Michael Canney 1923-1999

Michael Richard Ladd Canney was born on 16 July 1923 in Falmouth, the only child of a clergyman, William Richard Ladd Canney, and Harriet Louise Canney (née Hewitt), an amateur artist. From the age of five, young Michael was taken annually to St Ives show days to visit the artists’ studios. In 1937 Michael was encouraged to take up art by his art master, W Lyons Wilson at King’s College, Taunton. Lyons Wilson was a fringe member of the surrealists and an exhibitor at the Redfern Gallery in London.

From 1940 to 1942 Canney enrolled in full-time art classes at Redruth and Penzance Schools of Art, and at Leonard Fuller's St Ives School of Painting, “more informal than Redruth or Penzance, being modelled on a Parisian atelier”. Professional St Ives artists such as John Anthony Park, Leonard Richmond, Borlase Smart and Dorothea Sharp visited regularly.

On St Ives Show Day 1942, encouraged by Borland Smart, Canney held a one-man exhibition of watercolours of Cornish landscapes and seascapes in one of the Piazza Studios. That same year Ben Nicholson showed his first work in West Cornwall, at Penzance Art School. At the exhibition Canney was introduced to Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo and Bernard Leach.

From 1942 to 1947 Canney served as a draughtsman in the Royal Engineers in North Africa, Italy and Austria. He documented his wartime journeys with many drawings, most now lost. Italian art and architecture were a revelation, and encouraged a lifelong affection for the country and its people; he finally returned to live there in 1984 for seven years. While in Florence, in 1945, Canney met Giorgio De Chirico, who made favourable comments about a series of Canney’s drawings and an etching of the Ponte Vecchio.

Whilst on leave in Britain, Canney saw an important Picasso exhibition, and on returning to Austria, made a number of experimental drawings in “an Analytical-Cubist manner”. After the war, from 1947 to 1951, Canney studied at Goldsmiths’ College School of Art in London. Fellow students included Bridget Riley. In 1947 he was impressed by a major Picasso exhibition in London and the London Gallery’s anthology of Cubist painting.

At Goldsmiths’ Canney studied illustration under Betty Swanwick, but decided upon a programme of auto-didactic study at home, in painting. He recalled: “I became an obsessional Neo-Cubist, because at that time, in the late 1940s, Abstract Expressionism had not yet crossed the Atlantic, and Cubism seemed as good a place as any for a young painter to start from”.

From 1950 to 1952 Canney was incapacitated intermittently with a serious attack of pulmonary tuberculosis, and returned to Cornwall to convalesce. When recovered, he painted extensively in West Cornwall, especially at Newlyn and Mousehole. “My illness, which at first seemed a disaster, turned out to be the best thing that could have happened, as it gave me the opportunity to paint full time, without any external pressures or worries, apart from the occasional painful treatment for a collapsed lung”.

In 1951 Canney exhibited his first works in London, and the following year worked in St Ives with sculptor Denis Mitchell, at that time Barbara Hepworth’s assistant, on a number of large mobiles in sheet aluminium, for the St Ives Festival. The years from 1952 to 1957 were spent teaching and lecturing in London, and he began making reliefs, while continuing with Neo-Cubist works, the subject matter including still lifes, portraits and motifs from Cornwall; however, his paintings were now tending towards abstraction. He made frequent visits to Cornwall and met his wife, Madeleine in Penzance in 1954.

From 1957 to 1958, Canney’s paintings began to change under the prevailing influence of Abstract Expressionism, and that of the painter and fellow Cornishman Peter Lanyon, who exhibited regularly at Newlyn and became a close friend. Lanyon’s influence however, ultimately ran contrary to Canney’s instinct as an artist. “After a time I found that Lanyon’s intensely individual approach to the landscape was too personal for me, the pursuit of the ‘genius loci’ too elusive, and the informed automatism of the painting process too exhausting, both physically and psychologically. I realised that I was beginning to seek the security of a more measured and geometric structure in my work again, and was also looking for some continuity from my earlier paintings and reliefs. …. Although Gabo had left for America in 1946, his influence lingered on in West Cornwall, and Constructivism was a common subject for discussion. Evidence of a constructive approach was apparent in Lanyon’s early constructions and drawings, in the paintings of John Wells, in Barbara Hepworth's sculpture, and in the general look of St Ives painting at that time. The direction seemed clear enough, but I was not quite sure how to go about it”.

