Jeremy Annear
Encyclopedia
Jeremy Annear is a late generation Modern British Artist. He is married and lives with his wife, the painter Judy Buxton, and his daughter on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall
. He describes himself as a European Modernist and has painted within that genre all his life. Early exposure to St Ives Abstraction (Ben Nicholson
, Barbara Hepworth
, Peter Lanyon
, Roger Hilton
, Terry Frost
etc.) had a profound influence on him in his early teens and an abiding love of 20th century European Art in particular the work of Picasso
, Braque
, Poliakoff
, Klee
, and Miró
have left their mark on him and his work. He has worked extensively in Germany
and Australia
and has absorbed influences in his work from both these cultures.
To find something which is truly original after artists have been creating art for millennia is a challenge, but when one sees the art of Jeremy Annear all cynicism is forgiven and faith restored. His style is truly unique; a mixture a calm intelligence and spontaneous atmospheric inspiration depicted in cubist shapes interspersed with natural formations. For any other artist this seeming hotchpotch of inspiration and depiction would simply not work, Annear though walks this fine line perfectly without once straying into confusion or farce in his pieces.
Annear’s road to becoming one of this century’s most collectable artists began simply enough with a three year stint at Exeter College of Art during the late 1960’s. From there he became an art teacher, his first post being at the Dyrons Art Centre in Devon where he became the Assistant Director in 1976. He later became the Director at the Ryder's Gallery at Dartington College of Art in 1984. It was not until 1987 that Annear moved to Cornwall in order to paint full-time and it was during these early years that he was inducted into the Newlyn Society of Art (NSA) and the Penwith Society of Artists. He subsequently became a committee member of the NSA and served on the council of management of the Newlyn Gallery.
The early 1990s saw Annear spend an increasing amount of time in Europe, and especially Germany where he received the DAAD Scholarship (Atelierhaus Worpswede). This was followed by a number of solo shows in Berlin, Leipzig, Bremen and Worpswede at the same time. The popularity of the work in Germany explains why the country holds one of the biggest collections of Annear’s work outside Britain.
David Shaw Fine Art 2009
The Eye of the Spirit
‘Close your bodily eye, that you may see your picture first with the eye of the spirit. Then bring to light what you have seen in the darkness, that its effect may work back, from without to within.’ Caspar David Friedrich’s advice to fellow painters has been closely heeded by Jeremy Annear, who makes abstract images resonant with light and pattern, which partake of both still-life and landscape (vase and field), while also attempting to suggest the essential presence of the spiritual in all our lives. The vigorous textures of his pictures denote the physicality which must balance and support the spirit, and their long gestation – evident in the layered re-working – is indicative of the process of discovery which is for him the act of painting.
Jeremy Annear is a mature abstract painter working confidently within the mainstream of Modernism. The context in which his work is made, and can be best understood, is that of European painting, with particular reference to the masters of the 20th century. He has described Braque, for instance, as his artistic ‘father’, and his sustaining relationship with other giants of Modernism, such as Klee, Kandinsky, Arp, Miró and Picasso, may be discerned in an enjoyable series of new gouaches called Exotic Singing Birds and Fish. Annear has been particularly inspired by Cubism but he has thoroughly assimilated his various influences and developed his own voice, working in an idiom which is both individual and highly contemporary, while fitting well within the mainframe of Cornish Modernism, now in its third generation.
Annear lives and works on the Lizard peninsular in Cornwall. There is a sense of an ancient landscape interpreted by a modern sensibility in his paintings; the land as the repository of historical meaning. Here also we apprehend the complex pleasures of passing through, or existing in, a real landscape, not an imaginary one: the seduction of place, familiarity and change, the presentness of the past, the unending narrative of the sea and the weather. Such a response to landscape may be read as an emanation of the European Romantic tradition, but this is checked and qualified in Annear’s work by an urge to classical order. His distinctive imagery, with its fruitful dialogue between the specific and the generalized, homes in on the notion of ‘place’ – as if it were a product of the archaeological imagination crossed with the demands of contemporary existence.
