To celebrate Bath Fine Art's re-launch as Bath Contemporary the gallery commences with a solo exhibition of 35 paintings by Cornish artist Neil Pinkett this September, exploring his journey to secret places around the British Isles, including Snowdonia, Cornwall, the Isles of Scilly and Scotland.
This is a man who thinks nothing of traversing mountains, hanging out of helicopters and pushing his body to its limit via monumental cycling and canoeing trips, all in the name of art. But while Pinkett is undoubtedly one of the more physical of British artists, he is also one of the most sensitive.
Witness, for example, his latest body of work, created from travels in Snowdonia, Cornwall, the Isles of Scilly and Scotland. The topography may vary, from summery beach scenes to the vastness of mountain ranges, but there is a common denominator. Each painting, layered with oils in Pinkett’s Marazion studio from watercolour sketches made en plein air, is imbued with a subtle, enigmatic sense of tension, as if the landscape is at once benign and yet indifferent.
“I like to seek out places of solitude,” says Pinkett, adding that often the experience of being “remote, as if in a lost world” engenders a curious feeling of sanctuary. Curious, because Pinkett’s response is not as unilateral as that of Romanticism’s embrace of the sublime. This exists, certainly, but it merges with a more modern sensibility, a Conradian grappling with the impassiveness of the landscape around him.
“My task is to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see”, wrote Conrad, a statement of intent that could as easily apply to Pinkett’s oeuvre. Born in St Just, mainland Britain’s most westerly town, in 1958, he is one of five children to a father who was a ship’s radio officer and a mother who worked in a doctor’s surgery. He enjoyed drawing from an early age, and quips that it – and painting – was “all I could ever do.”
Pinkett’s self-deprecation belies his mature, deft and nuanced handling of landscape. His work is impressionistic, in the way of some of Conrad’s writing, but, again like Conrad (and, indeed, one of his key influences, Turner), consistently powerful and stirring. If two tiny, thinly delineated figures may appear at the foot of a mountain, they serve not merely to provide a sense of scale but also to convey man’s fragility amid such overwhelming forces.
And yet, of course, the two figures are there, together, barely discernible but walking beneath the towering rock forms. Isolation is leavened; sanctuary is possible. Existential alienation is nevertheless infused with the sublime.
It is this – the blurring of opposing philosophies in his response to the landscape – that helps make Pinkett’s work so distinctive, so alluring, so impressive. This, and the extraordinarily physical commitment to his art. As he says: “Some of the trips I made for the bigger canvases, among mountains, were very perilous. They took me to the edge.”
For Neil Pinkett, the edge is always there, calling him. The rest of us can be glad that he makes his journeys there, to return with so finely judged, and yet impassioned, a response.
This article was written by Alex Wade, writer and regular contributor to, among others, The Times, The Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement.
For more information, visit www.bathcontemporary.com.
