Lar Cann Hon. SWAc
Lar Cann studied at the Plymouth College of Art from 1959 – 1965 gaining an NDD in Painting Special. He lives and works near the world heritage site of the Phoenix Mine and Cheesewring Quarry on the Caradon Hill mining complex of South East Cornwall.
A member of the Plymouth Society of Artists since his student days, he is the current Chairman having served on its Executive and Selection Committee since the mid-1980s. He was invited to the membership of the St Ives Society of Artists in 2006, serving as a Director and Chairman until 2015. He was elected an academician to the South West Academy in 2006 and is a full life-member of the Penwith Society of Arts in Cornwall.
For more than two decades Cann has been engaged with the visual impact on the landscape of the South West, in particular that of Cornwall, brought about by the industrial extraction of copper and tin. This intervention has revealed an otherwise hidden world of mineral wealth unrivalled in its beauty of colour, form and texture and has been a continuing source of investigation and motivation in his painting.
This use of the landscape, or more precisely the hidden world of landscape revealed by anthropologic activity is one point of reference. Specifically it is the rich, saturated colour that his work focuses on, to the point of it becoming the subject, colour derived principally from observation of his mineral collection.
Study for De Lank Reprise
De Lank Reprise XVIII
The geometry and planar composition of the work is usually based on references to another aspect of Cornwall’s geology, that of granite quarrying. The two sources are often mixed, irrespective of any scientific accuracy, even resorting to juxtaposing two or more colours from unrelated minerals. But this is always for the sake of the painting’s composition: it is a response rather than a recording. Reference to scale is deliberately avoided in order to allow these characteristics to predominate. For the most part there is no attempt at figuration.
In Cann’s own words he observes:
In his book Colour and Meaning the academic John Gage comments ‘But we are increasingly aware that painters are not necessarily privileged spectators of their own works; and when they turn to words they may in fact be rather less able than other categories of writers to articulate their thoughts about the notoriously opaque world of visual sensation’.
Just so: I can however identify the stimuli and, though the outcomes are essentially abstract in character, it is the geological and industrial landscape of Bodmin Moor and the farmland on its edge that motivate enquiry.
The region has been my home since the turn of the 1970s: the accrued understanding of its landscape over the years, this acquaintance with the place is fundamental to the synthesis and the process of making pictures. It will be an often-remembered, often-visited, part of the continuum. Casual visits to a site are not enough for me. I need a longer time to work at it. This is probably as much to do with over-dependence of the ephemeral in an image as my loss of the familiar and the understanding of what has gone before. As a consequence it allows me to view things differently, with an altered sympathy.
His work is held in public and corporate collections that include The Box, Plymouth, the Royal Institution of Cornwall, the University of Sheffield Heritage Collections, the Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital Trust and DB Publishing as well as numerous private collection in the UK and worldwide.
