'Mousehole, Cornwall' is typical of Helen’s paintings with its patchy, lightly scumbled brushwork, and a flattening out of the elements of composition with its echoes of late cubism crossed with the ‘motif’ of a specific land or seascape. Braque comes to mind but always Helen’s singular focus makes it very much hers.
The view is seen through a window with curtain slanting in from left, boats anchored in the shallow inner harbour and the tall wooden crane standing dominant in its geometry between the two curving piers at the entry from the sea to the harbour. This can be seen as a patch of blue paint behind the crane. Until the mid-1970’s this crane was used to hoist boats over the baulks which closed off the inner harbour to protect the village from winter storm surges.
Helen’s idiosyncratic drawing with her large brushes is evident in the navy shadows under the boats and in her patches of colour; yellow, white, green, blue and ochre in a row across the middle of her composition. As with many of her paintings - especially her later 1970’s works - they are all pushing towards an abstraction and reflect her knowledge of contemporary French modernist painting that started with her early training in 1931 at the Hans Hoffman school of art in Munich.
