Peter Davies, an art critic and painter, recalls the fun-loving socialist who ran the radical Penwith Society of Arts for half a century
• See the Observer's obituaries of 2013 in full here
Kathy Watkins's long stewardship of the radically modern Penwith Society of Arts in St Ives, Cornwall put her at the epicentre of the later St Ives art scene, comprising several waves of artists inspired by the groundbreaking modernism of the founding pioneers, such as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon and Bernard Leach.
Kathy dedicated most of her life to running this important – mainly artist-led – organisation. Steering it through successive phases and a changing postmodern and then millennial zeitgeist, she oversaw the establishment of a commercial arm, Penwith Galleries Ltd. Watkins, a Bristolian, brought with her administrative skills and social tact gained from several jobs, including that of hotel receptionist. These stood her in good stead, for as well as acting as curator and secretary, Watkins was also accessible front of house, a suitable role given her natural, gently outgoing conviviality and striking looks. If only she had let down her famous beehive bun of thick black hair.
I first encountered Kathy in 1978, while visiting St Ives in order to loan several Barbara Hepworth sculptures for a modern British art exhibition, and saw her two or three times a year for the next 35 years. Many (often long and impromptu) conversations took in Bristol, a shared interest and faith in left-wing politics, and the wide dragnet of assorted British artists we knew or had been professionally involved with. Her unsurpassed knowledge of the St Ives art scene – from its creative luminaries down to passing hangers-on – was always discreetly relayed. Though later increasingly set in the ways of an extremely ordered life, Kathy never lost her sense of fun and humour, and she peddled the rumour of having written an intimate diary of her long St Ives career, something that has, sadly, not yet come to life (assuming it ever existed).
She was an exemplary ambassador for an art colony celebrated around the globe. She was also an old-school socialist corporatist, and here her world view, though obliquely trained on the celtic periphery, chimed perfectly with the utopian idealism of the Hampstead modernists, Nicholson, Hepworth and Naum Gabo, who colonised this enchanted place on the Atlantic seaboard at the outset of the second world war. Increasingly, however, she lived in an idealistic time warp (a good as well as bad thing) and was something of a luddite and technophobe – never graduating beyond an electronic typewriter and a dial-ring telephone.
The hard-edge abstract painter Roy Conn, Kathy's partner from 1968 onward, led a separate professional life, other than exhibiting as a Penwith member. They were a retiring couple, seldom on the local social circuit. Kathy was always a visible presence around town, however, shopping every lunch hour and leaving with Roy to spend every weekend in a forest cabin near Hayle. They would also take a Sunday stroll from the Penwith cottage they lived in in Downalong (the former fishermen's-turned artists' quarter) to a large house Kathy had bought in 1959 at Porthminster, at the opposite end of town. Roy continues to paint in this retirement house.
Though marking the end of a near-half century era, Kathy's passing has left the Penwith needing to adapt to a radically different world, epitomised by the challenge of the Tate St Ives juggernaut a stone's throw away.