Born in Hampshire, Benjamin studied engineering for four years at the Regent Street Polytechnic before becoming an artist. After some months studying drawing at Leger's studio in Paris, he arrived in St Ives in 1955. Buckman reports that here he split his time between flower-growing and abstract landscape painting, and leading an artistic life somewhat apart from the general circle of working artists. Benjamin took over the cottage and land formerly inhabited by the controversial and colourful Sven BERLIN. He was away for one year (1958-59) on a French Government fellowship allowing him to study with S W Hayter at Studio 17 in printmaking.
That same year he was part of a mixed show, entitled Twenty Cornish Artists sponsored by the Falmouth Art Group at their Polytechnic Gallery, a show that was shared with Newlyn Art Gallery and the Penwith Gallery in St Ives. This was to be seen as establishing his credentials in the Cornish art world and became a springboard to wider exhibiting. In 1960 Benjamin was selected by Michael CANNEY, curator of NAG, to exhibit in the Painters in Cornwall 1960 Exhibition in the City Art Gallery, Plymouth. (See Hardie 100 Years, p 122). In 1962 Canney, with the architect and painter John MILLER, redesigned the Fore Street Gallery in St Ives and the Lower Gallery at Newlyn, and Benjamin was offered one of the first one-man shows that followed.
Financial pressures, and the need to earn a living, meant that he had to leave Cornwall. By this time he was working also from London, and accepted teaching/lecturing posts in Canada and the USA. An impressive range of group and solo shows followed, and Benjamin's work became widely recognised and respected.
He returned to London in 1973, settling with his Canadian partner and sons at Kelling Village Holt, Norfolk where he continued to work up until his death in 2002.
Stella was born in Chislehurst, Kent. She began weaving in 1975, working with Breon O'Casey and using a Navajo style loom. Employing handspun sheet and goats' yarn, she also made her own colours with chemical dyes.
Her work was featured in the 1988 show, Craft Work, curated by Sheelagh O'DONNELL at NAG to show the work of top craftsmen and tapestry weavers in the South West.
Listed in Whybrow's 1921-39 list of artists in and around St Ives.
William Roger Benner's granddaughter contacted us in 2018 to let us know that he spent a considerable time in Cornwall in the years between the two World Wars. The subjects of his watercolours included fishing boats and steam engines.
Benner was a teacher at High Pavement Boy's School in Nottingham from the 1920s until the early 1950s. He continued teaching during World War II, being over the age of conscription. He retired to Blythburgh in Suffolk, where he continued to paint.
Richard E Bennett has been an oil painting conservator from the 1970s. He owned a small gallery in Thirsk, north Yorkshire, and started painting watercolours in 1999. In 2009 he relocated to Cornwall and in 2021 started to paint 'en plein air'.
Information provided in 2012 by the spouse of a descendant of the artist's wife (Edith Ashdown) suggests that Bennett, a commercial artist, spent a considerable amount of time in Cornwall, though he was born in Brighton and later lived in Croydon. He was an exhibitor at the Royal Academy, where he had work hung in 1951 and 1952. He carried out a great deal of work on commission for Salmons postcards.
It is believed that he and Edith (also known as Daisy) may have met through Clem Lambert, a Sussex painter connected with her family. Godwin and Edith were married in Steyning, Sussex, in 1913. In 1920 they had a daughter, Margherita, but were later divorced. Godwin died in Croydon in 1970.
Two oil paintings by this artist are in the fine art collection of the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro: Cornish Wrestling: K Hawkey vs P Sheldon (1963) and a portrait of Billy Bray (1794-1868), the Cornish evangelical preacher.
Philip Bennetta is a poet and artist, and he and his wife, the artist Susan BENNETTA live on Bodmin moor. He studied contemporary arts at Christ Church College, Canterbury, Dartington Hall College of Arts and Kent Institute of Art & Design, and gained an MA from Lancaster University in 1990. His career has included community based arts projects with young offenders.