In the same way, his work is a meeting place of the cerebral and the sensual: it combines the intellectual rigours of design
with the seductiveness of colour – colour which Annear is using with ever greater freedom and authority. (Note the seductive interlocking planes of colour and pattern – striped or stippled – in the Sand Forms series.) Texture also plays an important sensual role, and even Annear’s trademark linearity often has a curvaceous physicality that appeals to the senses rather than the mind. Increasingly, geometry is subverted by deliberate inexactitude: lines not quite meeting at a point, a circle squashed out of its perfect shape, or a slight curve appearing in an expected straight line. Human error is thus brought into account, the hand-drawn triumphing over the ruler and compasses.
The interaction between the drawn, painted or incised line, and the space around it, is an essential feature of the work. Annear deals largely with the edges of things, their contours and boundaries, and the way one thing impinges on another. So the sea draws its tide-line on the beach, but shifts this line of demarcation with every new wave, overlaying the previous boundary, advancing or withdrawing, constantly varying the territory. In much the same way, Annear modifies his containing lines, so much so that the inside of a form becomes the outside of another, and the fact that all things are inter-related and connected plainly emerges.
Although music has played an important part in Annear’s life since the earliest point he can remember, the relationship between his painting and music should not be over-stressed. Walter Pater famously remarked that ‘all art aspires to the condition of music’, but it’s such a wonderfully generalized remark that it has always been wide open to interpretation. Annear makes reference to music in several of his titles for recent paintings – Tango, Song, Ballade all appear – but he also draws our attention to Line, Form and Totem, not to mention the frequent presence of the moon. In fact, these are abstract paintings which deal essentially with the relationship of line and form to the two-dimensional surface, and it is in this that they have their primary identity, not in music or musical form or theory.
Gauguin, when discussing the purely formal aspects of his work, referred to ‘the music of the picture’. Certainly there is the sense in which music is pure, abstract form and this has encouraged people to suppose it an equivalent of pictorial abstraction. This comparison can be misleading if applied too closely. However, that’s not to say that Annear’s work
is not informed by music as it is also informed and enriched by observation (or basic awareness) of the natural world in which we have our being. The moon, the tides, the patterns of the earth – in the dispositions of rock, for instance – are all of distinct relevance to this artist, and music is a force of a similar elemental nature for him. Although man-made (for the most part), it exerts a fundamental influence over him; to such an extent that he admits that he couldn’t imagine a life without music.
I sometimes think of the phrase ‘hearing inner harmonies’ when looking at Annear’s work. He has written: ‘I especially like the idea in music that when the untrained ear hears the foundation note, it’s simply a single note, but with a trained listening ear you can hear the harmonics that vibrate together to make the note.’ Annear comments: ‘that idea when applied to painting is very exciting’. It reminds me of the Anatole France story in which a monk dreams about God. He has been told that God is represented as white, but in his dream he sees Him as a great wheel in which each spoke and section is a different colour, with no white anywhere. Then the wheel begins to turn, and as it spins faster and faster, all the colours turn to white: the spectrum becomes pure light. This idea offers new insights when looking at Annear’s favoured white grounds.
There is also a suggestion that we are hearing ‘the music of the spheres’ when engaged in contemplation of Annear’s forms, although that can connote a kind of art too other-worldly for this artist. His imagery remains rooted in the earth, though it does leap high with the imagination. He deals with visual fact (note the wit with which he employs asymmetry), but also with the illusion of line, form and space. In much the same way he juggles the symbolic and psychological effects of colour with the importance of leaving passages of quietness and silence.
It is possible to trace the powerful compositional route through the work, the battle between spontaneity and intentional control, a dialogue that is usually resolved over a period of time and through much re-working. The imagery bears traces of this history, in its layered facture and evidence of statement, question and re-statement, yet it also has a flowing quality that is matched by the toughness of the final resolution. It’s essential to recall the wandering wit of Annear’s line when considering the apparently unyielding final image. The process of arriving is as important as the destination.
