Conan Treloar
Charcoal tides, bodies, boats
Conan Treloar is a fictional Cornish painter imagined as working between a draughty studio above Penzance harbour and winter lodgings near the dunes at Hayle. His art treats the beach, boatyard and bathing pool as places of primitive theatre, where people and vessels become rough signs scratched into light. Rather than describing the coast, Treloar attacks and pares it back, leaving only the pressure of charcoal, the shock of colour and the stubborn whiteness of the surface.
Conan Treloar makes stark coastal abstractions where bathers, harbour boats and cliff-edge figures are reduced to urgent charcoal scrawls, bruised blocks of oil colour and exposed white ground. His pictures feel half-erased and half-sung: raw, bodily, comic, weather-beaten, with the Cornish coast appearing as a stage for awkward human appetite and sea-wind.
Inspirations
- Roger Hilton's raw gestural figurative abstraction
- St Ives modernist colour and space
- Cornish harbour drawing and boatyard forms
- Newlyn and Penzance bathing culture
- Primitive mark-making and studio floor drawing
- Atlantic weather, chalky light and exposed paper
Signature features
- bold black scribbled charcoal contours around simplified bodies and boats
- large areas of untouched white ground functioning as sea, sky or silence
- awkward reclining or standing figures with blocky limbs and mask-like heads
- tilted harbour shapes, hulls, masts and oars reduced to restless signs
- sparse oil colour applied as rough islands rather than full coverage
- visible erasures, smudges, fingerprints and rubbed charcoal dust
- deliberately unstable composition with figures sliding toward the edges
- raw humorous sexuality and bodily awkwardness in beach and bathing scenes
4 series · 127 works.
Series by Conan Treloar
Fine art editions
Working Harbour
73 works · Cornish working harbours, boats and quays in charcoal
Poolside Arguments
27 works · Bathers gathered around Cornish sea pools, caught in comic disputes, damp towels and whitewashed concrete against blank Atlantic glare.
Bathers
19 works · wild swimmers and bathers in the Cornish sea, charcoal life studies
Storm Tides
8 works · Storm Tides — Cornwall, in the artist's own style