J E R E M Y A N N E A R

1. EARth RhYthM IV, 2016 oil on canvas 100 x 70 cms 393⁄8 x 271⁄2 ins

J E R E M Y A N N E A R

N E W WO R K S

2016

tex t byAndrew Lambir th

www.messums.com

With this exhibition Jeremy Annear celebrates 20 years with Messum’s, and it is appropriate that he should have produced such a luminous and beautiful body of new work to mark the occasion. He has worked intensively since the beginning of the year in a bout of sustained creativity, and admits that this has been for him a particularly important and fruitful season.

Painting for Annear is a process of discovery through making, a negotiation with the world that is also a spiritual rite of passage. The act of painting is instinctive rather than long pondered, but he approaches his daily stint in the studio in a highly professional manner, focusing his inner resources on a state of being that is dispassionate, disciplined and truthful. Yet he prefers to wear his gift lightly, and does not offer sermons but celebrations. In his scintillating pictures a Modernist interpretation of life in Cornwall (ancient landscape meets everyday objects and activities) is played out through a dialogue between the geometric and the hand-drawn. The organic element is strong: perfection is for God only, and we humans deal in emotional and ad hoc solutions. Annear tempers his straight lines and delicious curves with deliberate imprecision. Often avoiding the obvious meeting point of lines or the predictable completion of a shape, he creates a new and believable tension between the elements of his compositions. By means of varied texture and the habit of layering, he builds a complex painted surface which only releases its relevance and meaning gradually.

His trademark pale surfaces, built up with a palette knife over a dark ground, are not so evident in these new paintings. It’s as if we are going back to an earlier archaeological strata before the top layers of lighter pigment have been added; an earlier time. These new pictures tend to have darker grounds, richer and more vibrant colour harmonies.

The forms dive and swoop, point and oscillate, stack up in geometrical rhythm, syncopate and resonate. The placement of colour, in wedge and angle, trapezium and semi-circle, is altogether more assured but also more subtle; in a word, more masterly.

His earlier work was distinctly painterly and expressive, and gradually, over the years, his approach has become increasingly geometric and linear. Then the still-life forms were clearly in evidence – the mugs and jugs and teapots were recognisably what they were, and guitars were a frequent feature. In recent years, these descriptive forays have been distilled to simple outlines, shapes rather than objects, and even the outlines have grown increasingly less specific. Thus a couple of related curves might suggest a jug, but they might equally refer to the side of a hill or the contours of a body.

J e remy Annear

Objects in Sky Blue Space, 1999oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cms

Polka Dot Still Life (Sandy Pink), 1999oil on board, 47 x 63.5 cms

Around the late 1990s, his paintings took on the look of collages – as if differently patterned papers had been torn and overlain in a search for related form and composition. The polka dot became a key element among towers or table-tops of connected shapes. Gradually the forms have been pared down to their bones, their skeletal outlines. The patterns

have been simplified, the carried spatial presences brought into line on the picture plane, though always with a suggestion of greater complexity than first appears. In general, the work has become increasingly evocative and atmospheric rather than declarative and descriptive. Yet the crispness of line which Annear favours has never been sacrificed. Perhaps its authority derives from the unconscious – as does so much that is pertinent in art – for Annear is a great believer in the Surrealist strategy of automatic drawing.

His art is a system for harmony, a search for beauty. The familiar dialogue between abstraction and representation is given a new twist by the overlaying of interior and exterior, still-life and landscape. His principal subject has long been a fruitful combination of still-life and landscape, yet each painting is also a kind of portrait - of a mind at work. As Norbert Lynton wrote of Annear in 2000: “It strikes me that he speaks primarily of landscape and of nature while his overt subject-matter is most often still-life.’ Annear has in effect created a new hybrid genre in which the forms of still-life are superimposed over the vistas of landscape. Lynton also identifies what he calls ‘an urchin cheek’ (like pavement chalked graffiti, perhaps) to Annear’s lines, which can be said to link him to such post-modernist masters as AR Penck and Sigmar Polke.