In 1958 Peter Lanyon brought Mark Rothko, during his famous visit, to meet Canney and to view some of the artist’s work. “A man of great presence and charm, he was very generous about my work and spent some time looking at it. This was very encouraging, as I regarded Rothko as the most important painter on the international scene at that time”.

Another artist who made a lasting impression on Canney was Roger Hilton as he recounted in 1990; “Roger stayed with us while searching for a studio at Newlyn, and we became good friends. My work was becoming increasingly abstract and we had some discussions about the problems involved. Although moving in the direction of figuration himself at this time, he would reiterate the basic teaching that he had received in Paris, which seemed to be essentially concerned with the use of colour in a purely abstract sense. This was the advice that I needed, and it has served me well ever since”.

Also in 1958, working as the curator at the Newlyn Art Gallery, Canney researched and organised the exhibition “Paintings of the Newlyn School – 1880-1900”. Canney considered that “this very successful travelling exhibition encouraged a reassessment of these painters, and of the position of the Newlyn School in 19th-century British art. Surprisingly there had been no major exhibition of their work since 1902”. The Newlyn School has since been recognised and championed by the opening and continuing success of the Penlee House Gallery and Museum.

In 1965 Canney was appointed visiting Gallery Director and Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, spending two years there. While there, he was involved in a number of exhibitions, including a major exhibition of Dada and Surrealism, in collaboration with the Santa Barbara Museum and Art Gallery. In 1966 Canney was invited by Paul Feiler to join the staff of the West of England College of Art. He remained at Bristol, where he became principal lecturer in painting in the department of fine art, until April 1983.

During the artist’s time in Bristol, many painters and sculptors from London and elsewhere visited. “As a result, I was able to meet a number of older artists whom I had never met before, and an entirely new generation of young painters and sculptors who undoubtedly exerted an influence on my thinking and my work. My paintings and reliefs of the early 1970s onwards are broadly related to the Constructivist tradition and rely upon simple principles in which the work constructs itself from itself. Both paintings and reliefs proceed initially from the square, which is then subjected to various processes, such as cutting, folding, overlapping, inversion and rearrangement of the parts, and so on. These divisions of the original square format are usually oblique and dynamic, precisely measured, and often rely upon certain classic proportions or numerical systems. The essential principle is that the painting or relief is ultimately constructed from the original material alone, and that nothing extraneous is added. In this limitation lies the creative challenge”.

In the early 1980s, following on his ‘white relief’ phase, Canney started to use a paint type “which would transform the variety and appearance of his pictures”, in the words of Robert Miller, who wrote the introduction to the catalogue for a posthumous Fine Art Society exhibition in 2007. “His discovery and experimentation with alkyd allowed his vision and thoughts to come to fruition in a burst of creativity… Alkyd, or alkyd oil paint, contains a resin which means that the medium dries quickly, or more accurately ‘sets’ or hardens. This happens in a matter of hours and allows blocks of colour to be laid down adjacent to each other without any danger of ‘run’ or mixing”. The earliest dated works by Canney using this medium are from 1981.

Canney considered a return to Cornwall in 1984, but finally rejected this idea in favour of Italy, a country for which he had a special attachment formed during his war experience there. With his wife, he found a 14th-century palazzo in the mediaeval hilltop village of Casole d’Elsa, between San Gimignano and Siena, and established a studio there.

After a year in France, Canney returned to live in Wiltshire in 1993, and continued painting until 1995, when ill health made further work impossible. Michael Canney died a few days before the new century on 29 December 1999.

In 2007 a posthumous exhibition at the Fine Art Society assembled a selection of 50 alkyd works which had occupied Canney’s final years. The gallery categorised Canney as a 'geometric-cubist'.

(A more complete biography of Michael Canney can be found at http://www.michaelcanney.co.uk)