Jago Praze
Memory-painted Cornish harbour primitives
Jago Praze is a fictional Cornish mariner-painter imagined as growing up between Mousehole boat sheds, Penzance wet docks, and the wind-bent lanes above Newlyn. In this invented practice, he paints not from sketches but from tide-memory: the silhouettes of schooners, luggers, pier heads, buoys, beacons, and harbour lights carried in the mind after years at sea. His work is grounded in the self-taught Cornish marine tradition, especially naive harbour painting, but forms its own consistent studio language of tilted board, flattened depth, and tar-dark colour.
Jago Praze paints the sea as if recalled through salt-stiff hands: boats tip upward, harbours fold in on themselves, and lighthouses stand like white pegs against black-green water. His fictional body of work uses naive marine geometry, weathered ship-paint surfaces, and a stubbornly limited palette to make each scene feel found, salvaged, and remembered rather than observed.
Inspirations
- Alfred Wallis's self-taught marine memory-painting
- Cornish fishing harbours and quay walls
- Schooner and lugger sail plans
- Salvaged boatyard boards and ship-paint
- Naive British folk art
- Atlantic weather, foghorns, and lighthouse charts
Signature features
- Irregular salvaged board shape visible around the image
- Flattened shifting perspective with sea, quay, and sky stacked vertically
- Boats shown in simple profile or tipped plan view at the same time
- Thick black outlines around hulls, sails, harbour walls, and lighthouse forms
- Sparse rigging scratched as wiry white or black lines
- Large areas of dark water broken by blunt cream wakes
- Tiny houses, chapel roofs, cranes, and quay lamps reduced to childlike blocks
- Weathered matte surface with chips, scuffs, nail holes, and exposed underpaint
20 works in the collection.