David Haughton

David Haughton was one of the band of British artists who were attracted to West Cornwall in the years immediately after the Second World War. He came as a young man along with other contemporaries such as Terry Frost, John Wells, and Denis Mitchell and Wilhelmina Barns Graham to work alongside the more established Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth.

It was a heady environment and a good grounding, but while Haughton shared the obsessions of his peers he made his own way and the discovery which was to be the most formative of his career was of a place. Paradoxically, it was not the picturesque fishing town of St Ives but the gaunt mining town of St-Just-in-Penwith, some 10 miles to the south-west, perched between the moors and the Atlantic Ocean on the edge of the Land's End peninsula.

Even after Haughton left Cornwall in 1951 to teach at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, it was St Just which was to provide his inspiration and the fuel for his imagination. In 1961 he recalled: The turning-point in my life occurred when I discovered the town of St Just. What happened to me on that spring day was inexplicable, but it was an experience that has, I believe, happened to a good many people... I have no idea what caused it, whether it really was the divine and transcendent visitation that it so clearly seemed to be or merely a freak of one's chemistry. But I do know that it was all-important and unutterably beautiful, a trance that went beyond logic and never against it, and that I was at home and everything was mine, loving and tender, the landscape and houses a living thing.

Haughton’s early works of St Just were detailed celebrations of its cottages, backyards, chapels and windy streets. The drawings and etchings in particular were packed with observation while remaining briskly free of sentimentality. During the late Sixties, his close involvement with the essential matter and light of the place led to a series of large abstract paintings which had a religious intensity. Their subtle multi-faceted devices and motifs echoed the fall of light on quartz-veined granite: the stuff of which Cornwall is built. By 1979, when he had a major retrospective touring exhibition mounted by Newlyn Orion, the imagery had once again become figurative. However, a disastrous studio fire in the early Eighties destroyed most of his work, a blow from which in many ways he never fully recovered.

However, enough of David Haughton's work survives in public collections (with the notable exception of the Tate Gallery) and his inclusion in the 1985 St Ives Exhibition at the Tate ensures that Haughton will be remembered as an artist, even though more in the shadows than he deserves.

He will also live on in the memories and works of innumerable students who came under his tutelage during his long association with the Central School of Arts and Crafts. He taught by example and his single-minded devotion to his own work and his sources was infectious. For many years he brought panics of students to St Just, where they would take over a pair of cottages as bases for expeditions into Haughton's own territory. It was on these trips that they perceived his fierce concentration and powers of observation, and learned the necessity of these virtues. They also learned from him the fundamental language of drawing. "Line is everything, without it imagination is confined to the material, without it colour becomes decoration, forms flat, and invention an impossibility." Waves of students became loyal friends and despite his demanding and at times self-centred needs they were able to give him companionship and hope in return for his undoubted gifts to them.

Haughton retired from teaching in 1984, and during the last seven years suffered a series of multiple illnesses. Living in reduced circumstances, he yet maintained yet both independence and his obsessional drive to make art. Last summer, he had mustered the will and strength to return to St Just to make some drawings and had the offer of a London exhibition before him. It was typical of his intensely-driven genius.
Despite his affiliations with St Ives and the London Group, Haughton remained outside the mainstream of post-war British art. He was more in the category of those romantic obsessionals who have remained true to their own vision and in doing so have added a rare flavour to the tradition of painting in this country and richness to the lives of those artists who had the privilege of being alongside. No doubt in the celestial St Just, David Haughton is still working.

John Halkes