Roger Lowry: The Artist Who Painted Penzance's Boats — and Why His Work Matters
Two MAPublisher books. Hundreds of paintings. A lifetime of boats, harbours and maritime memory.
Some artists paint a subject.
Some artists develop a relationship with it.
And occasionally, an artist paints something for so long, and in such volume, that the work begins to become something else:
a record of a place.
That is how I have come to see the work of Roger Lowry.
Roger is a Penzance resident, boat owner and painter. His fascination with boats has resulted in a body of work numbering more than 400 paintings, many connected to the maritime landscape of Penzance, Mount's Bay, Penwith and West Cornwall.
At MAPublisher, we have now published more than one book of Roger's work.
That is significant.
Because this is no longer simply the story of an artist producing a book.
It is the beginning of a published record of a much larger body of work.
Roger Lowry and the maritime landscape of Penzance
Roger's paintings are rooted in a very particular part of Cornwall.
Penzance.
Mount's Bay.
Newlyn.
Mousehole.
The harbour.
The coastline.
The fishing boats.
The visiting vessels.
The traditional craft.
The boats that have come and gone.
His paintings capture the things that caught his eye — often with bold colour, strong shapes and a distinctive naïve style.
His first MAPublisher book, Lowry's Boats – Paintings of Traditional Vessels Associated with Mounts Bay, Cornwall, was published on 5 December 2022.
It contains 79 pages of full-colour paintings and carries ISBN 9781910499962.
The book's description makes a striking claim: that Roger has inadvertently captured and recorded boats that have come and gone, creating a body of work documenting aspects of the heritage of Penzance, Penwith and Cornwall.
That is an important way of looking at Roger's work.
He wasn't necessarily setting out to create an historical archive.
He was painting boats.
But sometimes the archive happens because somebody keeps looking.
Four pieces of evidence that make Roger's story bigger
When promoting an artist, it is easy for a publisher to say:
“We think this artist is important.”
That is our opinion.
It is much stronger when other people, independently, have already responded to the work.
In Roger's case, there are several pieces of public evidence that deserve to be brought together.
1. The Association of British Naive Artists
The first is particularly valuable because it comes from the art world.
A review from the Association of British Naive Artists' 2016 exhibition describes Roger's colourful works as:
“warm, witty and well worth seeing.”
That is not MAPublisher describing Roger.
It is a historical assessment associated with the Association of British Naive Artists.
And it helps explain something important about Roger's work.
His paintings should not simply be judged by asking whether they look like conventional maritime paintings.
They don't.
That is part of their identity.
Roger's naïve style gives him freedom to interpret his subjects through colour, shape and character.
The boats are recognisable.
But they are unmistakably Roger's boats.
2. A maritime historian's response
The second piece of evidence comes from a completely different direction.
Mike Smylie, a maritime historian specialising in the fishing industry and working vessels, has written for numerous maritime publications and is the author of more than 20 published books. He is also associated with several maritime-history organisations.
After receiving a copy of Lowry's Boats, Smylie described it as both a “fun-packed frolic” and a serious study of the craft associated with West Penwith.
That combination is revealing.
Because Roger's work isn't trying to be a dry catalogue.
It has humour.
It has colour.
It has personality.
But underneath that is a very real concentration on boats and maritime heritage.
For somebody with a specialist interest in working vessels and maritime history to respond positively to the book gives Roger's work another dimension.
It tells us that the paintings can be appreciated not only as art, but also as a visual encounter with the vessels of a particular maritime region.
3. The response from people who know the boats and the place
The public response to Lowry's Boats contains other revealing comments.
Traditional boat owner Neil Burman described his copy as well worth the money, highlighting its detail, paintings and boat history. Artist Pam Secker wrote:
“AT LAST!! You should have been publishing such a long time ago.”
And maritime-history researcher John McWilliams, associated with the St Ives Archive and Penlee House Museum's photographic research group, described the book as a warm, evocative, colourful and lively reminder of Mount's Bay's story and boats.
McWilliams is particularly relevant because his own work includes research into Cornish maritime history, and he was made a Bard of the Cornish Gorseth for that work.
These are different voices.
An artist.
A traditional boat owner.
A maritime researcher.
A maritime historian.
They are looking at Roger's work from different perspectives.
And they are seeing something in it.
4. Roger is part of Penzance's cultural history too
There is another piece of evidence that I think deserves much more attention.
Roger isn't simply connected with Penzance because he paints its boats.
He was also part of the town's wider cultural scene.
In a 2024 interview with It's Psychedelic Baby Magazine, members of the Cornwall-based band The Brainiac 5 recalled the Penzance music scene of the 1970s.
The interview describes the Sail Loft in Penzance as a venue for gigs and mixed-media events.
And Roger is specifically remembered in that history.
The interview states that Roger Lowery was asked to make posters and work the door at the Sail Loft — and then refers readers to his book of “primitive painting of boats”.
That is fascinating.
Because suddenly Roger's story is not just about painting.
It is about Penzance's cultural life.
Music.
Art.
Posters.
Poetry.
Performance.
Boats.
The harbour.
The people who made the town what it was.
Roger was part of that world.
And today, his paintings are helping preserve another part of it.
From one book to two
The first book was:
Lowry's Boats
Paintings of Traditional Vessels Associated with Mounts Bay, Cornwall
Published by MAPublisher in December 2022.
79 pages.
Full colour.
ISBN 9781910499962.
Then came:
Lowry's Boats of Penzance
Published by MAPublisher in August 2024.
86 pages.
Full colour.
ISBN 9781915958105.
The second book concentrates even more specifically on Penzance and the surrounding maritime landscape.
Lulu describes its naïve painting style as giving Roger the freedom to use colour in ways conventional artists might not, with every page packed with colour.
