EXHIBITION - forthcoming

'The Rainyday Gallery, in Penzance's Market Jew Street, is something of a hidden gem.
....its owner Martin Val Baker, grew up within the local creative matrix and as such is able to sustain a programme of excellent, interesting and often unusual work - Matthew Lanyon is featured from September 6th.
In spite of his father, Peter Lanyon's, huge importance as a painter, or perhaps because of it, Matthew, now reaching his fifties, only began working in 1988 and then ironically, it was drawing with his baby son that got him started. He has come to painting through a circuitous route - found objects, photomantage, thoughts, words - "heading downstream on a raft of black and white" is how he describes it, until the "release" of completeing his first painting in 1994. Now he is so clearly off and running, using the colours of the local terrain to explore its contours, digging into crevices and mining its depths, not just for abstract shape and form, but for its power to embody myth, stories of Minoan Crete that sit well in the granite uplands where he works.
If St Ives rocked the cradle of British Abstract art, the landscape around it continues to exert a powerful influence on the artists working there today. Take a tip and explore them both.'