An artists’ trail around St Ives and Newlyn

It’s a perfectly blue-skied and breezy day when I visit St Ives. From the field-turned-seasonal car park perched above the postcard-pretty Cornish town, families barrel down the hill armed with bodyboards and beach paraphernalia. A relative stone’s throw to Land’s End, this once-busy fishing harbour and its constellation of sandy bays has been a holiday hotspot since 1877, when the Great Western Railway’s St Ives Bay Line opened. 

“It was a windy, noisy, fishy, vociferous, narrow-streeted town; the colour of a mussel or a limpet; like a bunch of rough shellfish clustered on a grey wall together,” wrote Virginia Woolf, who spent her childhood summers in St Ives. Today the family’s holiday home, Talland House, bears a black plaque (the Cornish equivalent of London’s blue discs), but it’s artists not writers that have become synonymous with this seaside spot. The spirit of the modernist St Ives School – a circle of painters and sculptors that gravitated around Barbara Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson in the 1950s – is still palpable. 

The minute you open up, St Ives floods into your veins

The trail of creativity winds from the hilltop Leach Pottery – the still operational “birthplace of British studio pottery”, founded in 1920 – to the brilliant Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, housed at Trewyn Studios, where the pioneering sculptor lived and worked from 1949 until her death in 1975. On the seafront sits Tate St Ives, the landmark opened in 1993, where you can currently see Interlude, an installation by Cornwall-based Ro Robertson that combines metal sculpture and drawing. 

“It’s a bit of a love letter to St Ives,” says Robertson – one of many artists working here today. “The drawings were made on Porthmeor Beach, just in front of the Tate.” In 2019, Robertson followed in the footsteps of Hepworth and relocated from Yorkshire to Cornwall. “Obviously it’s a cliché, but the light here has completely changed my work – all the blues and greens of the coastal landscape have been coming through.” 

Tate St Ives tells “the story of avant-garde modernism in St Ives from 1939”, explains the gallery’s director Anne Barlow, “when Hepworth, Nicholson and [Russian constructivist] Naum Gabo first came here with the outbreak of war”. Their work is shown alongside paintings by their contemporaries Patrick Heron, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and local fisherman-turned-artist Alfred Wallis, who started painting prolifically at the age of 70 (and is often cited as the town’s first ice-cream seller). In their day, “they were really radical artists”, says Barlow, who strives to “bring that same experimental spirit to St Ives” with the gallery’s contemporary programme.

For many, though, the landscape continues to be the first draw. Cornwall-based artist Abigail Reynolds collects seaweed and sand from local beaches and uses them to craft glass panels that are incorporated into architectural sculptures. “You need a boatload of wet kelp, dried and burned to ash, to get a tiny piece of glass,” she says. 

Robertson and Reynolds are two of a handful of artists based long-term at St Ives’s Porthmeor Studios. The Grade II*-listed building, almost on the beach, dates back to 1810, when it was used for processing and packing pilchards. It was first commandeered by artists in the 1880s – making it “perhaps the oldest working artists’ studios in the country”, says manager Chris Hibbert. “Every artist in west Cornwall has worked here, apart from Barbara,” he says of a roll call that includes Nicholson, Heron, Barns-Graham, Terry Frost and Francis Bacon. 

“There are splatters of paint from every single artist; this place has a haunting in the best possible way,” says London-based American artist Emma Fineman, who had a residency at Porthmeor in 2020, and recently returned to complete a single monumental painting. “There is such a rich community of artists here, still making,” she adds. “You can shut yourself in your studio, but the minute you open yourself up to St Ives, it floods into your veins.” (She recommends the craft classes at Sloop Studios – and Jelbert’s Ice Cream in Newlyn.)

Porthmeor’s 15 studios are more in demand than ever, to be used for residency programmes (including one hosted by the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust) and lets. “It’s increased enormously in the past year and a half,” says residency manager Alexandra House, who credits the uptick to the endorsement of recent inhabitants such as Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid or Cornwall-born art star Danny Fox. 

The views don’t hurt either. The Trust experienced one of its biggest spikes in enquiries when “one of our artists posted a photo of a sunset from his studio”, recalls Hibbert. “It got about 12,000 likes,” he adds of the image by Sam Bassett, a St Ives-born painter (and son of the harbour master), who held a studio at Porthmeor for seven years. 

A 25-minute drive from St Ives, on the opposite coast, Newlyn had its own school of painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who were drawn to the famous light to paint en plein air. The Newlyn Art Gallery opened in 1895 and today shows contemporary exhibitions, while the Borlase Smart John Wells Trust runs two studio sites in town. 

“Newlyn has a different buzz to St Ives because it’s a working fishing harbour and port,” says London-based artist Georg Wilson, who spent two months earlier this year at Anchor Studio – the 1888-built, part-granite-cottage studio used by Newlyn School artists Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes. “You can watch the weather changing across the bay through the vast windows. The concentration I had there was like nothing I’ve experienced before.” 

Back in St Ives, the Penwith Gallery – founded by Hepworth et al – can still be found in an old pilchard-packing factory (The Pilchard Press Alehouse, adds Samuel Bassett, is “great for a pint if you’re bored with the view and the people”). “Historically,” says Hibbert, “artists came here to work but their market was in London – and I think it’s pretty much the same now.” Pam Evelyn, for instance, used her time at Anchor to make paintings for her New York debut (opening at Pace on 8 November); Bassett is looking ahead to a show with Toby Clarke at Vigo gallery in London; and Wilson is hoping to head back to Anchor ahead of her London exhibition with Berntson Bhattacharjee Gallery next year. 

But St Ives isn’t standing still. Tate is taking on another project: the “Palais de Danse”. The former cinema and dance hall that Hepworth purchased in 1961 – and where she made some of her largest, most famous works – will be revived as a space for workshops, performances and events. Leach Pottery, too, is expanding both the site and its outreach. Each are linked to the St Ives Town Deal, a government-backed initiative that looks to “enhance” the town, “focusing on the needs of residents, whilst continuing to welcome visitors”, says a report. It’s the ideal balance to hope for, amid a landscape of seasonal holiday lets, second homes and escalating house prices.

When Hepworth got to St Ives, she found it to be her “spiritual home”. Her story still seems to inspire, even considering that artists now mostly live out of the town itself. Reynolds, who lives in St Just, recalls her teenage pilgrimage to the sculptor’s studio and garden in 1989. “It made me realise that you can make your own world,” she says. “That is what you can do here.”