So we now have two published volumes.
And that changes the way I look at Roger's work.
One book can be a collection.
Two books begin to demonstrate continuity.
And when you add the fact that Roger has produced more than 400 paintings, the scale becomes much clearer.
More than 400 paintings is more than a collection
Imagine having more than 400 paintings connected to one artist, one region and a recurring subject.
That is not simply a pile of artwork.
It is a body of work.
And bodies of work can become historical records.
Roger's paintings include vessels and maritime scenes associated with Mount's Bay, Penzance, Newlyn and the wider Penwith coastline.
Some of the boats he painted have come and gone.
Some are part of local memory.
Some are historically interesting in their own right.
Some may be familiar to people who know the area.
Others may be discovered through Roger for the first time.
The paintings therefore have two lives.
They are artworks.
And they are also records of what one artist saw as worth remembering.
This is where I believe the real value lies
I have tried to get Roger's work in front of institutions that I believe should at least consider what he has created.
That has included efforts to get exposure through the maritime museum world around Falmouth.
It hasn't produced the response I had hoped for.
But institutions have their own policies, priorities and criteria.
That is their decision.
What I don't want to do is allow an absence of institutional recognition to become confused with an absence of cultural value.
Those are not the same thing.
Because when I look at Roger's work, I see something that has taken years to accumulate.
More than 400 paintings.
A very specific geographical focus.
A very specific maritime subject.
A distinctive artistic style.
A connection to the cultural life of Penzance.
And now, two published books.
That is why I believe Roger's work deserves to be preserved and promoted.
Could Roger Lowry's work become an institution in itself?
This is my personal view as Roger's publisher.
I believe it could.
I don't mean that Roger has been formally designated an institution.
He hasn't.
I mean that the body of work itself has the potential to become a reference point.
Imagine somebody researching Penzance's maritime history years from now.
They could find photographs.
They could find newspaper articles.
They could find official records.
They could find harbour records.
And they could find Roger Lowry.
An artist who kept painting the boats.
Again.
And again.
And again.
That accumulated visual record could become increasingly valuable precisely because Roger was not trying to create an official archive.
He was simply recording what mattered to him.
And sometimes that is how cultural history survives.
Why the books matter
This is why I don't see Lowry's Boats and Lowry's Boats of Penzance as simply art books.
They are certainly books of art.
But they are also published records.
A painting can hang in someone's home.
A painting can be sold.
A painting can disappear into a private collection.
A painting can be seen by relatively few people.
A book does something different.
It gathers the work.
It reproduces it.
It gives it an ISBN.
It makes it discoverable.
It allows someone who never met Roger to encounter his work.
And it means that part of this body of work exists in a form that can be passed from one person to another.
That is why publishing matters.
Buying the book is investing in the record
I would use the word investment carefully here.
I'm not talking about a promise that the book will become financially valuable.
Nobody can honestly guarantee that.
I'm talking about cultural investment.
When you buy one of Roger's books, you are supporting an artist and acquiring a published piece of a much larger body of work.
You are taking home part of Roger's visual Penzance.
You are acquiring paintings of boats, harbours and places connected with a changing maritime landscape.
And you are helping that record circulate.
That has value.
Perhaps especially because Roger's work is so rooted in a particular time and place.
Why Roger's paintings may become more interesting with time
There is an irony here.
The less static Penzance becomes, the more interesting Roger's record may become.
Boats change.
Harbours change.
Buildings change.
Businesses change.
People change.
The working relationship between communities and the sea changes.
What is ordinary today can become historical tomorrow.
A boat that someone sees every week may eventually become a memory.
Roger has painted many of those things.
And he has done it in his own language.
Bright.
Bold.
Naïve.
Colourful.
Witty.
Personal.
That is why the paintings don't need to pretend to be photographs.
They are doing something different.
They tell us:
This is how Roger saw it.
MAPublisher's role
This is also why Roger's work fits the reason MAPublisher exists.
We publish writers, poets, artists and people whose work has something to say about place, memory and lived experience.
Sometimes the conventional route to recognition is already open.
Sometimes it isn't.
Our role is not to decide what an artist should become.
It is to help create a route through which the work can be seen, recorded and owned.
With Roger, that has now resulted in two books.
And I hope there will be more.
Because 400 paintings cannot be contained by two books.
These are volumes within a much larger archive.
Two books. Hundreds of paintings. One Penzance.
That is perhaps the simplest way of describing Roger Lowry's work.
Two books.
More than 400 paintings.
One artist.
One remarkable connection with boats and maritime West Cornwall.
And behind it all is Penzance.
Not the Penzance of a tourist postcard.
Not simply the Penzance of an official heritage record.
But Penzance as experienced by an artist who has spent years looking at its boats and painting what he saw.
That is why I wanted MAPublisher to publish Roger.
And that is why I believe these books deserve to be discovered.
Because the question is not only:
“Do you like Roger Lowry's paintings?”
The bigger question is:
“What happens when an artist spends years recording a place that is itself changing?”
Roger's answer is sitting in more than 400 paintings.
Two of them are now between the covers of books.
Discover Roger Lowry's books
Lowry's Boats
Paintings of Traditional Vessels Associated with Mounts Bay, Cornwall
Published by MAPublisher
Publication date: 5 December 2022
ISBN: 9781910499962
79 pages · Full colour · Paperback
Buy Lowry's Boats from Lulu
Lowry's Boats of Penzance
Published by MAPublisher
Publication date: 12 August 2024
ISBN: 9781915958105
86 pages · Full colour · Paperback
Buy Lowry's Boats of Penzance from Lulu
Two books from a body of work that is much larger than either volume.
Roger Lowry's Penzance. His boats. His colours. His record.
Published by MAPublisher.
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