Gill Watkiss (b. 1938)

ABOUT GILL WATKISS

By Judith Cook

Extract from, ‘Gill Watkiss Painting 1974 – 2002’

For many years Gill Watkiss lived on the north coast of the Penwith peninsula, where it reaches out into the Atlantic, the nearest landfall after the Scilly Isles being America and where prevailing winds blow from the west. It is a world away from the picture postcards, the surfing beaches and the theme parks. This is the Cornwall of the “tin coast”, of the mining villages with their terraces of granite cottages, of a people whose real memorial are ruined “castles”, the engine houses of dead industry. A coast where miners work a mile out under the bed of the Atlantic and where they could hear the granite boulders grinding above thier heads; an industry which buried their young men two-deep in the churchyard at St. Just.