Denise Dimech is a St Ives-based mixed media artist. She was born in Wales and won her first art competition at the age of eight. Subsequently the family moved to Malta, where the island's lively celebrations and vibrant pageantry, set against the backdrop of the bright blue Mediterranean, made a profound impact, continuing to influence her art today.
After marrying and starting a family, Denise and her husband moved to Bournemouth and opened a successful gallery in Poole Pottery. During this time Denise developed her art practice, exhibiting and selling her paintings locally. There followed a number of years as a single parent during which art had to take a back seat.
After meeting her current partner, Denise moved to Cornwall in 2009, putting down roots with him in his home town, St Ives. Her new life allows her much more time to focus on her art. Her work can be seen in Imagianation Gallery in St Ives, and she exhibits regularly at the STISA open exhibitions in the Mariner's Gallery.
Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society exhibitor in the September Annual Show 1846 (received First Class prize).
Laurence Dingley was born in Warwickshire. He completed a BA in Fine art at Reading University in 1983. He recently moved to Cornwall where he indulges his love of painting seascapes. He exhibits in London and throughout the British Isles.
Although she was born in Gravesend, the artist lived mainly in London. She studied at the Slade and Ecole de la Palette, Paris (exhibiting at Salon d'Automne 1912-14), and contributed illustrations to Rhythm. She is associated with St Ives in Whybrow's 1901-1910 list of artists in and around the town at that time.
Jen Dixon was born in the USA but has made her home in Crackington Haven. She works mostly in mixed media abstract and figurative painting. Her work combines emotional, mental and industrial relationships.
A recent correspondent writes (2012): 'I have a watercolour of a goose girl and her geese by a river and a bridge, signed Frank Dobbs, 1902, which was given to me by my mother, who was born in London in 1905. I was able to find some information on his life (although not on his artwork, unfortunately). He was born in Lincolnshire in 1870, and both of his parents were music teachers. They moved to London when he was young. He studied art as a young man, and as an adult his occupation was listed as artist (black and white, watercolour and oil). He continued to live at home according to the census data.'
His address in 1898 was in West Kensington, London, from which he is known to have exhibited one painting at the ROI. Though nothing more is known about him generally, both Whybrow and Tovey record his presence and participation in the St Ives artists colony before that time.
Mick Dobie moved to Cornwall in 2008 in order to study Fine Art at Falmouth University. He loves to paint outdoors around the River Helford.
A Scottish etcher who went on to exhibit 41 prints at the Royal Academy between 1885 and 1923, including prints of paintings by other artists: for example Betrayed by Walter LANGLEY (1888), A Hopeless Dawn by Frank BRAMLEY (1890) and Adversity by Frederick HALL (1891) - the latter two prints being published in The Art Journal (1890) also. His prints of various paintings gave many people the opportunity to both admire and own the art of the Newlyn School, and an early print, Fishing Boats at Hastings (1882), is held by the V&A.
Dobinson works from Trewidden Studios, Buryas Bridge, near Penzance. She says: 'I love the tension between the inner and outer spaces we inhabit.'
Faye was born in London and after completing her 'A' Levels had a variety of jobs before joining an art collective in Woolwich. In 1997 she worked, alongside other artists, from a studio in a disused factory in Greenwich. 'Second Floor Studio & Arts' flourished, moving to Southwark Bridge. Travels in Mongolia and Tibet followed, and on her return she enrolled at Falmouth University, obtaining a BA in Fine Art, which she completed while raising her daughter as a single mother.
Her oeuvre includes a series of paintings of female musicians, entitled 'Unsung' which was exhibited in Cornwall and London. She has also participated in 'On St Michael's Way', a collaborative project in which a number of artists interpreted the ancient route from St Ives to Penzance.
She is a tutor at Newlyn School of Art (2016).
The exhibitor is listed in 1927 as showing 'exquisite examples of bookbinding' at Newlyn in the Summer Exhibition. In the 1928 Summer Exhibition, her work is noted under two categories: bookbinding and leatherwork.
Richard Dobson has been a full-time painter since 1990 and is inspired by the skies and landscapes of the Lizard Peninsula where he lives.
The son of a professional painter of birds and flowers and a Welsh mother, Dobson's earliest art training was at the Leyton School of Art (1900-02) after which he was apprenticed to the sculptor Sir William Reynolds-Stephens for two years.
