Alan Furneaux
As a practising and acknowledged fine artist, Furneaux readily describes his style as ‘naïve’ in as much as it’s representative of a very uncomplicated, blocky visual disposition, complete with interesting shapes and frequented with saturated colours. There’s an almost child-like charm and pictorial resonance to its application, a stripped-back counter to over-elaborate renderings. For the large part, Furneaux’s works focus on towns and cities, such as London, Pals and Barcelona in Spain, Hammamet, Altea and Marrakech in Morocco, Montepulciano in Italy and Kos in Greece, whilst his native Cornwall (and Penzance in particular) serves as a perpetual muse. Indeed the artist spends much of his time in Penzance, capturing the beauty of the surrounding environs in his trademark innocent, naïve light, adding further dimensions to the already multi-layered beauty of this Cornish coastal town.
Most of Furneaux’s signature pieces project this innocent perspective, highlighted by a clarity of colour (despite the overall saturated feel on occasion) and onset of defined borders dividing the forms, which while they are grounded in realism are slightly abstracted by the variety of shapes, which ultimately afford the canvas this child-like quality as implied. To extract the maximum light play, Furneaux chooses to commit his painted scenes in the middle of the afternoon, typically.
