Lot 105: JACK PENDER Empty Harbour No. 1. Oil and acrylic

JACK PENDER Empty Harbour No. 1. Oil and acrylic on board. Signed with the artist's address and the date 1963 - 1972 to the back. Provenance: A private collection. We are indebted to John Halkes former director of the Newlyn Orion Gallery and close friend of the artist for the following observations. This is an important work of Jack Pender's middle period when he was an established member of the Penwith Society of arts and the Newlyn Society of Artists. It was begun in 1963 in his Mousehole studio and completed in 1972, in which year it was exhibited at Newlyn Art Gallery and subsequently in a solo exhibition at the Orion Gallery in 1973. From that exhibition it entered a private collection. Jack Pender had returned to his native Cornwall in the early fifties after service with the DCLI throughout the Second World War and subsequent art school training. He was involved in the post war abstract movement in West Cornwall and his work changed from a figurative style influenced by the late Newlyn School pre war painter and fellow Cornishman-Harold Harvey to a robust organic abstraction influenced by Peter Lanyon another Cornishman who rose to fame after the war. Empty Harbour no 1 was started in the year that Lanyon died in a gliding accident and there is something in it of homage to a lost friend and perhaps about the emptiness felt by many artists after that untimely death. But it also reflects the sense of loss keenly felt for the old Cornwall that Jack Pender knew as a boy before the war when one could walk across Mousehole Harbour on the decks of the moored fishing luggers. There were several other paintings in this series in which the artists resolved his feelings for the land he loved; a land of deep green hills, granite cottages, protective harbour walls and the ever changing coastal sea with its surface turquoise blues and hints of its submarine world of sand, rocks, reefs and seaweeds. 91 x 71cm.