In Cornwall (1904-06) 'I had practically no contact with other artists. I spent most of my time in painting and sketching that very lovely country and my spare time in swimming and sailing.' (He did, however, produce landscapes under two assumed names, as mentioned below, for his livelihood).
From 1906-10, having heard by chance in Cornwall of the Hospitalfield Art Institute in Arbroath, Scotland, he applied for and received a scholarship there, where he worked on his teaching methods and visited the Glasgow Institute, becoming 'gloriously drunk' on Monet and Pissarro before returning to London for further practice in drawing and modelling.
From 1910-12 he attended the City and Guilds School, Kennington after a brief abortive attempt to study with a disapproving Stanhope FORBES (who did not like his palette of colours) in Newlyn. He returned to Cornwall in 1913-14 as it afforded a cheaper place to work, and shared a studio at Newlyn with Cedric MORRIS. Here he painted oils and made his first sculpture, working with a local stone mason. Here, also, he met Augustus Edwin JOHN for the first time.
After active service in WWI (during which he also drew and painted) he returned to Cornwall in 1919, and married Cordelia Johnson, sister of the artist, Mary JEWELS, and they returned to a busy social life amongst artists and writers in London. Through a friend in Cornwall (Capt Guy Baker), he was introduced to Wyndham LEWIS, and later exhibited with Group X in 1920. As a sculptor, his first solo exhibition was held at the Leicester Galleries in 1921. During WWII he became an official war artist in 1940.
From 1946 to 1953 he was Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art.
Inscriptions include: Dobson; F Dobson; F O Dobson; FOD; F Dobson and title; F Dobson with number.
Born in Birmingham (25 October 1858 GRO), Docker studied art in Hertfordshire and France. He is mentioned as present in Newlyn in a Stanhope FORBES letter of 1886. The 1891 Census finds him resident in Newlyn, lodging at St Peters, Newlyn with the family of the widowed Mary Richards, and he had exhibited with the colony at Dowdeswells the previous year with the French title En Famille. His work Bucca's Pass, Newlyn (1891) is a painting of the street passage at Street an Nowan, Paul, near his lodgings.
By 1894 he had departed Newlyn and was living in Leamington; in 1902 he was exhibiting from an address in Pas de Calais. In 1910 he was living in Letchworth, and after this his name drops from The Year's Art lists of practising artists. He died in Bournemouth on 22 January, 1932, age 74 (GRO).
Born in Holyhead, Wales, Dodd trained at Glasgow School of Art. He lived in Manchester and London (Arundel House, Blackheath), and became a leading portrait painter, including a portrait of Virginia Woolf amongst his subjects. He was official War Artist during WWI, and later became a Trustee of the Tate Gallery, ARA (1927) and RA (1935).
The late Sam Dodwell was born in London.
A retrospective of his lively and colourful paintings of pub-visitors and jazz musicians was held at the Mid Cornwall Galleries in 2007. A Sam Dodwell Gallery had been opened by gallery owner Margaret Gould in 1990 in Cornwall.
Doherty has been the lead potter at the LEACH POTTERY since 2007. His roots are in Ireland where he first began to make pottery in 1970. Since that time his exhibition schedule has gone global, and he is indeed internationally renowned for his work which is primarily soda-fired porcelain small and large in scale, studio pieces and domestic in various shapes and uses.
For full information and illustration his own website, Doherty Ceramics, cannot be bettered (CV, list of exhibitions, public collections, etc.).
Dolton was a watercolourist. She lived at 2 Carter's Flats, St Ives but did not take part in STISA Show Days. A miniature portrait of the artist by Blanche Hamilton POWELL was exhibited at the RA in 1937.
A ceramicist working from west Cornwall, she became a member of Taking Space in 2024.
She is a regular exhibitor at STISA open shows.
Donner works with watercolour, glass, oils, tempura, silk and other materials.
Jon Doran graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from University College Falmouth in 2014. Based at Krowji Studios in Redruth, he is also a tutor at Newlyn School of Art (2017). His work has been shown regularly at 'Beside the Wave' in Falmouth.
Worked in Porthleven during the period of the Summer Painting School administered by Michael CANNEY, and the Porthleven Group's exhibition at the Porthleven Gallery, an old china-clay warehouse on the quayside (c1965-6).