CAPTURING THE WAVES.

Nicky Knill-Jones captures the wild Atlantic seaboard  in Cornwall in full roaring swing. Focusing, as well she might, on the rugged, weather- beaten north Cornish coast, the artist captures the sheer weight, power, energy and movement of rolling Atlantic breakers. 'Porthcurno Energy', 'Waves Crashing' and 'Porthcurno Light' are speedily executed pictures that say it all.  This subject-matter unleashes gestural and painterly handling with brush dipped into a credible and felicitous naturalistic palette of jade, blue grey and foam white.

   Knill- Jones studied in the early to mid 1990s at Kingston School of Art in Surrey, following in the footsteps of kitchen sinker John Bratby, a Kingston alumnus from the fifties. Like Bratby she is unafraid of paint and wields it like an abstract expressionist while remaining faithful to representational and descriptive imperatives of an ozone filled landscape that inspires her imagination and guides her hand and eye.

   Knill- Jones's engagement with the mercurial subject of the sea places her in a venerable tradition of Cornish, and indeed British marine painting epitomised by Julius Olsson, Borlase Smart from the early twentieth century and Robert Jones from contemporary art. 

PETER DAVIES.   Author, art critic and artist. July 2023.