Linearity equates in some way with spirituality – much as we follow a path (or line) to enlightenment. Annear fashions a line of sustained strength and vigour, a bounding line which creates a shape and helps to enrich it with meaning. Linearity has been taken as a specific trait of English art for centuries – at least as far back as manuscript illumination and Celtic ornament. As that great seer William Blake put it: ‘Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.’
The series of paintings entitled Sand Forms conjures up the notion of doodling on the beach: drawing with a stick in the smooth damp sand revealed by a retreating tide. This is very like the kind of drawing made with whippy twigs by Brice Marden, though Annear favours the awkwardly angular as against Marden’s flowing, looping script. Hieroglyphics, aerial photography of archaeological sites, an alphabet of linear symbols used to articulate space, the underlying geometry of the natural world (the perfect shapes that can be abstracted from nature, while remembering that organic form abhors the straight line), placement and relationship, contiguity and distance, surface and depth – all these are considerations when looking at Annear’s work. His own particular distillate of the world’s richness can at first glance appear misleadingly simple.
Certainly, it would be a mistake to think that with their emphasis on the linear these paintings are flat. On the contrary, their forms often take on a sculptural presence. The lines in their different thicknesses turn through space suggesting fullness of form as well as outline. Look, for instance, at Blue Totem (White Disc). Shapes dance back from the picture plane, into and out of recessive space. Here are different levels: superimposed, overlapping, ambiguously shifting, eventually finding their own depth. The process of resolution involves a sifting of priorities, and unexpected ways of looking. We must resist preconceptions and habits of thought in order to allow the full range of meaning in Jeremy Annear’s work to impress upon our minds and hearts. From without to within.
Andrew Lambirth April 2011 Writer, critic and curator
Cornwall
Cornwall is a unitary authority and ceremonial county of England, within the United Kingdom. It is bordered to the north and west by the Celtic Sea, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Cornwall has a population of , and covers an area of...
. He describes himself as a European Modernist and has painted within that genre all his life. Early exposure to St Ives Abstraction (Ben Nicholson
Ben Nicholson
Benjamin Lauder "Ben" Nicholson, OM was a British painter of abstract compositions , landscape and still-life.-Background and Training:...
, Barbara Hepworth
Barbara Hepworth
Dame Barbara Hepworth DBE was an English sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism, and with such contemporaries as Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo she helped to develop modern art in Britain.-Life and work:Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was born on 10 January 1903 in Wakefield,...
, Peter Lanyon
Peter Lanyon
Peter Lanyon was a Cornish painter of landscapes leaning heavily towards abstraction. He also made constructions, pottery and collage....
, Roger Hilton
Roger Hilton
Roger Hilton CBE was a pioneer of abstract art in post-war Britain. He was born in 1911 in Northwood, London and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London under Henry Tonks and also in Paris, where he developed links with painters on the Continent.In World War II he served in the Army, part...
, Terry Frost
Terry Frost
Sir Terry Frost RA was an English artist noted for his abstracts....
etc.) had a profound influence on him in his early teens and an abiding love of 20th century European Art in particular the work of Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, Braque
Georges Braque
Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
, Poliakoff
Serge Poliakoff
Serge Poliakoff was a Russian-born French modernist painter belonging to the 'New' Ecole de Paris .- Biography :...
, Klee
Paul Klee
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism...
, and Miró
Joan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...
have left their mark on him and his work. He has worked extensively in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
and Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
and has absorbed influences in his work from both these cultures.
To find something which is truly original after artists have been creating art for millennia is a challenge, but when one sees the art of Jeremy Annear all cynicism is forgiven and faith restored. His style is truly unique; a mixture a calm intelligence and spontaneous atmospheric inspiration depicted in cubist shapes interspersed with natural formations. For any other artist this seeming hotchpotch of inspiration and depiction would simply not work, Annear though walks this fine line perfectly without once straying into confusion or farce in his pieces.
