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Biddy Picard arrived in Cornwall having hitched a lift on board a Welsh
Crabber, and lived with her family first in Lamorna, in a gypsy caravan.
Moving to Mousehole in the 1960s, she set up the Mousehole Pottery and
Craftshop, and began painting and making stoneware sculptures. Her early
abstract painting owed much to the contemporary work of William Scott,
Paul Feiler and others working in Cornwall at the time, placing an emphasis
on bold geometric patterning, softened by the textures and colours of
the land. She began exhibiting with the Newlyn Society of Artists, as
well as teaching at Penzance School of Art. By the end of the seventies
she had moved from semi-abstraction to painting Cornish scenes of harbour
life, albeit mostly imaginary. Her work has become highly sought after,
and she had a major retrospective at the Great Atlantic Galleries in
2005.
'West Penwith Landscape' dates from the 1970s, when Picard taught at
the Penzance School of Art. She began a series of mixed-media paintings
in mottled brown hues, incorporating elements of monoprint, often based
around the shapes of coastal rock formations. This painting hovers between
landscape and abstraction. Echoes of the hilly headland and cliff appear
to project beneath the landscape's surface: the metamorphosing forms
suggest the subterranean strata of tin, and its mining in womb-like
caverns, such as we find in the paintings of Peter Lanyon. But there
is also the suggestion of boat forms in the lower right, and the reflected
sun suggests the sea continues down the painting too - rendering those
curves also coastal inlets.
References: Biddy Picard: A Life's Work, Great Atlantic Gallery, 2005.
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