Cornovii: History and Context

Born and Raised in Cornwall

Excerpts: Interview Transcription

2001

 GU: I was raised on a farm in North Cornwall with generations of farmers before me on my father’s side.  The atmosphere there was partly one of tradition, partly farming heritage, convention, old ways and a deep respect held for those values.  I remember the thresher and the horse ploughs in the rookery and my father riding horses bareback across the fields.  I made my own bows and arrows from willow and kept them in my hidden den at the back of the old wagon house.  I would drive sheep by day and pull off lambs in the season by night, down in the shipping, under the glow of a single naked bulb, beside my father.  I was educated in all things nature as I grew up, witnessing the changing of the seasons and how all my country life was linked inextricably to it.  I also had the influence of the Atlantic Ocean on my doorstep.  Not only was there a harvest from the land but from the sea too in terms of painting material.

But I'm not sentimental about my past.  It just was.  I rarely think about it actually.  I rarely reflect upon it.  I’m more interested in the works I haven’t made and the future.  My family were quite Victorian in many ways.  I wanted to be liberated… to be free from any kind of yolk.  When I went to Glasgow, to art school, I felt that yolk lifted.  I grew up with security and all the wholesome things family life can bring.  So, when I left home, I was searching for anything but that.  I wanted adventure and freedom. I needed to travel and took every opportunity afforded me to do that.

I was painting on the island of Barra years some ago and had one book with me to read over the duration of my stay.  It was a book about the life of Robert Burns.  It spoke about his early years on his father’s farm from which could be seen the sea.  He would thresh grain for the day’s needs, tend the horses, milk the cows, and plough, which he was good at.  Life was built upon principle, and the days routine of hard work.  Things very familiar to me in my own upbringing.  His relationship with his father is reminiscent also; his father’s word was law, but he also took time to teach him the names of wildflowers, and grasses, and he was a kind and attentive stockman. I felt an affinity with both the ploughman and the artist in him as well as the conflict that arose from feeling a powerful need to create, against the restriction of freedom to do so because of financial poverty and duty. It was and is still sharply relatable.

I now have a studio in Cornwall. There are very practical grounds for that.  The fact is I was born and raised in Cornwall, so I feel connected to the land and know it intimately well.  I am situated in the north part of the peninsula which is very quiet and remains somewhat untouched by meta-modernisation . It has no relationship with nor connection to the artists associated with West Cornwall of the 1950s.

The landscape here is very dramatic and rugged which suits me.  I can leave my studio and drive to a cliff edge overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and will hardly see single a person on the road.  There is an emptiness there which is powerful and profound.  When I drive through the landscape, I am thoroughly aware, sometimes exhaustingly so, of my past.  I have an old family history.  Working in a landscape where my forefathers laboured and farmed their whole lives through, I do feel connected to it and thankful for the roots.  There are days when I love it and days when I don’t.  When I travel and live away, I don’t have all that history weighing upon me. 

North Cornwall can present as a very English landscape, inland and around the more fertile, pastoral farmland - mist rising in the valleys on a summer’s morning, rolling hills…but, it has a granite backbone.  It is of course exposed to the full force of the prevailing and turbulent winds and waves of the Atlantic Ocean.  There are many impressive sheer-drop cliffs in north Cornwall and hard, resistant slate in the coastline.  It also boasts of intimidating chevrons of carboniferous rocks - layer upon swaying layer - the Culm Measures.  The exposure gives the coastline a wilder nature than the more leafy, inland places.  There are not many offers of safe anchorage to seafarers here.  There’s always something astounding happening in the Cornish landscape.  It moves me.  The extremes of weather and season are stimulating.  A storm here isn’t spiritless. And the fertile areas are gentle and poetic.  It offers many things a painter could need to have a flourishing studio practice. 

I wish to be embedded in this landscape somehow - I want to give something back…painting it will achieve that I think, and that’s not a choice - it feels like the right thing to do.  It has always been my home.  My childhood was full of freedom - I always had space to run and build and make things and paint and play.  I always had places I could be all day, just painting, often with no-one else around.  Cornwall still affords me that.

Geoff Uglow

Studio 2021