Neil Pinkett
Neil Pinkett: I have lived in Cornwall most of my life and exposure to such a dramatic environment has inspired me to paint. The landmass of West Penwith is small but encompasses such geographic diversity – from the turquoise seas of Lamorna on the South Coast to the wild rocky outcrops and crashing waves of the North Coast, and great stretches of moorland in between. I work with a knife as I want to express as forcefully as I can the forces of nature, the ever-changing elements, cloud formations, piercing blue skies over acres of red bracken, the raw beauty of the landscape. The natural progression towards paintings on a greater scale is leading to an exploration of larger landscapes further afield.
Neil Pinkett was born in St. Just, Cornwall in 1958. His early artistic career saw him work as a successful illustrator and visualiser but moved into the fine art arena with a hugely successful debut solo exhibition in 1996. Since that date Neil has become one of the foremost landscape painters in Cornwall. His work has been exhibited at a large number of venues throughout the UK and has also toured in America. Painting trips form a fundamental basis to his painting practice and include a 1000 mile cycle journey from Cape Wrath in Scotland to Cape Cornwall in 2006. The expedition was meticulously planned and he cycled through Scotland, North West England and Wales and the entire Atlantic coast of Devon and Cornwall. The physically demanding trip saw Neil produce a prolific amount of watercolours and sketches along the way of sweeping valleys, mountains, land and seascapes. In 2008 he canoed down the River Shannon in Ireland painting from an easel stashed across the bow of a specially adapted canoe. The Shannon is the longest river in both Ireland and Britain at over 200 miles long from its source to the sea. In 2009, Neil undertook a second epic canoe and painting trip starting near the Forth Bridge in Scotland, through the Forth and Clyde and Glasgow and then out to the Inner Hebrides of Arran and Mull. In 2012 he produced a number of paintings of The Thames in London after chartering a helicopter to provide source material for the project. Cornwall Contemporary staged the subsequent exhibition of the paintings in Shoreditch, London and then Cornwall Contemporary arranged for the paintings to be exhibited for one year at Gordon Ramsay’s London restaurant The Narrow.
Neil Pinkett portrays the landscape of Britain from a uniquely different perspective and the paintings are intrinsically linked to the land and sea. He evokes a real sense of experience beyond what is merely captured within the picture frame and he has become widely recognised as one of the UK’s most prominent and respected landscape painters.
