatic ‘heat’, which also serves to place them alongside the work of colourists such as Heron and Terry Frost, both of whom Harris was friendly with. Variations in hue and tone provide a sense of dynamic rhythm that causes the viewer’s eye to dance across the picture plane.

By the late 1960s, however, Harris had embraced curves and other organic forms, and was allowing figurative motifs to creep into his pictures, such as Blue Lands 1969, Pears with Knife 1969 and Winter Still Life 1969. Here, one can discern the influence of not just Nicholson and Heron, but also William Scott. Like many St Ives artists, Harris was responding to the Cornish landscape even while traversing a modernist path through abstraction. Experimenting with figure-ground and pictorial space, he began to exploit the 6

tension between illusion and flatness, image and object in paintings that have a touch of the neo-romantic about them.

Harris’ works from the early to mid 1970s bear the enduring influence of St Ives, even as the artist and his family were exploring their new environs in South Australia. Roundhouse Snooker 1972 recalls Nicholson’s carved and painted reliefs as well as Alexander Calder’s mobiles. A lifelong snooker player, Harris used to play at the Roundhouse in Market Place, St Ives.

“I really enjoy the game – it’s not unlike painting, in a way. With both, you have to think about body position, perception, how you see the balls and read the subtle angles,” Harris says.

“Some of the other artists in St Ives were a bit exclusive and tended to stick together. I was friends with them, but snooker and the working men who played it were always part of my life.

When we lived in St Ives, I had strong friendships with many of the local men,” he says.

Likewise, Red Still Life with a Circle 1973 and Blue Still Life 1974 suggest aesthetic continuity more than rupture occasioned by moving to the other side of the world. The chief inspiration would appear to be Paul Klee over anything glimpsed in Australia.

With Coastal Movements 1973, Coastal Movements II 1973 and Coastlands with John Reeve’s Jug 1974, however, Harris’s experiences of the Australian landscape – especially Myponga Beach on the Fleurieu Peninsula – are beginning to filter into his pictures.

“When we first moved to Adelaide, we used to stay in a shack on the beach at Myponga on weekends and holidays. To get there, we’d take a road up this huge hill, which then sharply descended.

Looking back from the beach you could see these bare rolling hills, like reclining nudes from behind – curving bottoms, hips, shoulders and backs. With few trees in the area, you became aware of basic geologic forms,” Harris says.

“We explored further, and from Second Valley you could walk over these hills as they swept down to the sea. They were huge.

I’d never seen that ochre colour or that bareness. It reminded me of walking the rugged coastal path between St Ives and Zennor, but a different colour, of course,” he says.

In 1974, Harris constructed a series of reliefs in shallow boxes in response to these landscapes, six of which are included in the exhibition. Comprising oil on board, relief, pencil and perspex, these ‘built’ landscapes nod to Nicholson and Pasmore. In a break with the past, we see Harris limiting his normally vibrant palette to the more muted hues of his new environment – white, beige, brown, olive, pink and russet.

Paintings made in the past 20 years show Harris re-engaging with pure colour and pictorial flatness in spare, abstracted landscapes seemingly glimpsed from above. Often featuring large expanses of a single hue – tree-frog green, desert pink, turquoise and violet – these gestural canvases may take some of their inspiration from Peter Lanyon, whom Harris met several times before the St Ivesborn painter’s tragic death following a gliding mishap in 1964.

As someone whose formative years were spent living and working in St Ives during its modernist heyday, it’s little wonder Harris continues to draw on the rich storehouse of memories and images in his mind. And he has returned to St Ives five times since, including in 1980, 1994 and 2018, when he made several suites of etchings depicting local views, whose diverse visual registers and bravura line work point to his old-school training. Standouts include St Ives, Cornwall, The Harbour 1980-81, The Harbour 1994 and Mrs Thomas in Her Garden 1994, the latter referring to a kindly neighbour who lived next door to Harris and his family on Bowling Green Terrace.

