Cornwall Artists Index

Eloise Pilbeam is a sculptor.

Kim Pilgrim works from Krowji Studios, Redruth. In 2001 she obtained a BTEC Diploma in Art & Design from Colchester Institute. This was followed three years later by a BA (Hons) at Nottingham Trent University. She continued her studies at University College Falmouth with a BA in Contemporary Visual Arts in 2007. She has been awarded several residencies and has been involved in a wide range of community art projects throughout Cornwall. Since 2009 she has been a specialist gallery educator at Tate St Ives and the Barbara Hepworth Museum & Sculpture Garden.

The artist was born in Leicester. He now has a gallery in Bude, Cornwall.

Douglas Houzen Pinder painted in oils and more frequently in watercolour, favouring coastal views, moorland landscapes and desert scenes. According to most biographies he was born in Lincoln in 1886 but the GRO index and census returns clearly indicate that he was born in Derbyshire at Starkholmes and registered in the Bakewell RD towards the end of 1886. His father, a schoolmaster died in 1887, so by 1891 his mother had returned to Lambeth where she first had married, and became a school teacher.   By 1901 the family had moved to Newquay where Douglas's mother is recorded as an infant mistress in a board school..

In the early 1900s, Douglas Pinder was articled to a local architect. The 1901 census describes him as an architect's apprentice but he then turned to painting full time and is described as an artist in 1911. In the meantime he had married Edith Jane Osborne from St Wenn in 1908.

Motivated by membership of the Plymouth Brethren, on 19 June 1916 Pinder appeared as a conscientious objector before the Newquay Military Service Tribunal. He was exempted from combatant service, entailing call-up to the Non-Combatant Corps. He served until July 1918, when with four others he was court-martialled for disobedience. It is presumed they were given an order contrary to conscience. On 26 July 1918 he was sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour, and sent to Wormwood Scrubs Prison. There he was interviewed by the Central Tribunal, who found him to be a genuine conscientious objector, and he was released from prison.

Later also he was sponsored to go to Egypt to paint a number of Desert Scenes from the station at Base Said. For about two years, Pinder lived at Horrabridge on Dartmoor, where he painted moorland scenes which he often signed 'Ben GRAHAM'. He also lived in Plymouth for some period. By 1930 he was back in Newquay, painting and selling art in his own gallery at 80, Fore Street.

He did not drive a car, but used a bicycle, heading off to many locations along the north Cornish coast, with a special carrier attached to the bike's crossbar for his painting equipment. He painted many watercolours and a far smaller number of oils, usually seascapes, which often included details that allowed the location to be clearly identified. He did not exhibit with art societies, preferring to handle his own work in Newquay. His early work is signed D H Pinder, while later works are signed DOUGLAS (H) PINDER in a printed script.

He died towards the end of 1949 at the age of 63, registered in the St Austell RD, some 6 to 9 months after his wife. A view of Polperro was exhibited posthumously in 1950 at the Plymouth Art Society Exhibition.

A correspondent has been in touch (2021) to tell us of a watercolour by Douglas Pinder entitled 'Arch Rock Perranporth' which he inherited from his grandparents, resident in Perranporth from the 1920s to the 1980s. The image includes the figure of a beachcomber who apparently was a well-known local character.

Artist & Art Mistress of County Boy's School.

A Mousehole artist, her death was announced, aged 30, in the Cornishman in January 1942.

Piper moved to Cornwall when he was still at school, from Salisbury where he was born. His paintings are of the landscape and its dramatic features in his adopted country, and his work is widely shown and collected.

His painting, Moorland Cottages (2004) is held by Penlee House, Penzance. John is one of the group of artists who contribute regularly to the collections and exhibitions held at Gallery Tresco, on the Isles of Scilly.  In general he visits to paint on the Islands during the winter months. He is also a regular exhibitor at Tregony Gallery on the Roseland peninsula.

Mary Piprell was born in St Peter Port, Guernsey. She studied drawing and painting at Regent Street Polytechnic, and moved to Mousehole in 1936. She exhibited with the Royal Academy from 1937 and with the Newlyn Society of Artists at Passmore Edwards Gallery from 1939.

She is buried at Paul, near Mousehole.

