Michael Canney

Memoir 1923-47

Roger Hilton used to say it’s not good for artists to write or talk about what they do, but of course artists are always writing and talking about what they do: Turner said, “Art’s a rum business.”

I was an only child so I had no playmates particularly and maybe this was the initial incentive that enabled me to create my own world on paper, I had a good visual memory and therefore a sort of natural ability with art; I also had an awareness of art and its importance from quite an early age, due perhaps to the fact that Cornwall was the home of professional artists and I lived there for most of my early life and therefore came into contact with them. My father was a clergyman who had an interest in architecture and he took my mother and me on a tour of English cathedrals – well, we also went to Wales and Scotland – we did a sort of Grand Tour of architectural masterpieces. I think this must have had some effect, though they didn’t have much taste where art was concerned, but he did feel that art was important and architecture was important, and this gave me some sort of standards, I suppose. He believed in the necessity of art and had a great enthusiasm for Ruskin, which meant he had a sort of moral attitude about art. He thought that art should have some moral purpose. My mother painted when she was young – not very well, but she did, and these pictures were round the house – and in the home we did have works of art. We had prints of Rossetti, van Eyck and anonymous watercolours of Venice which all looked as though they were painted at night – perhaps they were. My mother and my father were both very fond of Venice and they went there on holiday on more than one occasion, and to Italy in general.

Redruth, where I lived, was a centre of mining and was therefore an industrial town, but it was a decayed industrial town, so it had a sort of melancholy that was visually haunting, I think. My earliest watercolour paintings were of mines, beaches, landscape and also assemblages, because these areas where the mines had been were full of scaffolding and pieces of metal and so on from the mine winding gear, criss-cross structures. I think actually those occur quite a lot in my paintings. There were various odd cultural influences such as the eccentric clergymen that Cornwall seemed to be full of in those days. There were a lot of Anglo-Catholic clergymen and they were very keen on pilgrimages and we used to go on these pilgrimages with their cassocks and surplices flying in the wind, I remember, to anywhere where there was a holy well, because Cornwall is littered with holy wells from the early Cornish saints who had come across from Ireland, on mill stones usually; they’d usually arrive on the coast on a mill stone – so they said. Likely tale. And these pilgrimages were visually interesting because they had religious banners that blew in the wind – coloured.

Another quite interesting thing that I’ve only realised recently that was important to me was the fact that Sir Hugh Lane, who gave the Lane collection to the Tate Gallery, was the son of a previous rector of the parish and had lived in this rectory that I lived in, and he’d been drowned in the Lusitania in the Great War, which was torpedoed on its way back from America, where he’d been on some business connected with pictures. My father used to talk about Hugh Lane quite a bit and I felt that his ghost was maybe – not that I’m very keen on ghosts – but I had a feeling that there was something of his spirit there. He must have lived there for quite a fair time. He was born in Ireland and he came to Cornwall when he was three and so I suppose he was there until he was about 15. His mother did take him on trips around Europe so he did the Grand Tour but he must have been at Redruth; and indeed the old people said that they did remember him when he was present at church fetes. I think he was gay but I hadn’t any proof of this fact. This is libellous!

Every year there was an annual Sunday school trip which went to Carbis Bay near St Ives and this was quite an occasion where they had a harmonium on the beach which we used to play and sing hymns. But of course it was only just across the sands there and you’d be in St Ives. So early on I was taken to St Ives, saw the studios, smelt the oil paint – I am sure one of the most important events in young artists’ lives – and saw the studios and these weird creatures who came out of the studios, particularly these women who looked rather strange – the sandal brigade absolutely. They had show days – and they still have them in St Ives, I think – once a year when all the studios were open and you could go round and everybody traipsed around and this was interesting because you actually saw pictures. You see, you were sort of aware of how pictures were actually painted and a working atmosphere which later on with the abstract painters one didn’t get because they didn’t open their studios as far as I can remember. I don’t remember people like Ben Nicholson opening their studios to the public. We even had a local artist in Redruth, and Redruth is the most provincial town that you can imagine, who had a big bow tie, a canary yellow waistcoat and an enormous hat. He was unfortunately arrested together with a number of young men and my father had to go and get him out of the nick. I’ve always remembered this because my mother said, “Dirty, filthy beasts!” It had a profound effect on me.

