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PEOPLE: TINLEY, Jim - Art teacher & artist (1944-2018)





Jeremy W L TINLEY, known as Jim TINLEY was born in 1944 in Cuckfield, Sussex. 

Jim Tinley died on 09 November at the age of 74. From the 1970s through to the late 1990s he created hundreds of paintings and drawings of local people in and around his home at Porthleven

His evocative art works capture the everyday moments of life, from people at work or enjoying a drink in the local pubs to those whiling away time overlooking Porthleven’s picturesque harbour. He was particularly keen to record the village's ‘old characters’, such as retired fishermen who used to gather in the old men’s shelter to chat and play cards.

Jim, a former art teacher at Helston School, drew many pencil portraits which were bought by his subjects as well as stunning oil paintings.His wife Sue Tinley said: “His paintings were one of a kind and very much centred on Porthleven. Jim’s drawings and paintings were often of people at their work and a lot of them have gone now. “He made hundreds of drawings and pretty much every household in Porthleven from the 1970s to the late 1990s must have had one.”She said his later oil paintings were so detailed and lifelike that many people accidentally referred to them as ‘photographs’, leading Jim to humbly correct them.

Sue said Jim took a teaching post in Taunton for a time before returning to Cornwall  in 1973, to teach at Penrice School in St Austell.“He was taken on as a pottery teacher having never thrown a pot in his life,” Sue added. “He was very fortunate that one of his friends was the potter John Leach who used to help him. You could say he was apprenticed to John Leach, if only in his lunch times.”Jim then moved to Helston School where he taught art for around 10 years. Throughout this time he also worked at his portraits and paintings.

“In 1978, (harbour owner) Trevor Osborne gave him an exhibition in London which practically sold out," Sue said. "A lot of his early work was in pencil. It was only later that he started using oils. “He had a gallery in ‘the shacks'. It’s not there now but it was where (the ice cream shop) Nauti But Ice is now. Then in 1982, he joined two other artists, Sally Cole and Nell Pascoe, and with Trevor Osborne’s help they open Breageside Studios, which is now Rick Stein’s.”

Jim opted out of education in the late 1990s and set up his own window cleaning business, which passed to his son when he retired in 2002.





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