Painter, relief maker, writer, broadcaster and teacher, born in Falmouth, where he was early on taken to art shows. His teacher at school in Taunton, W Lyons-Wilson, encouraged Canney, who at start of 1940s joined full-time classes at Redruth and Penzance Schools of Art and St Ives School of Painting, under Leonard Fuller. After Army service, 1942–7, which included travel to Italy, where he continued to draw, Canney studied at Goldsmiths’ College School of Art, 1947–51, and after a bout of pulmonary tuberculosis spent six months in postgraduate study at Patrick Allan-Fraser School of Art, Hospitalfield, Arbroath. Around the time that he was teaching in London, 1952–7, Canney started making reliefs and pursued neo-Cubist work. In 1956 he was appointed curator of Newlyn Art Gallery, supplementing a meagre stipend with freelance broadcasting, contributing about 200 documentary programmes to radio and television.
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In 1964–5 Canney taught part-time at Plymouth College of Art; was in 1965–6 appointed visiting gallery director and lecturer at University of California, Santa Barbara; then joined the staff of West of England College of Art (subsequently Bristol Polytechnic), 1966–83. In 1984 Canney chose to live in Italy, in a village between San Gimignano and Siena, continuing to paint, but in 1985 scripted a documentary film for television on painting in Newlyn which won an award in New York. Canney exhibited regularly at group exhibitions in Britain and abroad. His later one-man shows included Newlyn Art Gallery, 1983; Prescote Art and Design, Edinburgh, 1984; and Belgrave Gallery from 1990. In 2003, the Paris-based dealer Martin du Louvre held an exhibition of Canney’s late works, 1973–93, and began to promote him internationally. Katharine House Gallery, Marlborough, gave Canney a 1940s–1990s retrospective in 2005. Mondriaanhuis, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Plymouth City Art Gallery and several other public collections hold his work. Lived in Devizes, Wiltshire.
Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)