I discovered later on that Peter Lanyon had been a playmate because he had the same Nanny that I had and he used to be brought up from Carbis Bay or St Ives, rather, which is where he used to live, to play and to be looked after by this lady, and I used to be there as well. I can vaguely remember him, though I was probably only five or so and he’d be eight or nine. But I do remember this blonde haired boy with this very attractive face and charisma. Another future artist was John Barnicoat, whose father was the vicar of St Agnes which was the nearby parish and because I didn’t have any little playmates at all, I used to go over and see him quite often and we used to go exploring along the cliffs, into the caves and into the mines: and indeed I led him astray I’m afraid – he was younger than I was – and took him across the sands and into some caves which were part of old mine workings, and the tide came in and his father found out that he‘d gone and this was where he’d gone and was petrified and rushed and got ropes and tackle and arrived on the cliff edge with the car and came down to find John and myself perfectly all right. Well, Barnicote course became the Head of Chelsea School of Art later on.

We went to the same school, to the public school, John and I, at King’s College Taunton, My fellow students were Geoffrey Rippon who took us into the Common Market, who’s now Lord Rippon, and we didn’t have any art at all initially when I was there, but a new Headmaster came and he brought a man called Lyons Wilson who came from the North somewhere and he was a real artist, showed at the Redfern Gallery in London, and he had standards and he really did understand about art and was friendly with people like Sir Herbert Read and Jacob Kramer who was quite a well-known artist: and the thing that was rather nice about Lyons Wilson was he had a marvellous sense of humour and used to tell these terrific stories about people like Kramer, who used to give his pictures to people and they’d be terribly grateful and they would frame them, and he would then meet them in the street some years later and say, “By the way, you know that picture that I let you have? I wonder if I could borrow it back for a retrospective exhibition I’m having?” And they’d say, “Yes certainly, of course!” having spent a fortune on framing it, and then they wouldn’t see him again for two or three years, and then they would see him and say, “Oh Jacob, about my picture!” And he’d say, “I’m terribly sorry, there was a mistake you know and it got sold!” And he used to tell us these sort of stories which were marvellous. He’d also got some terrific pictures on the walls, big reproductions, things like Christopher Wood, one of those Breton pictures of his; and this made me realise that Cornwall could be turned into art of some quality if one was an artist of some quality.

My parents were very keen on the Navy because we’d had a number of Naval people in our family and they wanted me to go into the Navy but I am afraid that that was a disaster. I had a disastrous interview which came to nothing and I didn’t do very well academically. I got my equivalent of A levels and my parents were very good and allowed me to go to art school in spite of all this, at Redruth, the local art school, which did have one or two quite good people in it over the years. This is when I was 18, And so I did what was called the drawing exam in those days which was very, very academic and I got through that all right and there was this chap called Sven Berlin who used to come to the school to do Life Drawing and was “a real artist”, The art master himself did not bad academic watercolours and he too had a lot of friends in the art community in St Ives. One came into contact with these people quite early on in one’s life. I also had to go to Penzance and St Ives art schools for extra life drawing because I couldn’t get enough at the art school in Redruth because they only had one model who came one day a week or one day every other week, so I used to go down to these other schools. Then through that, particularly at St Ives, I ran into all those early academic painters there like Borlase Smart, John Park; and down the road from the art school in St Ives was Alfred Wallis who was at work on his little paintings on Quaker Oats packets and things that he used to work on. I used to go down with a friend of mine from the art school because we were not really supposed to because he was thought to be completely potty and he was being bought by people like Lanyon and others and so the traditional artists didn’t like this at all. They thought that this old man was being exploited which he wasn’t really because he hadn’t got any money anyway so whatever you gave him was worth having. I think I did realise, looking at Wallis’s work, that what he painted was real – you know, that the sea was real, boats were real, the coast was real in a way in which these multi-coloured pictures by the academics were not, where the sun was always shining and the seagulls were always flying. But Wallis didn’t paint this sort of thing and he pointed out to somebody that sea water is actually colourless, it isn’t blue which is what the academics painted it: and he put some sea water into a glass and held it up and he said, “You see it hasn’t got any colour, or it’s white.” He used to paint it white usually which was the equivalent of colourless. I met him although I couldn’t say “met” him because he was just an old Cornish peasant. My friend and I got chased away by a woman from the other side of the road and she said, “You clear off! Don’t you come bothering Mr Wallis!” because the boys worried the poor old mad artist,