“As an artist, I’m interested in what’s going on inside our heads and how it relates to the stuff outside – the world in all its marvellous beauty. I have the visual language and formal awareness to deal with that figuratively and non-figuratively,” Harris says.

“But whichever style, medium or technique you’re working in, you’ve got to get it right. That can take a long time until you feel it formally, that it exists and that it has a right to exist.”

Tony Magnusson April 2022

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Yellow Squares / 1968 Oil on board 98 x 105 cm

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Red Squares / 1969 Oil on board 98 x 107 cm

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Jeffrey Harris – A Homecoming Retrospective The Leeds born and trained painter and printmaker Jeffrey Harris joined the vibrant and celebrated art colony of St. Ives at a particularly auspicious and critical juncture.

Entering the creative maelstrom of the halcyon late 1950s, as an outsider from Leeds, Harris’s early painting experience was one of an opening up in a quest to find a visual language and release from figuration. Producing abstract colour-field pictures punctuated with small squares and discordant colour patches that, as he was later to explain to me in 1993, fulfilled formal “considerations of figure-ground, intervals, proportions” on the one hand and a more romantic, mysterious and evocative mood on the other. Victor Pasmore’s teaching at Leeds was an important early influence.

Despite the architectonics of point and line to a plane, Harris’s mosaic-like surfaces pulsated with a star-like celestial energy.

The way such compositions seemed concerned with the spiritual in art, to use Kandinsky’s celebrated catch phrase, afforded them kinship with the transcendentalism of Americans Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Lateral surface rhythms vied with the dynamics of deep internal space. Out of these tensions vintage period works

by Harris including Yellow Squares (1968), Composition in Yellow (1968) or the darker Green Squares, Night (1969) stood out with formal and thematic authority on Penwith exhibition walls.

Harris’s tough formal rationale had been spawned in Leeds. With its Gregory Fellowship and Thubronian Basic Design Courses, Leeds provided the ideal springboard for the by-now galloping modern movement in St Ives, and the young artist duly followed the welltrodden path from the north to south-west Cornwall. A creatively restless Harris periodically tested his own stylistic parameters.

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Following Harris’s decision to move to Australia a Penwith friend and colleague, the hard-edge painter Roy Conn, recalled an episode on Porthmeor beach where paintings and furniture were consigned to a bonfire as a necessity due to the impending move.

Changes were certainly afoot and by the 1970s Harris pictures like Box Circle and Box Window (1974) saw the adoption of a Ben Nicholson-inspired constructionist idiom in terms of geometry and white reliefs. Harris’s subsequent pictures softened this severe purism and introduced still life imagery. The colour and form of these compositions represented new departures into intriguing new chromatic combinations and a curvilinear, even biomorphic, range of shapes recalling the interlocking jig saw-like compositions of late Wynter, Scott or Heron.

Harris’s move to Australia, first to Tasmania with second wife the painter Gwen Leitch, and then Adelaide, concluded a decade plus long St Ives phase he again described in 1993 as “immensely rich and vital”. The much longer period in Australia inevitably engendered a much stronger palette and different topography in landscape paintings relating to the new environment. He explained these as representing “a celebration, a joy, and a thanksgiving for safe arrival in a new land.” Despite these seismic shifts, Harris revisited his important and enduring St Ives years in terms of intaglio printmaking.

The inspiration of Ben Nicholson reappeared and with it exquisite and intimate views of St Ives alleyways, rooftops, nooks and crannies relayed with the intense linearity of etchings like Academy Place from 1980 or The Bell Light from as recently as 2018.

