Essential Spirit
Jennifer Durrant
Introduction
Jennifer Durrant is now in her early 60s, with a long and distinguished career to her credit and is one of the significant non-figurative painters of her generation (writes William Packer). Her Last Conversations series emerged directly from the working method she was constrained to adopt. Using gouache and acrylic paint, she first laid simple grounds of colour upon sheets of paper, which she cut into narrow, rather wonky strips of more-or-less brush-size width. Onto these she then painted the animating dots, accepting any chance drip or splatter in the doing, before laying them out in various arrangements and pasting them onto the cards. The Last Conversations series also clearly carries with it associative suggestion of other and more physical kinds, geological strata, perhaps, or crop marks and cultivation patterns, slices through fruit or roots, or of seeds and microbes beneath the microscope. Of the two, however, it is very much the Uccelli group that is the more obviously suggestive of landscape as such, in both a particular and a general way. The format is more various, less schematic, less insistent. The constituent blocks of colour, though conforming to roughly rectangular a model, are wilfully inexact. The thought of a geometry is there, but the hand has moved. Edges are ragged and far from straight. Threads peep out. Cut from the old canvas, these elements remain as they were, with no further painted inflection, modification or addition. The colours are the colours of the earth, and of nature: green and blue, yellow ochre, terracotta, purple, black.
Images
These can be viewed either as:
- Individual images (via thumbnails on the left) or as a
- Slideshow
In the slideshow click on the right-hand side of the images (or press keyboard N) to view the next image in the gallery, or click on the left-hand side of the images (or press keyboard P) to view the previous image.
A gallery catalogue (113 KB) can also be downloaded in PDF format.
Images reproduced by permission of Art First.
Citation
Jennifer Durrant (2008). Essential Spirit. Colour: Design & Creativity (2) 7.
URL: http://www.colour-journal.org/2008/2/7/
