Essay by John Martin to accompany the exhibition ‘Recent Paintings’ in association with John Martin London, Albemarle Street, London – 2006.

Simon Averill moved with his wife Lucie to Cornwall from Sussex 20 years ago. Like many painters before him, Cornwall, and in particular that peninsula around St Ives and West Penwith had come to symbolise an approach to painting; an aesthetic allegiance and a new way of life. Following in the tradition of artists like Ben Nicholson and Tony O’Malley, Averill has set out to strip away the visual clutter of conventional landscapes to find a new poetry through rigorous observation and stark simplicity.

Pictured below: “Blades With Violet Shadow”

Averill had begun as a landscape painter; and one always of the Cornish landscape. Even as a student in Brighton he was painting Cornwall. Yet strangely it is those chalk cliffs of the Sussex coast, the dense white rock pitted with fossils and flints that his most recent work seems to recall. The prevailing white background, holding the objects in suspended animation, appears like a membrane through which light seems to pass. In creating the illusion of light and space, these deceptively simple white backgrounds offer the only discernible reference to the landscape in his work.

Pictured below: “Lost and Found”

His love for the Cornish countryside is very much at the heart of everything he paints. “I still think of myself as a landscape painter” he says, “largely because the objects in each painting refer to a particular place”. And it is evident in talking to him that his deep affection for the landscape is recreated through memories rather than any conventional description of particular vistas, trees, rivers and clouds. This is an evocation of the landscape told through the poetry of objects and their relationship with the space that surrounds them.

Like the buzzard’s feather that fell in front of him and which prompted a series of exquisite feather studies, the objects he collects are personal mementos of a landscape. Though the arrangement might suggest the precision of a taxonomist, they are not, he stresses, objects that are in themselves noteworthy or rare. In fact going through the little pots of seed-heads, flints and pods that he has collected on his walks, he is reassuringly unaware of their names. It is as if each tiny pot holds a store of memories and he combines them with the skill and sensibility of an accomplished choreographer.