An introduction to "Summer in the Scilly Isles"

The Scilly Isles, 1962-4 Art and Writing. Exhibited in York, Spring 2019

The exhibition displayed drawings from the young artist’s time as a seasonal worker in the Scilly Isles along with stories from his journals. They are pencil, line studies of people he worked, played and drank with. They came from a digital archive of approximately 2000 drawings and paintings made by his sister after his sudden death in 2014. This was the fourth exhibition of this reclusive artist’s work derived from that archive. They were well received in York and his home town South Elmsall, where he lived and worked for most of his life - a former coal mining area.The exhibition told of his awakening to a different life in the idyllic Scilly Isles but it occurred in the shadow of his father’s cancer diagnosis and the misery this brought to his large close family at home which touched him deeply and created conflicts within him. This is recorded in a journal he kept titled, “The Island - The Dead Watcher” which he left in the care of his sister. She has transcribed passages from it which were displayed in the exhibition and which will be shared in this blog.