Gill Watkiss

Here’s another Sentinel album where the significance of the cover outweighs that of the music within. It’s a Christmas album from the Holman Climax Male Voice Choir (and associates) and features the usual mix of traditional carols & festive cheer.  What makes this album more appealing is the cover painting, an early work by Penwith artist Gill Watkiss. A fairly realist depiction of a Christmas scene, it’s fairly atypical of her approach; her painting is usually far more stylised, and all the better for it. For me, her work is the precise visual equivalent of the spookier end of early 70s psych-folk, creating exactly the same quietly unsettled, sinister aura that –say- Linda Perhacs’ “Parallelograms” or the theme from "Picture Box" conjures up. It’s all in the movement of the air and the characters’ faces; I can still remember encountering her work for the first time in Newlyn Art Gallery in the late-70s and feeling oddly uneasy. But in a good way.  

This is what she does: 

 

Amazing stuff.

Most of Gill’s paintings depict St Just & its environs, and the cover of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” (SENS 1044, 1979) is no exception, the clock in the village square being instantly recognisable in both paintings here. Recently her work seems to have shot up in value, and rightly so. She is genuinely a one-off. Her website can be found at  www.gillwatkiss.com