Returning Home oil on canvas board 29 x 44cm £1,350

Neil Pinkett - Scillonian

I must go down to the sea again,
to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship
and a star to steer her by

The facts tell us one story. The Scillonian is the name of the passenger ship owned and operated since 1925 by the Isles of Scilly Steamship Company. She has had previous incarnations, but is presently known as Scillonian III. She carries up to 600 passengers, has a notoriously shallow draught and was christened, in 1977, by his Royal Highness Prince Charles, the Duke of Cornwall. But facts only ever reveal the bare bones. There is often a subtext, especially in matters marine, where the call of the running tide may be a clear, even a wild one - but is just as likely to be married with wind like a whetted knife.

Neil Pinkett, one of Britain’s finest landscape painters, knows this. In Scillonian, his fifth exhibition at Cornwall Contemporary, his depiction of the vessel which links mainland Britain with the Isles of Scilly is nuanced, subtle, deft and, above all else, impressionistic in the sense deployed by one of the sea’s great writers, Joseph Conrad. “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 which Pinkett, a profoundly physical man, seems to exude in his being as much as in his work.

Witness, for example, the DVD created in accompaniment to Pinkett’s book, Travels in Britain. It is an ingenuous, unadorned portrayal of a working methodology which has seen Pinkett undertake lengthy cycling and canoeing trips in Britain. Complete with panniers packed with paints, canvases and brushes, not to mention a six-month training regime which saw him clocking up 40 to 50 racing-bike miles a day, Pinkett cycled from Cape Wrath to Cape Cornwall in 2006. A thousand miles later, he was not only elated but also in possession of oodles of material for a fresh, vibrant body of new work - just as he was when he completed canoe trips, first down the River Shannon in Ireland and then through the Clyde and Glasgow and out to the Inner Hebrides of Arran and Mull. But as much as he is peripatetic, perhaps even restless, Pinkett’s work is often of the land and sea of the Cornwall he has known since childhood. 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.”

His many admirers will be glad of Pinkett’s lifelong absorption in art; so, too, of his knowledge of the vessels operated by the Isles of Scilly Steamship Company, past and present. Scillonian thus emerges as a body of work comprised of much, much more than mere facts, a series of paintings pregnant with possibility and affirming a delightful intimacy with their subject.

The wind may be like a whetted knife: Neil Pinkett makes you see it, as much as you hear and feel the Scillonian in all her glory.

 By Alex Wade, writer and regular contributor to, among others,The Times, Financial Times and Times Literary Supplement.