Collection: MICHAEL CANNEY, 1923-1999

Discover Michael Canney paintings for sale; St Ives Abstract artist.

Michael Richard Ladd Canney was born on 16 July 1923 in Falmouth. In 1937 Michael was encouraged to take up art at King’s College, Taunton. From 1947 to 1951, Canney attended Goldsmiths’ College School of Art in London. Fellow students included Bridget Riley. 

At Goldsmiths’ Canney recalled: “I became an obsessional Neo-Cubist, because at that time, in the late 1940s, Abstract Expressionism had not yet crossed the Atlantic, and Cubism seemed as good a place as any for a young painter to start from”.

In 1958 Peter Lanyon brought Mark Rothko, during his famous visit, to meet Canney and to view some of the artist’s work. “A man of great presence and charm, he was very generous about my work and spent some time looking at it.”

In 1966 Canney was invited by Paul Feiler to join the staff of the West of England College of Art. He remained at Bristol, where he became principal lecturer in painting in the department of fine art, until April 1983. Of his work during this period the artist revealed: “My paintings and reliefs of the early 1970s onwards are broadly related to the Constructivist tradition and rely upon simple principles in which the work constructs itself from itself. Both paintings and reliefs proceed initially from the square, which is then subjected to various processes, such as cutting, folding, overlapping, inversion and rearrangement of the parts, and so on. ”

In 1981, Canney started to use a paint type, Alkyd oil paint, “which would transform the variety and appearance of his pictures”. Alkyd oil paint contains a resin which means that the medium sets quickly. This allows adjacent blocks of colour to be laid down without mixing. 

Canney continued painting until ill health made further work impossible in 1995. Michael Canney died a few days before the new century on 29 December 1999.

In 2007 a posthumous exhibition at the Fine Art Society assembled a selection of 50 alkyd works which had occupied Canney’s final years. The gallery categorised Canney as a 'Geometric-Cubist'.

(A more complete biography of Michael Canney can be found at http://www.michaelcanney.co.uk)