R. J. Lloyd is a versatile and seasoned West Country artist. Primarily a painter, Lloyd has also made serious inroads into pottery, sculpture, stained glass, book illustration and printmaking. While we may speculate about interdisciplinary osmosis, Lloyd's pictorial language is more the product of a particular accord between poetic and plastic factors or between naturalism and abstraction.

The current exhibition "The Cornwall Paintings" reveals fundamental facts about the creative machinations of Lloyd's art. The subjects, isolated or relatively inaccessible places like Boscastle, Cadgwith, Kynance, Godrevy and Mullion, show a resistance both to tourist honeypots and to the well-trodden art cauldrons of St. Ives and Newlyn. He did live in Camborne and Porthleven during the early 1950's, but his inherent individualism savoured isolation while partaking in the more or less universal neo-romanticism that, courtesy of surrealism and post-modernism, so effected landscape painting in this country throughout the 1940's and 50's.

Elements of this taut and delineated style persist in Lloyd's art today as does the enduring "genius loci" of Cornwall, which Lloyd characterises in terms of steep narrow inlets, deserted tin mines, cocooned harbours and beached boats. More personal symbolism lies in the recurring head of a young woman that appears like a phantom or witness in the foreground. Insistent surface pattern and rhythmic design sees topographic description and embellishment subordinated to compositional architectonics. In line with the modern artist he is, Lloyd creates ambiguity and intrigue between concrete surface imagery and the illusion of spatial depth and in this tension lies the essential character of his style.