Bennetta describes his work thus: 'I work in subject sensitive media and make paintings, drawings, soft sculpture, poems, pamphlets, artist's books and film as part of the creative process.
Susan Bennetta is a visual artist. She and her husband, the artist Philip BENNETTA, live on Bodmin moor. She describes herself as 'an artist whose work usually starts with an image, often small and seeingly insignificant. Whatever it is, it allows me to embark on a process of exploration, internal and external. The end of that process may be a painting, sculpture, video, text or sound piece or indeed a combination of them all.'
A member of the pottery team at Leach's pottery, specialising in glazes and glaze-making in the 1940s and 50s.
Claire Benson is a Penzance-based printmaker. She was a student at Winchester School of Art and Falmouth College of Art.
She is a regular exhibitor at STISA open shows.
Mentioned in Whybrow's 1921-1939 list of artists in and around St Ives; no further information currently available.
Born in North Kilworth, Connemara, Medora spent much of her early life at Erisslaanen (Connemara) which gave her the title for her autobiography. She was educated in England and studied at the Slade with Randolph Schwabe (1930-33) , and at the Central School of Arts and Crafts where she studied stained glass. She worked on Sark, in Ireland at Errislannan, and in Cornwall (St Ives, during WWII).
She was noted at a 1944 exhibition by the St Ives Times for "her war pictures." Buckman comments that she was much influenced by the places where she lived, including Connemara, Sark, and St Ives. As well as paintings, she produced sculptural models depicting religious scenes, and painted furniture. She moved to a new studio in St Ives in 32 Fore Street in 1947. She moved to Wareham in Dorset in the mid-1950s, and died in Poole.
Bentley began his career working for the Fielding brothers as an engraver. He was elected an Associate of the Old Watercolour Society in 1834 and a full Member in 1843. He painted all round Britain, and visited the Channel Islands and northern France.
Pip was the Cornish-born elder daughter of Alec George WALKER and his wife Kathleen EARLE, the creators of Crysede hand-printed silks. She was also to become an artist with a wide range of talents. She has written the story of her own life in The Pink House (which is Myrtle Cottage, Newlyn), and Mark Vaughan has encapsulated her life as a natural ecologist in a fine article in Resurgence magazine. See references.
See her obituary by Michael McNay, in the Guardian Thursday 16 September 2010 19.15 BST
Pip sat for Dod Procter in the Tate owned painting ‘Kitchen at Myrtle Cottage’ ( https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/procter-kitchen-at-myrtle-cottage-n04817 ).
Paul Benyovits moved to west Cornwall in 2002. After living in Sheffield, Morvah and then Mousehole, he is currently (2025) based in Newlyn.
His work, which he describes as 'abstract' and 'abstracted figurative' is sculpted in a variety of materials including stone, wood, resin and bronze. Themes include heads, torsos, reclining figures and pure abstract form.
He has exhibited extensively in Cornwall and abroad.
Clarissa Beothy worked as an industrial metalworker in her native Hungary before fleeing Communism in 1969 to settle in the West. Subsequently she became a student at Falmouth College of Art. Her work reflects her attempt to show the barriers that she (and others) face in their 'lives full of limitations'. She is a sculptor working in a range of materials: wax, soap, ceramic, resin and bronze.
The artist is listed as a member of NSA (2010).
This German artist was a regular visitor to Polperro from 1908 to 1913, producing numerous paintings of the fishing village which won him several awards. Bergen achieved great success, not only in his own country, but throughout Europe, and he became celebrated for his depictions of naval warfare during World War One.
During his time in Cornwall he fell in love with Polperro, focussing on harbour scenes and producing fine sketches of the local fishermen.
Works by this artist are included in the University College Falmouth Art Collection.
Born in London to an English mother and Swedish father (paper merchant), Berlin was originally an apprentice mechanical engineer before leaving that trade to enrol in the Beckenham School of Art at the age of 17. He then began training as an Adagio dancer. Retiring from dancing in 1938, he and his wife settled in a cottage on the Zennor moors.