Cornwall and the Lizard peninsular where he lives are clearly of immense importance to Annear. It is no coincidence that nearby lies the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station, a major satellite communications centre founded on the Lizard in 1961, with more than 60 satellite dishes facing out into space. That prevalence of circle, dish and cone shapes in the

landscape has surely been a reinforcing factor in Annear’s particular blend of organic and geometric forms. Sea-horizons too are a crucial ingredient in his imagery, bringing to the work a salt taste of distance and an implication of travel. Each artist carries a personal list of artists important to them, their own sense of tradition. For Annear, Klee and Kandinsky, Arp, Braque and Morandi, the loopy linearity of Miro, but above all Picasso, are among his inspirations. Of English artists, Ben Nicholson is an obvious point of comparison.

Annear deals compulsively in outline or bounding line (as in limits), but also outline as in summary or suggestion. Line becomes metaphor, superimposing, overlapping,

Light Forms (soft white), 2001oil on board, 71 x 71 cms

Linear Melody (Yellow Blue), 1999oil on board, 25.5 x 71 cms

interlocking, suggesting blueprints and diagrams or the structural order of landscape behind appearances, of cup and jar at the heart of still-life. A sense of the physicality of place is balanced by an equally commanding feeling for the rhythm and beat of placement. Geometry is here too, forms folding into one another like screens, abutting, leaning,

surfacing and disappearing, straight line against curve, inner and outer, edge and insert, proposition and echo. Much of Annear’s picture-making is concerned with reconciling f latness with space and movement, with the linear directive (the analytical line and deconstruction of form), and with the language of signs.

Looking at these new paintings, there is less of the rich, buttery palette-knifed paint, and far greater emphasis on veils of colour lightly scumbled over one another. (To scumble is to modify an existing colour by applying a thin layer of semi-opaque paint to give it a softer effect. To blend. This can also be achieved by rubbing the painted surface.) The resulting skin is much drier in appearance, not laden with fat paint, but stained – as in Earth Rhythm (no. 7), although this painting effectively juxtaposes both types of surface, refulgent and matt. Generally speaking there is a greater variety and range of surface on offer among

this latest body of work. Interestingly, the format has also noticeably changed: there are more vertical compositions here. (In fact, out of 30 paintings, 26 are vertical.) A couple of the darker upright paintings are particularly effective, for instance Icon V (Terra Incognita) (no. 4) and Icon VI (no. 2), both of them dense with allusion.

Echo Space is the principal painting here, without doubt a masterpiece of this period of Annear’s work, a superb picture beautifully modulated. This artist has long been known for his concision of image, but he has reached a new peak of lucidity. Crossform Offset (no. 6) is only slightly less inventive and memorable, a fine painting solidly constructed and intriguingly nuanced. In Contrabalance (no. 18) Annear is at his most Ben Nicholson-like – which is actually not that much. Nicholson is an inevitable presence for second generation St Ives painters, and the challenge is to acknowledge his inspiration (if not influence) without succumbing to its limitations. The central triangle of Annear’s painting is overlaid by a pale greeny-blue arch, more human rump and back than guitar sound box, which it also resembles. It’s a distinctive shape that reappears throughout Annear’s oeuvre, sometimes

Harbour Forms III (Blue Edge), 2008oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cms

Sand Forms with Ochre Disc, 2010oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cms

summoning up the landscape, at others the interior. Here the variants of blue and brown (signature colours for Annear: sky/sea and earth) sing gently and persuasively together.

Harbour I and II (nos. 23 and 24) are excellent smallish pictures, as is the tall thin Echo I. And I can’t help but notice the benign presiding spirit of Juan Gris in this group of works – particularly

in the two series, Icon and Earth Rhythm. The shapes are fielded and brought together with great aplomb. Triangles, trapezia, sections of circle and ellipse, echoing and playing off against each other. There is much formal grace here, as witness the wedge of stripes against other-angled bands in Blue Prism I (no. 25), a beguiling small painting, or the subtle and exquisite Form Dance (no. 28). In Folded II (no. 30), the forms appear slightly cropped and overlapping, wrapped around a central core. Annear conjures serenity in the midst of flux.