Peter Davies April 2022

Blue Lands / 1969 Oil on board 48 x 57 cm

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Pears with Knife / 1969 Oil on board 98 x 105 cm

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Winter Still Life / 1969 Oil on board 105 x 98 cm

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Red Still Life with a Circle / 1973

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Blue Still Life / 1974

Oil on board

Oil on board

24 x 22 cm

23.5 x 22 cm

Coastlands with John Reeve’s Jug / 1974 Oil on canvas 40 x 60 cm

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Roundhouse Snooker, St Ives / 1972

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Hill Lands with a Circle / 1974

Pencil, oil, letraset on board

Relief, perspex, oil on board

20 x 25.5 cm

29 x 26 cm

Coastal Movements II / 1973 Oil on board 98 x 105 cm

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Box Circle / 1974 Relief, perspex, oil on board 27 x 33 cm

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Coastal Movements / 1973 Oil on board 98 x 105 cm

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The White Divide / 1974

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Box Window / 1974

Relief, oil on board

Relief, perspex, oil on board

31 x 32 cm

33 x 27 cm

Sellicks / 1974 Relief, oil, pencil on board 31 x 33 cm

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The White Lands / 1974 Relief, oil, pencil, on board 35 x 32 cm

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Dalesman / 1974 Oil on board 29 x 32 cm

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Blue Harbour / 1988 Oil on canvas 65 x 65 cm

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Red, Green and White / 2005 Oil on canvas 56 x 56 cm

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Venetian Black and White / 2004 Oil on canvas 56 x 56 cm

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Zennor, Cornwall / 2007 Oil on canvas 91.5 x 122 cm

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Black Hill / 2010 Oil on canvas 124 x 94 cm

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Cornish Still Life (Blue) / 2009 Oil on canvas 75 x 101 cm

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Uraidla, Adelaide Hills / 2012 Oil on canvas 65 x 72 cm

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Honesty with White Jug / 2017 Oil on canvas 40 x 46 cm

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The Blues / 2019

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The Dark Land / 2020

Oil on canvas

Oil on board

25 x 25 cm

20 x 20 cm

Side by Side / 2022 Oil on canvas 75 x 101 cm

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St Ives, Cornwall, The Harbour / 1980/81 Sepia etching / 3/6 16.5 x 37 cm All etching dimensions plate size 34

Harbour and Church, St Ives, Cornwall / 1980 Colour etching / 1/6

Harbour Church / 1980 Etching / 2/6 8 x 6 cm

6 x 10 cm

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St Ives, Cornwall, The Harbour (Boats) / 1980 Colour etching / 1/6 8 x 5.5 cm

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Harbour Gull / 1994 Etching / A/P 12.5 x 12.5 cm

Mrs Thomas in her Garden / 1994

The Harbour / 1994

Etching / A/P

Etching / A/P

15.5 x 16 cm

21 x 15.5 cm

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A Bollard, The Harbour / 2018

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The Bell Light / 2018

Etching / A/P IV

Etching / A/P I

12.5 x 12.5 cm

11 x 8.5 cm

Jeffrey Harris Curriculum Vitae

Solo Exhibitions 1961

Inaugural one-person show, Rowan Gallery, London

1962

5 Young British Artists, Rowan Gallery, London

1962 / 65 Peterloo Gallery, Manchester, UK 1970

New Arts Centre, Hobart

1971

Lombard Street Gallery, Adelaide

1971

Lidum’s Gallery, Adelaide

1976

Gallery de Graphic, Adelaide

1981

Montrichard Gallery, Adelaide

1986

Montrichard Gallery, Adelaide Festival of Arts exhibition

1990

New Painting – Jeff Harris, Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney

1990

Portraits of Places, Grennhill Gallery, Adelaide

1994

Kensington Gallery, Adelaide (etchings)

1997

Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, works on paper

The artist painting at Porthmeor Studio / 1960s 2000

Testament, 16 Linocut prints, St Peter’s Cathedral, Adelaide

1932

Born: Leeds, Yorkshire, UK

2006

On a Summer’s Day, Adelaide Central Gallery

1948–52

Studied Painting and Printmaking, Leeds College of Art

2012

My Father’s Table, Light Square Gallery, Adelaide

1952

Leeds College of Art Travelling Scholarship: 6 months study in Paris

1956

Moved to St Ives, Cornwall

Selected Group Exhibitions

1959–70

Shared 7 Porthmeor Studio with second wife Gwen Leitch

1957–69

1956–70

Member of Penwith Society of Arts and Crafts in Cornwall

Penwith Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall, group shows three times per year.

