Thirteen newly uncovered works by celebrated West Cumbrian climber and artist Bill Peascod will be revealed at Cockermouth’s Castlegate House Gallery in a new exhibition from Saturday.
Bill, who was born in Maryport in 1920 and died in 1985, worked as a miner from the age of 13, before becoming a dominant name in British climbing in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
After qualifying as a mining engineer, he emigrated to Australia where he developed a great passion and natural skill as an experimental landscape painter, often producing mixed media works with their surfaces burnt to change the appearance and nature of some of the painted areas.
Despite his success and major exhibitions in Australia, Bill longed for his native Cumbria, and returned to the UK in 1980. Here he continued to paint, inspired by the fells he’d got to know before leaving 28 years earlier. He died of a heart attack while climbing in Wales in 1985.
The new exhibition features 14 works, 13 of which have never before been seen and were acquired from long-term friends of the Peascods, who now live in Somerset.
Castlegate House Gallery owner Steve Swallow said: “The paintings in the exhibition span Bill’s art career and show both sides of his life, from very large sculptural pieces of the 1960s in Australia, to his return to Cumbria in the early 1980s, with his smaller depictions of the fells and crags he so loved to walk and climb.
“It’s rare to be able to acquire even one or two works by Bill Peascod each year, so we were absolutely thrilled to have been able to acquire 13 works that had remained in private hands for the last four decades.
“Bill Peascod was a true inventive artist of the 60s. Works in the exhibition show this clearly, from pieces burnished with a blow torch to one even including a large piece of wood attached across the horizontal; as much a work of sculpture as painting. With some of the very large works from this time you feel you can almost climb up the surface, such is the nature of the materials used.”
The exhibition runs from May 7 to 28. Cumbrian filmmaker Steve Wharton, who produced a film to celebrate the artist’s 2020 centenary. called At Home in the Steep Places, will be giving a talk at Keswick Mountain Festival at noon on Sunday May 22.