The great American painter Philip Guston said: ‘I would like to think that a painting is finished when it feels not new but old, as if its forms had lived a long time in you, even though until it appeared you did not know what it would look like.’ The forms of these new paintings by Jeremy Annear look as if they have lived a long time within him, while yet retaining a freshness and bloom which suggests the immediate and spontaneous. They are well-worked but not over-worked, and they mark a high point in this artist’s creative endeavour. In conclusion, I return with great pleasure to the compelling limpidity of Echo Space (no. 9), a museum-quality painting if ever I saw one, a major achievement in Jeremy Annear’s already garlanded career.

Andrew Lambirth May–June 2016

Author and Art Critic

Jeremy’s studio, 2016Jeremy’s studio, 2009

Gathered Objects (Earth), 2012oil on board, 24 x 39 cms

2. IcON VI , 2016 oil on canvas 122 x 92 cms 48 x 36 ins

3. IcON I I (FOLdINg FORM), 2016 oil on canvas 120 x 100 cms 471⁄4 x 393⁄8 ins

4. IcON V (tERR A INcOgNItA), 2016 oil on canvas 120 x 100 cms 471⁄4 x 393⁄8 ins

5. IcON VI I , 2016 oil on canvas 122 x 92 cms 48 x 36 ins

6. cROSSFORM OFFSEt, 2016 oil on canvas 122 x 152 cms 48 x 597⁄8 ins

7. EARth RhYthM, 2016 oil on canvas 100 x 70 cms 393⁄8 x 271⁄2 ins

8. ENcLOSuRE , 2016 oil on canvas 103 x 127 cms 401⁄2 x 50 ins

9. EchO SpAcE , 2016 oil on canvas 122 x 152 cms 48 x 597⁄8 ins

10. EchO I , 2016 oil on canvas 100 x 50 cms 393⁄8 x 195⁄8 ins

11. EchO I I , 2016 oil on canvas 100 x 50 cms 393⁄8 x 195⁄8 ins

12. MEtROSpAcE I , 2016 oil on canvas 75 x 50 cms 291⁄2 x 195⁄8 ins

13. MEtROSpAcE I I , 2016 oil on canvas 75 x 50 cms 291⁄2 x 195⁄8 ins

14. MEtROSpAcE I I I , 2016 oil on canvas 75 x 50 cms 291⁄2 x 195⁄8 ins

15. MEtROSpAcE IV, 2016 oil on canvas 75 x 50 cms 291⁄2 x 195⁄8 ins

16. MEtROSpAcE V, 2016 oil on canvas 75 x 50 cms 291⁄2 x 195⁄8 ins

17. MEtROSpAcE VI , 2016 oil on canvas 75 x 50 cms 291⁄2 x 195⁄8 ins

18. cONtR AbALANcE , 2016 oil on canvas 110 x 130 cms 431⁄4 x 511⁄8 ins

19. MARItIME EdgE , 2016 oil on canvas 127 x 123 cms 50 x 401⁄4 ins

20. A xIS MuNdI I , 2016 oil on canvas 60 x 20 cms 235⁄8 x 77⁄8 ins

21. A xIS MuNdI I I , 2015 oil on canvas 60 x 20 cms 235⁄8 x 77⁄8 ins

22. A xIS MuNdI I I I , 2016 oil on canvas 60 x 20 cms 235⁄8 x 77⁄8 ins

23. hARbOuR I , 2016 oil on canvas 60 x 50 cms 235⁄8 x 195⁄8 ins

24. hARbOuR I I , 2016 oil on canvas 70 x 60 cms 271⁄2 x 235⁄8 ins

25. bLuE pRISM I , 2016 oil on canvas 50 x 40 cms 195⁄8 x 153⁄4 ins

26. bLuE pRISM I I , 2016 oil on canvas 50 x 40 cms 195⁄8 x 153⁄4 ins

27. bLuE pRISM I I I , 2016 oil on canvas 50 x 40 cms 195⁄8 x 153⁄4 ins

28. FORM dANcE , 2016 oil on canvas 40 x 30 cms 153⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins

29. FOLdEd I , 2016 oil on canvas 46 x 36 cms 181⁄8 x 141⁄8 ins

30. FOLdEd I I , 2016 oil on canvas 46 x 36 cms 181⁄8 x 141⁄8 ins

Jeremy Annear (b. 1949) is an abstract painter who was born in Devon and has since moved westwards into Cornwall. There he lives in a converted chapel on the Lizard Peninsular with his wife, the painter Judy Buxton.

