Painting In Stives

The Cornish town enjoys a double life as an internationally famous artists’ colony. We explore why it has attracted painters for decades

- Patrick Heron

The light streaming through Tate St Ives’ glass front hints at the gallery’s symbiotic relationship with place where it stands. Towering over the bay, Tate’s regional outpost is a testament to the town’s painterly past and present. From the 1940s to the 1960s, it attracted and inspired the most important artists of the day. Painter Ben Nicholson and sculptor Barbara Hepworth led the way, moving there shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. When the war ended, their presence drew a younger generation of artists to the area.

During its artistic heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, St Ives welcomed, or was home to, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Sir Terry Frost, Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon, among others. And, despite the abstract nature of much of these artists’ work, the shapes, forms and colours of Cornwall’s famously beautiful landscape and light informed their art.

The town’s artist pedigree was given a new lease of life in 1993 when Tate St Ives opened, and a recent £20 million extension has doubled the space available to show art. The first exhibition in its new gallery is a major retrospective of Patrick Heron. Also a prolific writer, he was a key in creating the town’s reputation. He is integral to the gallery, too. At the entrance, sunlight pours through the three-metre Heron window, a stained-glass work he gifted during construction.

Born in Leeds in 1920, Patrick Heron moved to St Ives when he was five. In 1929, the family moved again to Welwyn Garden City. By 1945, he was in London making a name for himself, moving to Cornwall in 1955 and living at Eagles Nest, Zennor, just along the coast, until his death in 1999. “This is a landscape that has altered my life,” he wrote. “The house in its setting is the source of all my painting.” The light, colour, shape and textures he found there would remain his inspiration, if not his subject.