A recent correspondent (2011) has noticed that most biographies of the artist appear to omit an interlude when Sven, his wife and children, lived in a farm-labourer type of cottage, one of two or three row cottages in Happy Valley, Treswithian, Camborne. [This was perhaps when he was studying at Redruth nearby.] 'About the only furnishings were a few upright chairs, an inverted half-barrel that served as a table, and small nude paintings of his wife on all the colour-washed walls. There was bread and water. The two, I think, little girls ran about barefoot. I was then fifteen or sixteen.'
Berlin studied under Arthur Creed HAMBLY at Redruth School of Art, describing Hambly as "the third of the Three Wise Men sent to guide my destiny" - also adding "but the special quality of integrity as an artist and teacher made him a unique person: a man of truth". At the outbreak of war in 1939 he registered as a Concientious Objector; in 1943, however, he joined the Royal Artillery, taking part in the Normandy landings. Discharged in 1945 on medical grounds, he suffered from nervous shock and the breakdown of his marriage.
Before joining the military, Berlin had met Ben NICHOLSON, Barbara HEPWORTH and Naum GABO and also helped at the Leach Pottery. On recovery from his breakdown, he rented an unoccupied building on the Island called 'The Tower', turning it into a sculptor's workshop. In 1950 he was evicted from 'The Tower' in order for it to be converted into a public convenience. He subsequently remarried and moved to a house at Cripplesease which was destroyed by fire in 1952. The following year he bought a gypsy caravan, moving to the New Forest to live among the gypsies there.
As well as sculpture, Berlin produced drawings, paintings and wrote highly regarded poetry and prose. His writings and aspects of his controversial and explosive life are fully explored on the internet, and remain of local interest in Cornwall today. His daughter, Greta BERLIN, is also a sculptor, and a piece of her larger work, The Couple, is in Trevelyan House, Penzance at the Hypatia Trust.
Greta is the daughter of Sven BERLIN and was born and grew up around St Ives in the 1940s and '50s in the artistic community in which her parents moved. At the start of her own career she exhibited in the Penwith and Salt House Galleries, but moving on with her family, then marriage and family life of her own, she lives in Dorset where she also teaches ceramics. Her websites follow her busy exhibition schedule elsewhere, and though known locally by most of the older artists, her work is not now exhibited in Cornwall.
In Cornwall, her sculptures have, some years ago, been shown and sold through the auspices of Tony Sanders' Gallery on Chapel Street, Penzance (now closing 2010), where the Hypatia Trust acquired its much-prized example of her strong and sensuous work, The Couple.
Berry was the wife of the artist Job NIXON (1891-1938). In 1931, at the urging of Samuel John Lamorna BIRCH, Nina and her husband moved to the area, settling originally in Lamorna to be near the Birch menage. They moved on to stay at Riverside Studios (1931-33), but due to her husband's appointment to the Slade staff in 1935, her involvement in the area was brief.
Berry, along with painter Gemma PEARCE, was one of the two partners in the Seastar Gallery, a small seaside art gallery in Mousehole, Cornwall. From a business background, she is keenly interested in textiles and photography, and is herself a maker of handmade and individual jewellery, including the use of semi-precious beads and stones.
Bob grew up in Yorkshire, and from 1954-58 he studied at the Brighton College of Art and Architecture, the latter of which subjects he took up from graduation. First he worked as a junior in a private architectural practice, and then in his own practice. At the same time he was a lecturer at the Leeds School of Architecture and the Leeds Polytechnic.
Moving south again he lectured at Plymouth Polytechnic, before moving to the West Cornwall area where he taught at the Penzance School of Art. In 1986 he established the Coldharbour Pottery at Towednack, where he produced raku ceramics.
Bob and his wife Pamela then moved away for a couple of years, before returning to West Cornwall to settle at Helston, where Bob has continued to exhibit at local galleries and in exhibitions. Their son, Bob BERRY Jr. is the prominent art and landscape photographer.