Represented by Messum’s, Cork Street, London

BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY1966-69 Exeter College of Art, Painting and Printmaking.1973-76 Rolle College, Exmouth, Devon (B Ed).1976-84 Assistant Director, Dyrons Art Centre, Devon.1982-84 Lecturer, South Devon College.1984-86 Director, Ryder’s Gallery, Dartington College of Art, Devon.1988 Member of the Penwith Society of Artists.1989 Member of the Newlyn Society of Artists.1993 Elected on to the Council of Management, Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall.1993 Elected Committee Member, Newlyn Society of Artists.1997/98 Visiting lecturer, Cheltenham College of Art.2015 Became a represented artist on ideelart a virtual online organisation

promoting Abstract and conceptual art worldwide (www.ideelart.com)

SOLO ExHIBITIONS2016 Messum’s, London 2015 Lemon Street Gallery, Truro ‘Two-fold’ with Judy Buxton2014 Campden Gallery2013 Messum’s, London New Craftsman St Ives with JudyBuxton and Terence Coventry2012 Campden Gallery2011 Messum’s, London2010 Campden Gallery2009 Messum’s, London2007 New Millennium Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall.2004 New Millennium Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall.2002 Messum’s, London2001 New Millennium Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall.2000 Messum’s, London1998 Messum’s, London New Millennium Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall.1997 Messum’s, London Artco Gallery, Leipzig, Germany.1993 Porthmeor Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall.1992 International Celtic Festival, Lorient, France. Galerie Passage, Berlin, Germany.1991 Galerie Maeder, Berlin, Germany. Galerie Altes Rathaus (with Margaret Kelly/Wolfgang Lehmann). Galerie Haus Martin, Bremen, Germany.1989 The Salthouse Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall. The Underground Gallery, Bath.

SELECTED GROUP ExHIBITIONS2004 NumerousGroup and Mixed exhibitions since 20052004 New Millennium Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall, winter 2003/4 and ART2004

Islington Business Design Centre.2003-1998 ‘ART 2003’, David Messum Gallery, Business Design Centre, Islington,

London.2002 ‘Art & Spirituality’, Truro Cathedral, Cornwall.2002-1996 ‘Kunst uit Cornwall’, Amersfoort, Reina de Weyer, Holland.2002/01/00/99 Wenlock Fine Art, Much Wenlock, Shropshire.2000 ‘Twenty Years of Contemporary Art’, Falmouth Museum and Art Gallery.1999 ‘The Next Generation of Cornish painters’, Jeremy Annear and Kurt Jackson,

David Messum Gallery, London.1999 ‘Aspects of Abstraction’, Falmouth Art Gallery, Cornwall. ‘Cornish Painting’, The City Gallery, London. ‘Cornish Art in the Nineties’ Beatrice Royal Gallery, Eastleigh.1999/98 Innocent Fine Art, Bristol. ‘The British Show Truro’, Lemon St Gallery, Truro, Cornwall.1998 ‘5 Leipziger Jahresausstellung 1998’ Leipzig, Germany. ‘Panel Paintings’, Rosanna Wilson, Stephens Fine Art, London. ‘Newlyn Now’, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol.1998/97/96 ‘Now and Then’, David Messum Gallery, London.1998/97 London Olympia Art Fair. ‘The Little Picture Show’, The Rainy Day Gallery, Penzance.1997 ‘Limelight II’, Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn. ‘Quality of Light’, St Ives Tate Peninsular Programme, Open Studio.1997/96 Cadogan Contemporaries, London. ‘Critic’s Choice’, (Sasha Craddock), Newlyn Art Gallery.

