Jean Foulds

april 27th to may 25th

Absract

My father was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy (RNVR), and gave his children a love of the sea from a very early age. I had family and godparents in Falmouth and Saltash, and we spent many happy times in Cornwall as we grew up. As a child I cannot remember a time when I was without a sketchbook.

I have felt drawn to Penwith with and Its artistic influence since 1960; and I remember seeing Barbara Hepworth, whose work I greatly admire, directing the loading of a sculpture onto a lorry outside the old dance hall In St. Ives.

After a busy career, bringing up a family and caring for others I now have the opportunity to work as a serlous artlst, soaking up the coastal landscape around me and expressing my perceptions of it,

I have always enjoyed music and dance. i am a member of the Penzance Choral Society, and of the Mounts Bay Methodist Circuit Choir, and I also enjoy walking swimming and yoga.

"All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures..... Feelings about ideas and people and the world all about us struggle inside me to find the evocative symbol....." (Barbara Hepworth)

My artistic background is in three-dimensional work, but my M.A. research study involved children's emergent drawing. I became fascinated by the novel and often amazingly articulate symbols used by young children, revealing their knowledge and concepts through their drawlngs as they grow towards our culture. I developed a great respect for the capability to convey information with the minimum of symbols, which with increasing literacy is lost as children begin to draw what they see, rather than what they know.

Working in the abstract is for me a similar intellectual journey. It facilitates Intense description of aspects of reality, which are inaccessible In representational art. It allows me to express the reality of what I know and feel, rather than merely to represent a perceived picture; and it allows a freedom of imaginative response for the audience in the search for meaning.

Much of my work is influenced by the rhythm of the sea, the human form and by the feeling of being at one with the Penwith landscape.