"Many of the world's foremost artists visited St Ives, a remote fishing port in the south west of England. A number of them lived and worked there.Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicolson, Henry Moore, Naum Gabo, Bernard Leach and Sjoji Hamada were among them. Already in the early 19th century William Turner made sketches during his visit. At the end of the century Whistler spent part of a winter in this Cornish town. In the following years a relatively large number of artists settled there. In the late 1950's St Ives was one of the world centers for artists and writers. Nowadays the Tate St IVES continues the art tradition. This museum also includes Barbara Hepworth's studio which is located in the center. 'Finding Trewyn Studio was a sort of magic', wrote Barbara Hepworth; 'here was a studio, a yard and garden where I could work in open air and space'. During her first period at Trewyn Studio, she worked predominantly in stone and wood, but during the 1950s she increasingly made sculpture in bronze as well. This led her to create works on a more monumental scale, for which she used the garden as her viewing area. The bronzes now in the garden are seen in the environment for which they were created, and most are in the positions in which the artist herself placed them. The garden itself was laid out by Barbara Hepworth with help from her friend, the composer Priaulx Rainier. I visited her studio in 1975 just after she died. This was short time after I had met Henry Moore in Forte Dei Marmi in Italy, where he told me about the period in Cornwall. For all these reasons I chose this name for our website when I initiated it back in 1997. It was my first visit to this small and remote town in Cornwall, back in the seventies which prompted me to use the name St. Ives for another international community of artists. In this way St Ives Net will be a new center for the arts on the world wide web. Our aim is to present the best of the arts and to make no concessions to commercial temptations. There may indeed be a few ads on some pages which will help finance our art sites; but there will be no links on the artists' pages themselves nor will there ever be any banners." Lucien den Arend back | st-ives home | selected-art | artists | join | history | links
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den Arend
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