Annear’s road to becoming one of this century’s most collectable artists began simply enough with a three year stint at Exeter College of Art during the late 1960’s. From there he became an art teacher, his first post being at the Dyrons Art Centre in Devon where he became the Assistant Director in 1976. He later became the Director at the Ryder's Gallery at Dartington College of Art in 1984. It was not until 1987 that Annear moved to Cornwall in order to paint full-time and it was during these early years that he was inducted into the Newlyn Society of Art (NSA) and the Penwith Society of Artists. He subsequently became a committee member of the NSA and served on the council of management of the Newlyn Gallery.
The early 1990s saw Annear spend an increasing amount of time in Europe, and especially Germany where he received the DAAD Scholarship (Atelierhaus Worpswede). This was followed by a number of solo shows in Berlin, Leipzig, Bremen and Worpswede at the same time. The popularity of the work in Germany explains why the country holds one of the biggest collections of Annear’s work outside Britain.
David Shaw Fine Art 2009
The Eye of the Spirit
‘Close your bodily eye, that you may see your picture first with the eye of the spirit. Then bring to light what you have seen in the darkness, that its effect may work back, from without to within.’ Caspar David Friedrich’s advice to fellow painters has been closely heeded by Jeremy Annear, who makes abstract images resonant with light and pattern, which partake of both still-life and landscape (vase and field), while also attempting to suggest the essential presence of the spiritual in all our lives. The vigorous textures of his pictures denote the physicality which must balance and support the spirit, and their long gestation – evident in the layered re-working – is indicative of the process of discovery which is for him the act of painting.
Jeremy Annear is a mature abstract painter working confidently within the mainstream of Modernism. The context in which his work is made, and can be best understood, is that of European painting, with particular reference to the masters of the 20th century. He has described Braque, for instance, as his artistic ‘father’, and his sustaining relationship with other giants of Modernism, such as Klee, Kandinsky, Arp, Miró and Picasso, may be discerned in an enjoyable series of new gouaches called Exotic Singing Birds and Fish. Annear has been particularly inspired by Cubism but he has thoroughly assimilated his various influences and developed his own voice, working in an idiom which is both individual and highly contemporary, while fitting well within the mainframe of Cornish Modernism, now in its third generation.
Annear lives and works on the Lizard peninsular in Cornwall. There is a sense of an ancient landscape interpreted by a modern sensibility in his paintings; the land as the repository of historical meaning. Here also we apprehend the complex pleasures of passing through, or existing in, a real landscape, not an imaginary one: the seduction of place, familiarity and change, the presentness of the past, the unending narrative of the sea and the weather. Such a response to landscape may be read as an emanation of the European Romantic tradition, but this is checked and qualified in Annear’s work by an urge to classical order. His distinctive imagery, with its fruitful dialogue between the specific and the generalized, homes in on the notion of ‘place’ – as if it were a product of the archaeological imagination crossed with the demands of contemporary existence.
In the same way, his work is a meeting place of the cerebral and the sensual: it combines the intellectual rigours of design
with the seductiveness of colour – colour which Annear is using with ever greater freedom and authority. (Note the seductive interlocking planes of colour and pattern – striped or stippled – in the Sand Forms series.) Texture also plays an important sensual role, and even Annear’s trademark linearity often has a curvaceous physicality that appeals to the senses rather than the mind. Increasingly, geometry is subverted by deliberate inexactitude: lines not quite meeting at a point, a circle squashed out of its perfect shape, or a slight curve appearing in an expected straight line. Human error is thus brought into account, the hand-drawn triumphing over the ruler and compasses.
The interaction between the drawn, painted or incised line, and the space around it, is an essential feature of the work. Annear deals largely with the edges of things, their contours and boundaries, and the way one thing impinges on another. So the sea draws its tide-line on the beach, but shifts this line of demarcation with every new wave, overlaying the previous boundary, advancing or withdrawing, constantly varying the territory. In much the same way, Annear modifies his containing lines, so much so that the inside of a form becomes the outside of another, and the fact that all things are inter-related and connected plainly emerges.
