Glyn Macey
Agenius of expressive, powerful mark making, David Bomberg captured wild moorland landscapes as never before. The ability to create a ‘living, breathing canvas’ full of colour, texture and expression was Bomberg’s forte. Largely unknown and disregarded during his lifetime, Bomberg is today considered to be one of Britain’s great modern masters.
In August 1947, David Bomberg and his family travelled through the south west of England to Cornwall on a sixweek painting expedition. Camping under the stars with a makeshift tent made from a silk parachute crammed full of large canvases, paints and the family dog, Bomberg captured the natural landscape in a way that helped him to make sense of the world. The high moorland and dramatic granite, windswept carns of west Cornwall became a compelling subject for the artist. Wild and unspoilt, with Bronze Age field patterns dropping away to vertical cliffs and pounding seas, this landscape had attracted many of his contemporaries, such as Bryan Wynter, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, with whom Bomberg had shared a painting trip to Switzerland 25 years earlier. However, in spite of camping only a few minutes walk from Bryan Wynters’ remote cottage at Zennor, David Bomberg deliberately avoided the St Ives artists during his stay, deciding instead to focus fully on his own vision and output.