1995 Online Gallery, Southampton.1994 Galerie Plein 1, Zeist, Holland.1994/93 ‘G12’, Amersfoort, Holland.1993 Demarco’s European Art Foundation, The Edinburgh Festival. ‘G12’, Salthouse Gallery, St Ives. ‘Summer Exhibition’, The Royal Academy of Arts, London. ‘Demarco’s Choice’, Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall. Newlyn Fish Festival, guest artist with Ralph Freeman, Newlyn Art Gallery,

Cornwall.1992 ‘Crossing the Boundaries’ Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, (4 Cornish Artists

in Europe).1992/91/90 Bath Contemporary Art Fair, Ogle Fine Art.1992/91/90 Contemporary Art Fair, Business Design Centre, Islington, London, Ogle

Fine Art.1990 ‘Art London 90’, 5th International Art Fair. ‘Six Porthleven Painters’, The Porthmeor Gallery, St Ives.1989 ‘St Ives 89’, New Street Gallery, Plymouth. ‘From Cornwall’, The Park Gallery, Cheltenham College.1989-1998 Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn.1998-1992 ‘The Penwith Society of Artists, Penwith Gallery, St Ives.1986 Louise Hallett and Vanessa Deveraux, London. Louise Hallett Gallery, London.

PUBLICATIONS, AWARDS ETC2014 Exhibition Catalogue Campden Gallery. Catalogue Essay ‘The Anxious

Object’ Graham Boyd. ISBN:978-1-908753-23-62013 Exhibition Catalogue. New Craftsman St Ives. Catalogue Essay ‘Jeremy

Annear’ Mercedes Smith. ISBN: 978-0-9926590-2-82013 Exhibition Catalogue. Messum’s London. Catalogue Essay ‘Encounters with

Beauty’ by Andrew Lambirth. ISBN: 978-1-908486-37-0. Publication No: CCCxLV

2012 Exhibition Catalogue. Campden Gallery. Catalogue Essay ‘A Kind of Music’ Ian Collins. Art Writer and Curator. ISBN: 978-1-908753-07-6

2011 Exhibition Catalogue. Messum’s London. Catalogue essay ‘the Eye of the Spirit’ by Andrew Lambirth, Writer Critic and Curator. ISBN: 978-1-905883-93-6. Publication No: CCCI

2010 Exhibition Catalogue. Campden Gallery. Catalogue Essay ‘Forensic Traces’ by Andrew Lambirth. ISBN: 978-0-9562719-4-5

2009 Exhibition Catalogue. Messum’s London. Forward by Nicholas Usherwood. Catalogue essay ‘Silent Harmonies’ Dr Jane Hamilton. ISBN: 978-1-905883-44-8. Publication No:CCxLxII

2007 Exhibition catalogue, New Millennium Gallery (foreword by David Falconer).2006/7 Interview ‘Jeremy Annear on European Modernism and Cornish Art in the

Eighties’, www.artcornwall.org2004 Exhibition catalogue, New Millennium Gallery (foreword by James Aitchison

and ‘The Meeting’, a poem written for the catalogue by Robert Vas Dias). Catching the Wave: Contemporary Art and Artists in Cornwall by Tom

Cross (Published by Halsgrove 2002).2002 Exhibition catalogue, ‘New Works’, Messum’s Contemporary.2001 Galleries Review, ‘Showing in St Ives’, Petronilla Silver.2000 Exhibition catalogue (foreword by Norbert Lynton), Messum’s Contemporary.1998/97 Exhibition catalogue, David Messum Gallery (foreword by John RusselTaylor).1996 Drawing Towards the End of the Century, Newlyn Society of Artists

Publication.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).

PROJECTS2013 Co-ordinator and Curator of IMS Charity Auction at Sotheby’s London with

Exhibitions at Falmouth Museum and Art Gallery and at Sotheby’s South Kensington London

2005-2007 Continuing studio-based collaboration with composer Jim Aitcheson.2003-2005 Artsound.co.uk A collaboration with composer Jim Aitcheson, Coleridge

Productions Andy Russo, The Coull Quartet and The Secconi Quartet.

COLLECTIONSLazard Bros.Ionian Trust.The Royal Holloway Collection.The Royal West of England Academy.Listed in Who’s Who in British Art and The Dictionary of Artists in Britain since 1945

B iogr aphy

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