Although music has played an important part in Annear’s life since the earliest point he can remember, the relationship between his painting and music should not be over-stressed. Walter Pater famously remarked that ‘all art aspires to the condition of music’, but it’s such a wonderfully generalized remark that it has always been wide open to interpretation. Annear makes reference to music in several of his titles for recent paintings – Tango, Song, Ballade all appear – but he also draws our attention to Line, Form and Totem, not to mention the frequent presence of the moon. In fact, these are abstract paintings which deal essentially with the relationship of line and form to the two-dimensional surface, and it is in this that they have their primary identity, not in music or musical form or theory.
Gauguin, when discussing the purely formal aspects of his work, referred to ‘the music of the picture’. Certainly there is the sense in which music is pure, abstract form and this has encouraged people to suppose it an equivalent of pictorial abstraction. This comparison can be misleading if applied too closely. However, that’s not to say that Annear’s work
is not informed by music as it is also informed and enriched by observation (or basic awareness) of the natural world in which we have our being. The moon, the tides, the patterns of the earth – in the dispositions of rock, for instance – are all of distinct relevance to this artist, and music is a force of a similar elemental nature for him. Although man-made (for the most part), it exerts a fundamental influence over him; to such an extent that he admits that he couldn’t imagine a life without music.
I sometimes think of the phrase ‘hearing inner harmonies’ when looking at Annear’s work. He has written: ‘I especially like the idea in music that when the untrained ear hears the foundation note, it’s simply a single note, but with a trained listening ear you can hear the harmonics that vibrate together to make the note.’ Annear comments: ‘that idea when applied to painting is very exciting’. It reminds me of the Anatole France story in which a monk dreams about God. He has been told that God is represented as white, but in his dream he sees Him as a great wheel in which each spoke and section is a different colour, with no white anywhere. Then the wheel begins to turn, and as it spins faster and faster, all the colours turn to white: the spectrum becomes pure light. This idea offers new insights when looking at Annear’s favoured white grounds.
There is also a suggestion that we are hearing ‘the music of the spheres’ when engaged in contemplation of Annear’s forms, although that can connote a kind of art too other-worldly for this artist. His imagery remains rooted in the earth, though it does leap high with the imagination. He deals with visual fact (note the wit with which he employs asymmetry), but also with the illusion of line, form and space. In much the same way he juggles the symbolic and psychological effects of colour with the importance of leaving passages of quietness and silence.
It is possible to trace the powerful compositional route through the work, the battle between spontaneity and intentional control, a dialogue that is usually resolved over a period of time and through much re-working. The imagery bears traces of this history, in its layered facture and evidence of statement, question and re-statement, yet it also has a flowing quality that is matched by the toughness of the final resolution. It’s essential to recall the wandering wit of Annear’s line when considering the apparently unyielding final image. The process of arriving is as important as the destination.
Linearity equates in some way with spirituality – much as we follow a path (or line) to enlightenment. Annear fashions a line of sustained strength and vigour, a bounding line which creates a shape and helps to enrich it with meaning. Linearity has been taken as a specific trait of English art for centuries – at least as far back as manuscript illumination and Celtic ornament. As that great seer William Blake put it: ‘Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.’
The series of paintings entitled Sand Forms conjures up the notion of doodling on the beach: drawing with a stick in the smooth damp sand revealed by a retreating tide. This is very like the kind of drawing made with whippy twigs by Brice Marden, though Annear favours the awkwardly angular as against Marden’s flowing, looping script. Hieroglyphics, aerial photography of archaeological sites, an alphabet of linear symbols used to articulate space, the underlying geometry of the natural world (the perfect shapes that can be abstracted from nature, while remembering that organic form abhors the straight line), placement and relationship, contiguity and distance, surface and depth – all these are considerations when looking at Annear’s work. His own particular distillate of the world’s richness can at first glance appear misleadingly simple.