Then the war came and it would be 1942 for me and I volunteered for the Royal Engineers and discovered I could be a draughtsman which meant I got free art materials; but I wasn’t in the firing line – only once or twice – so I had quite an interesting life really. Also I learned about draughtsmanship and also about surveying and building construction; and indeed on the boat on the way out to North Africa, I was panic stricken because I thought ‘God, when I get there I shall be put into some Company and they‘ll find out that I’ve never done any drawing!’ All I’d done were drawings of churches and things at art school for the drawing exam. Bannister Fletcher was the great book, wasn’t it? And I studied Bannister Fletcher and I really enjoyed architecture – terribly dreary book. So all the way out to North Africa on the SS Samaria, I read ‘Mitchell’s Building Construction’, I remember it to this day, We were attacked by submarines and things on the way, it was rather a nasty trip. Anyway that’s how I really genned up on the building construction business, Before I went out I was at Halifax, just for a few weeks; it was a holding unit and I went to the art school and did quite a lot of drawing again and I liked Halifax with all those mills – they’re all pulled down now by Fred Dibnah or someone – and I suppose there was some connection between that kind of industrial thing with the mills and the Cornish scene. So I felt quite at home at Halifax.

Anyway, I got to North Africa and there I did a lot of drawing because they used to send me out on these surveys and I usually went out by myself so I used to find a nice shady spot and do some drawing, and I’ve still got them. Then we went to Italy and when I got there I was in all the best places really for drawing – you know, I just went on with my drawing. I had an office which was actually a bit of a Nissen hut and then I used to go out and do the surveys, take a few measurements and do a few more drawings. When I got to Rome I found there were art classes in the Alexander Club – this was a club for the Forces – with a man called Cassola and he was a kind of Roman academic artist and he took me to a lot of artists’ studios. There was one guy who I was convinced was a Futurist, in the sort of hazy image that I have in my mind, and I’m sure he was one of the Futurists but I don’t know which one. It might have been Severini because he lived in Rome and it could have been him, but I remember this man’s house very clearly on the way out of Rome near Piazza del Poppolo: and I remember going to a wonderful dinner party there and all these brightly coloured pictures, sort of broken-up forms.

Then the Major said to me, “Well Canney, I don’t think you’re doing very much here, There’s an art course in Florence. Would you like to go on it?” I said, “Yes please, Sir,” So he sent me off to Florence to this art course where there was a man called Major Morse-Brown who was in charge of it and - you’ll probably wonder when the war was being fought - we went to the Academia Delle Belle Arte in Florence – the Academy of Fine Art which is still there. Anyway I went to this school and did a course there and one day the Major turned up with Giorgio de Chirico whom he’d known in Rome I believe, and De Chirico had come to Florence and had a studio there as well as in Rome, he’d come to Florence to pick up some things and so the Major had said to him, “Would you like to come and teach my young soldiers?” and he did. And he came round and patted me on the back and said, “Jolly good, that’s the way to go my boy,” because it was a very academic etching I was doing of the Ponte Vecchio and he approved of that. And the Major did a very good drawing, a little drawing of De Chirico and I did one at the same time. He was rather a nice man but he didn’t want to know about the earlier work; in fact we were told not to mention his earlier work because he rejected it as “the errors of youth”. That’s what he said to me.

When I was on leave – because I was coming back to England off and on, we’ve moved on a bit now to 1945 – I went back to Penzance art school and whilst I was there there was an exhibition of modern paintings and sculpture, including a relief by Nicholson: and I was standing outside the art school talking to the caretaker who was called Mr Argle(?), He called Hitler “Hilter”, and he used to say, “I think that there Hilter, he should be done to equal so bad as what he done to they!” which I thought proved that you don’t have to speak grammatical English in order to make your point! I was talking to Mr Argle and a little short man came up and said, “Can you tell me where the art school is?” because the pictures were being shown in the art school, and so the caretaker said, “Over ’ere!” And the little man went in and the caretaker turned to me and said, “Some people don’t know ‘ow to use their eyes!” And of course it was Ben Nicholson!

At the same time I met Gabo and Bernard Leach, not Barbara Hepworth – I met Barbara later – so really quite early on I’d met the principal protagonists. The Crypt group was starting up with Lanyon and all these people and this was absolutely the amazing moment really, you knew that something was going on when you saw these pictures that hadn‘t happened before in British art. It was all very strange, unfamiliar, but it seemed important and it somehow related to this landscape and seascape and everything that was around you. It was certainly different from the art I had seen in Italy and certainly different from the religious part I had been brought up with, very exciting and I met a number of the Cornish artists at that time.