Newlyn Gallery, Cornwall

1965–68 Lecturer at Falmouth School of Art, Cornwall

1962–63

Plymouth City Art Gallery, Plymouth

1970

Emigrated to Australia

1966

Axiom Gallery, London,

1970–72

Lecturer at the Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart

1966

Structure ’66, Arts Council UK

1973–89

Lecturer at the South Australian School of Art, Adelaide

1979

Australian Print Gallery, Melbourne

1980

Study Leave, UK art colleges and polytechnics

1982

Montrichard Gallery, Adelaide

1990

Retired to paint full-time, extensive travel and painting in Australia and return trips to St Ives, and UK

1984

Sydenham Gallery, Adelaide 39

1985

Montrichard Gallery, Adelaide, Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney

Collections

1985–88 Annual group shows, South Australian College of the Arts Gallery

Artbank, Australia

1989

Allen & Allen Hemsley, Sydney

Port Adelaide in Perspective, Royal Society of Arts, Adelaide

1990 / 97 Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney

Arts Council of Great Britain

1998-99

Oils, Watercolours, Lino Prints shown in mixed exhibitions Kensington Gallery, Adelaide

Cornwall County Council, UK

1999

Prouds Art Gallery, Sydney

2000

Kedumba Drawing Prize, NSW – Invited Artist

Education Department, Preston, Lancashire, UK Parliament House Canberra, Australia The Kedumba Collection of Australian Drawing 1997

Blake Prize Exhibition for Religious Art

1998

Fleurieu Peninsula Biennale

New Norcia Monastery, Western Australia Whitworth Art Collection, Manchester University, UK 2002

Fleurieu Peninsula Biennale Private Collections, Australia, Italy, UK, and USA. The Mandorla Art Award, WA Kedumba Drawing Prize NSW

2003–05 Heysen Prize for Australian Landscape

Selected Bibliography: Books, essays, reviews, features

2020 / 22 Belgrave St Ives, St Ives & Modern British exhibition My Fathers Table catalogue essay, Walker Wendy, Light Square Gallery, 2012

Awards and Acquisitions 1953

Leeds College of Art Travelling Scholarship, Paris

1965

British Council Acquisition Award

1980

Residency Oxford Print Union, Oxford University

1988

Burnside Bicentennial Art Prize

1989

Whyalla City (South Australia) Art Prize: Painting

1997

People’s Choice Award, Blake Prize for Religious Art

2002

Kedumba Drawing Prize, acquisition for collection

2003

Drawing Prize, Hysen Prize for Australian Landscape

2012

Arts South Australia Grant for My Father’s Table exhibition.

St Ives Revisited, Peter Davies, Bakehouse Publications, 1994 St Ives 1883–1993 Portrait of an Art Colony, Whybrow, P. Art Collectors Publications, 1994 100 Years in Newlyn: Diary of a Gallery, Hardie, M. Patten Press, UK, 1995 Sights for Sore Eyes, Giles Auty, The Australian, Review section, March 22–23, 1997 New Painting 58–61, Alan Bowness, catalogue essay, Arts Council of Great Britain Britain’s Art Colony by the Sea, Denis Val Baker, Denis, 1959, London: George Ronald Publishing

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Copyright ©2022 Belgrave St Ives

ISBN 978-1-9998524-4-3

The Crypt Gallery St Ives Society of Artists Norway Square St Ives TR26 1NA The Hepworth Room Penwith Gallery Back Road West St Ives TR26 1NL The Studio Higher Bussow Farm Towednack St Ives TR26 3BB