Litz Pisk was born in Vienna and studied stage architecture with Oskar Strnad and kinetics with Franz Cizek in the State Arts & Crafts School. She was also a visiting pupil in the Max Reinhardt Theatre School. In 1932 she was the stage designer for Bertold Brecht's and Kurt Weil's production of The Rise and Fall of the Town Mahogany, in which Lotte Lenya played Jenny. From this event she held her first solo show of pen and brush drawings, and her caricatures of musicians and actors were reproduced widely.

Movement was her great interest, and her future was to be in the sphere of choreography, costume & set design and teaching. She took up residence in England in 1937, after visiting first in 1933. Her work was directly with the Old Vic Theatre, the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Royal Exchange, Manchester, the English Opera Company and for TV and film productions.  She worked with many stars of the stage and screen in relation to their movement and flow within their roles. For example, notably, she choreographed the movement for Vanessa Redgrave in the film, Isadora (Duncan).

Her teaching career included employment with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the Old Vic School, Bath Academy of Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama.

She moved to Cornwall in 1970, purchasing a home on Trencrom Hill near St Ives. Aside from keeping up with events in London and showing her work there in exhibitions of drawings, the Newlyn Art Gallery mounted a major retrospective of her drawings in 1986.  She died in Cornwall on 6 January 1997.

The WCAA holds her Archive, a gift from her executors.

The artist, a member of the distinguished Pitt family which had produced two former prime ministers, arrived in St Ives with a manservant to care for him as he was crippled and confined to a wheel chair. One sister lived in Norway Square nearby, whilst two other sisters remained in the family home in Clifton, Bristol.

Pitt worked from the White Studio, a wooden chalet on the cliffs at Porthmeor Beach, which was open to the public, painting views of The Island and Clodgy Point. He opened his studio for the 1911 and 1913 Show Days at St Ives. Returning from Clifton, after an illness, in 1920, he found that his studio had been broken into, and eventually it was destroyed in a storm. He lies buried in Barnoon Cemetery.

As at 2008 [Waterside Gallery notes, Street-an-Pol, St Ives]: After studying illustration at Swindon College and Kingston School of Art, Surrey, the artist arrived in Cornwall to paint full-time.  He admits to the direct influence of his favourite painters, Vermeer and the American Edward Hopper, that can be observed in his paintings. From 4 Sept to Oct 3, 2008 his work was shown locally at the Waterside Gallery, St Ives. [www.watersidestives.com]

Pittam in 2010, was part of the exhibiting group which shows work regularly with Gallery TRESCO on the Isles of Scilly. His work for the Autumn Collection included acrylics on board with titles such as:  Mackerel and Pineapple, Cooking Apple and Sea Bream  and Crab with Blue and White Plate - all still life - and Bryher from the Castles, Tresco and Bishop Rock being landscapes.

Steven Platt spent his childhood in Newlyn and Hayle. After graduating from Coventry University, he started a career in car design in Paris. Back in the UK, he still feels closely connected to his Cornish roots - which is reflected in his subject matter.

In 2023 he created a vibrant series of paintings inspired by the chalets at Riviere Towans in Hayle.

Ella Plumb and her husband, Gerry, decided to leave their London (Chorleywood) lives in 2005, giving up conventional jobs and monthly salaries, and settling into the countryside of West Cornwall. Now, instead of the daily commute, they spend every morning walking their two Scottish deerhounds on a nearby ancient common, from which there are spectacular views of the Atlantic coastline.

What they had decided to buy was an old miller’s cottage, together with a watermill, granary and piggery, built around a courtyard and surrounded by four acres of land. Set within a small wooded valley, the property is reached via a bumpy farm lane and feels miles from anywhere, though in fact it’s little more than a stone’s throw from Penzance. The house, of late Georgian vintage appears older, needed only a small kitchen extension, and conversions of the piggery into Ella’s studio and the granary into Gerry's.

Anita Plume was born in London. She moved to Cornwall in 1988. Former hairstylist, hotelier and now running a B&B, she has always pursued her passion for painting. She lives in Padstow but travels to St. Ives on a regular basis to study at the St. Ives School of Painting. She studied Fine Art part-time at Falmouth College of Art, graduating with a B.A. (Hons) in 2000. Anita is also a member of the Porthmeor Group. Her inspiration comes from the landscape and the lush tropical gardens of Cornwall. She responds to her own experience in the landscape by seeking to capture that intimate sense of place, atmosphere and mood.