Leamington gallery hosts refreshingly colourful art by local painter

IT’s all too clear that when Cubbington born artist, James Duggins was producing his refreshingly colourful and energetically painted Cornish landscapes in the early years of the 20th century, the post-impressionist style of his mentor, John Anthony Park, was a significant influence on his development. The French Impressionists were able to demonstrate their avant-garde credentials by painting everyday subjects with nothing more complicated than a modest range of complimentary colours.

Nowadays you would need to bring a more off-the-wall approach to the task of being radical, but in Duggins’ day the adoption of the post-impressionist style was enough to demonstrate forward-looking credentials. The evidence that Duggins became a keen aficionado is there in the paintings. It is clear from his drawings that he had a conventional level of competence but in his vision and paint-handling he demonstrates a more excitingly foreign way of working on familiarly English landscape themes.

Like many modern-day artists, he didn’t make his living from his art but worked instead in the family firm. There’s a painting of his father that has all the hallmarks of the standard Victorian portrait. It’s a million miles from the best of the landscapes, such as Moonlit Bay, where the colouration is more expressive and the composition more formally abstract. And that’s an important distinction because its dark and brooding atmosphere gives it a more meditative, northern quality that seems to suggest where his work might have gone, had the family firm not beckoned him away.

Peter McCarthy