So I’d got to come out of the Army eventually, had to go somewhere, and I‘d got my drawing exam which was the first exam you did – by 1942 I had done that in Cornwall – and I now had to go on to the NDD and I went to Goldsmiths where I was with Bert Irvin, Bridget Riley, Mary Quant and Molly Parkin. Now [Graham] Sutherland came to Goldsmiths’ when I was there, in fact I owe him a drink. I felt rather bad about that because he bought me a drink in the Rosemary Branch which was the Goldsmiths’ pub. He was so PROPER. They were called The Beautiful People, he and his wife so I believe. Certainly he was very elegant. It was while I was at Goldsmiths’ that I got TB and I finished at Goldsmiths’ and was going for various Graphic Art jobs and so on, working for Pierce Signs doing Inn signs. I did some terrible things in order to survive; I even went on a course I remember to become an encyclopaedia salesman – thank God that came to nothing!

Somehow or other and I don’t know how this happened – oh yes, it was this thing of dropping into art schools – and I dropped into to my old art school at Redruth to do a bit of drawing, and there was a teacher there, a woman called Miss Hall: and she said, “Well, you’re still convalescing really. You ought to try and see if you can go to Abbott Hall at Arbroath, the Patrick Allen-Fraser Art College in Arbroath.” So she gave me the address and she said, “You can go there and you can paint. You’re given a studio and you pay £1 a week and you get your food and everything for that. It’s a kind of charity.” So I wrote off and lo and behold I was accepted for it, and it was an interesting place because I met people like Joan Eardley, Robin Phillipson who’s still going I think, a number of Scottish artists, and I got to know a bit about Scottish art. And there was a wonderful chap called Bill Burns who was an ex-Spitfire pilot and he was drunk most of the time but he was really quite a good painter and he had his own plane. Unfortunately, he took it one day and flew it out to sea and was never seen again. I think it was a suicide but it was never clear. I did have some entertaining times with him and he seemed to be a professional artist who somehow seemed to tag on to this art school. I don’t know whether he was teaching or whether he was merely there for the girls. It was an amazing place, it was a castle and the story of it was that Brian Cahoun [? probably Robert Colquhoun] had been a pupil there, Frank Dobson had, and there’d been a number of quite distinguished people in the past, They didn’t have very many, I think there were only about six or eight of us, and there was the warden – he’d got a nice cushy job – he was in charge, and we all just painted and that’s all you did you know, you just painted, Lovely! And your food was provided and you paid this minimal fee, And the thing still goes on, and I did a lot of paintings which I’ve still got of the landscape round about this place. The history of it was that there was a man called Allen Fraser who I think was a Scottish academician, and he had very little money but he did manage to discover a rather wealthy lady who owned this castle, The next thing you know he married this woman and she died and he inherited the cast1e. Then when he died, he left it in trust for students in perpetuity.

Anyway I had a very good time there which was important for me because I really did a lot of painting, more than I’d ever done before, and I was with other painters too which was very good for me because up till then I’d been with illustrators, designers and people like that. Initially I did etching at Goldsmiths and illustration and therefore I was concerned with tonal work which was essential1y black and white, until this time when one dived into colour. Whilst I was at Goldsmiths, Kenneth Martin turned up and I got to know him and he was always very interested in what was going on in Cornwall. He used to ask me, “What are they doing down there? What’s Ben doing? What’s Terry doing?” So that was quite an interesting contact, and it wasn’t until much later that Kenneth Martin’s austere constructivism really affected me I think. [Victor] Pasmore was living at Blackheath at that time and I was living at Blackheath in that fellow Ralph Jefferies’ house, and I used to see Pasmore every day walking across the heath. This was at the time when Pasmore was changing over from his early paintings to kind of Paul Klee-like paintings so this was just at the moment of transition for him; and everybody thought he was crazy. They all said, “Poor old Pasmore, he’s off his head you know. Have you seen those pictures he’s painting?”

I went to Paris from Goldsmiths’ and it was at an important time as this was about 1948 and there were quite important exhibitions on then. I remember going to one at the Gallery Maeght which was a major Surrealist exhibition. We as students met a chap called Monsieur Clotte who was about 26 and I suppose he was a bit of a Parisian hippie and said, “You must meet Picasso, I’ll introduce you. I see him every day of the week.“ I remember Bert Irvin being terribly excited and we were all terribly excited because we were going to meet Picasso. It never came off because it turned out that Picasso had gone off to the South of France! At that time he was living in the Rue des Grand Augustins. There was some very interesting painting going on and that was very important to me in the art that I saw which was different from the art that I’d seen in England. I became very much influenced by the Cubists and absolutely obsessed with Cubism. I couldn’t really see the sort of painting they were doing at Goldsmiths’, which was largely Bonnard and Carel Weight, I couldn’t really see its relevance. So I became an absolute Cubist.