Certainly, it would be a mistake to think that with their emphasis on the linear these paintings are flat. On the contrary, their forms often take on a sculptural presence. The lines in their different thicknesses turn through space suggesting fullness of form as well as outline. Look, for instance, at Blue Totem (White Disc). Shapes dance back from the picture plane, into and out of recessive space. Here are different levels: superimposed, overlapping, ambiguously shifting, eventually finding their own depth. The process of resolution involves a sifting of priorities, and unexpected ways of looking. We must resist preconceptions and habits of thought in order to allow the full range of meaning in Jeremy Annear’s work to impress upon our minds and hearts. From without to within.
Andrew Lambirth April 2011 Writer, critic and curator
Publications, Awards, etc.
- 2011"Exhibition Catalogue 'The Eye of The Spirit' essay by Andrew Lambirth Art Critic of 'The Spectator' ISBN 978-1-905883-93-6 publication no: CCCI published by David Messum Fine art
- 2010"Exhibition Catalogue-Forensic Traces"Campden Gallery, Chipping Campden,Gloucestershire.Essay 'Forensic Traces' by Andrew Lambirth, Writer and Curator currently Art Critic of 'The Spectator". ISBN: 978-0-9562719-4-5 First Published in 2010 by Campden Gallery.
- 2009 Exhibition Catalogue Messums, Cork Street London W1.(Forward by Nicholas Usherwood, Features Editor, Galleries Magazine. Essay, 'Silent Harmonies: The Art of Jeremy Annear' Dr Jane Hamilton. ISBN 978-1-905883-44-8 Publication no.CCXLXII Published by David Messum Fine Art.
- 2007 Exhibition Catalogue New Millennium Gallery (Forward by David Falconer)
- 2007 Painting, European Modernism and the Cornish Art Scene in the 80's Interview with Rupert White. www.artcornwall.org.
- 2004 Exhibition Catalogue New Millennium Gallery (Foreword by James Aitchison and The Meeting a poem written for the catalogue by Robert Vas Dias)
- 2002 Catching the Wave - Contemporary Art and Artists in Cornwall by Tom Cross (Published by Halsgrove 2002. ISBN 1-84114-207-7)
- 2002 Exhibition Catalogue. New Works, Messums Contemporary
- 2001 Galleries Review. Showing in St Ives, Petronilla Silver
- 2000 Exhibition catalogue (Foreword by Norbert Lynton ISBN 1-871208-94-7), Messum Contemporary
- 1998/97 Exhibition Catalogue, David Messum Gallery (Forward by John Russel Taylor ISBN 1-871208-43-2)
- 1996 Drawing towards the End of the Century, Newlyn Society of Artists Publication ISBN 0-9527685-0-X.
- 1994 St. Ives Revisited - innovators and followers by Peter Davis (Bakehouse Publications)
- 1991 Award Kreissparkasse, Bremen, Germany
- 1991/92 DAAD Scholarship (Atelierhaus Worpswede) Germany
- 1991/92 Atelierhaus Worpswede (Worpswede Verlag ISBN 3-89299-164-2)
Projects
- Artsound.co.uk A collaboration with composer Jim Aitcheson the production company Coleridge Productions 2003-2005 the musician Andy Russo and the chamber groups The Coull QuartetCoull QuartetThe Coull Quartet is an English string quartet that was founded at the Royal Academy of Music, London in 1974.The Coull Quartet premiered some of the later string quartets by the composer Robert Simpson, who before his retirement and emigration to the Irish Republic lived close to the University of...
and The Sacconi QuartetSacconi QuartetThe Sacconi Quartet is a UK based classical music string quartet founded in 2001 by four graduates of the Royal College of Music, London, UK. The Quartet has achieved widespread recognition, having given recitals in leading British concert halls and at music festivals in Britain and across Europe....
.