Meeting Forrester

I didn’t recognise the artist Denzil Forrester when he came into the Oxfam Bookshop to pick up a photography book a friend of his had asked to have put aside for him. The book was Antigua Black: portrait of an island people by Margo and Gregson Davis. Denzil mentioned it was the second book he’d bought here recently: the first was one by Peter Doig. Peter Doig! I exclaimed, I love his work.

Denzil Forrester loves him too. Doig was responsible for giving Forrester’s career a sizeable boost. Though they never met at the time, Doig had remembered Forrester’s degree show at the Royal College of Art some thirty years previously and asked Forrester, out of the blue in 2015, if Forrester wanted to show his work at Doig’s gallery in London, and in New York.

The rest is sort of history; Forrester’s drawings, he told me, now fetch £35,000. His paintings, over £100,000. He was very friendly and down to earth, though, despite tales of frequent visits to the Caribbean and art shows in New York. I, of course, plugged my current exhibition.

In 2016 Forrester made the move to Cornwall and had a show, From Trench Town to Porthtowan in 2018, at Kurt Jackson’s gallery. It seems a surprising move, as Denzil is a black man from the West Indies who spent the 1980s painting dub reggae clubs and black communities in London (and more recently, sketching Lee Scratch Perry when he used to perform at the Watering Hole in Perranporth); moving to Truro, Cornwall, a county with a 95% white population and the capital city being, well, conservative and dull, seems an odd choice at first. But of course, for hundreds of years artists have come to Cornwall for the light, and Denzil is no exception.

Also, Denzil told me in the bookshop, Cornwall reminds him of home. He’d just returned from Jamaica where on the north coast lies Frenchman’s Cove (itself a Cornish-sounding name) whose sea and cliffs feel just like Cornwall.

Though apparently moving to Cornwall to ‘retire’ (though artists never seem to retire; look at Hockney, aged 85), Forrester seems busier than ever, with exhibitions all over the world. His partner too, artist Phillippa Clayden, is also busy; her work can currently be seen at the Sarah Lucas-curated exhibition Big Women at Firstsite in Colchester.

After Denzil left the shop, two things suddenly occurred to me: this was the ‘handsome black man’ a volunteer had mentioned to me who had bought the Peter Doig book a while ago, and this was the ‘famous artist’ another volunteer lives next door to (but couldn’t remember his name). After Googling him, I immediately remembered his painting at the Tate in St. Ives. His work is full of movement and energy, people dancing in crowded rooms. His art has been compared to Marc Chagall and Forrester mentions Max Beckmann and Stanley Spencer as influences.

• Peter Doig’s new exhibition at the Courtauld Institute is on now until 29th May 2023

Previously on Barnflakes
Top ten contemporary painters
Satish Kumar talk on Soil • Soul • Society at Oxfam Books, Truro
Second hand serendipity
This afternoon in the bookshop
Echoes of mirrors
Notes on Hedluv + Passman