Georgia Stoneman Fine Art are delighted to announce their first online exhibition since the launch of their new website, a series of works on paper by renowned artist Jeremy Annear.
I am delighted to be showing what for me is a significant body of work on paper and collages with Georgia Stoneman Fine Art. One of my great regrets as an artist is that I never worked with Georgia's father, the renowned Master Printmaker, Hugh Stoneman a contemporary of mine, and with whom I had tentatively arranged to work, when sadly he was taken from us. Georgie herself is a well known and highly successful art dealer and is an expert in 20th Century prints and works on paper and so I was delighted when I suggested that I showed her this body of work, which I made between January and June this year, much of it during the long weeks of 'lockdown', and she suggested this online exhibition.
Although better known for my paintings on canvas and board I have worked on paper all my life and almost exclusively until the mid-nineties but since then have rarely exhibited this work.
This then for me is a first! The work in the show is a selection of smaller more intimate pieces that came about as a result of two unforeseen circumstances. Firstly, in the early days of 2020, the following took place. I prepared my studio for the coming months with the ritual annual cleanup. It always feels good scraping back my pallet, an old hospital trolley, replenishing the turps, sorting out my huge pile of paint tubes, throwing out old rag and paint soaked newspaper, brushing the floor, stacking paintings. With this task completed I left the studio.
The next morning, as I walked to my studio, coffee in hand, feeling energised and creative and looking forward to getting into a new body of work I opened the studio door and to my dismay found that the old lime plaster ceiling had collapsed, mainly falling on my workspace, and showering the whole studio with fragments of plaster and dust, the debris was everywhere and in everything! There was no way that I would be able to work in the studio for some time and so it happened that I ended up working at one end of a table in a sitting room with paper and pens, brushes ink and paint and began a series of line drawings.
Then came the second very unexpected event, 'lockdown' plunging us all into a kind of suspended animation and the sudden silence of confinement. It was in this context that the sitting room table continued to serve as my studio. Never before have most of us experienced such a time a unique moment in time. For me it has been an amazing opportunity to engage with and develop a body of work that has explored the potentials of line, collage, paint and paper in an uninterrupted sabbatical. It has allowed me to explore visual ideas simply and playfully. Many of the titles dreamily evoke associations, places and events outside the enforced isolation and are my own graphic daydreams.
Nobody could have anticipated these happenings. However, in some ways as a result of being completed in the unexpected scenario of a world 'falling apart,' this work expresses my searching for order and depth and beauty. I don't shy away from classical notions of beauty but need to express my own authentic encounter with it. On the long walks that I took as my daily 'allowed' exercise I found my eyes opened in a new way to the beauty of the world on my doorstep; the magic of light on water, the scents and sounds of nature and the ordering of the seasons, the moon, the tides that reassuringly assert their cosmic rhythm in these times of uncertainty. I aspire to communicate this enriched encounter in the language and making of my work.
- Jeremy Annear, August 2020
