Galleries - June 2021

Jeffery Camp RA Some People Dream A Lot 19 June – 5 September 2021 Kestle Barton Manaccan Helston Cornwall TR12 6HU 01326 231 811 info@kestlebarton.co.uk www.kestlebarton.co.uk Kestle Barton is proud to present an exhibition dedicated to Jeffery Camp’s paintings of Beachy Head and his late flower paintings. The edges of the landscape have been fundamental to Jeffery Camp’s painting since the 1940s when he returned to his native Suffolk to paint the beaches at Pakefield. In the 1960s Camp found the epic chalk cliffs at Beachy Head, Sussex and these became the defining motif of his life’s work, dominating paintings for the next 50 years. These vistas are finely observed, specific places, and yet they often contain a sense of otherworldliness. Camp’s vertiginous, ancient clifftops rich with wildflowers and birds are so impossibly fresh that they must be glimpsed in a vision. Amorous couples loll among the grasses and are caressed by the light of the sun, lost in the reveries of eternal youth. These cliff edges are dreamt places, as well as spaces from where daydreams are conjured. All of life is here. Lithe and languorous youths embrace and play as the restless sea slowly claims the crumbling cliff. The sensation that a sudden gust of wind might threaten to lift a body over the edge is tempered by the feeling that these bodies would only be carried weightlessly, entwined, up into the pale blue sky. These are paintings of long epochs and of fleeting moments. In Camp’s final burst of painting (c.2010-12), cut flowers began to appear with reclining bodies in place of the cliff edges. Fresh blooms, bound to shrivel and fade, offer a different sense of time passing. Some People Dream A Lot is the first solo exhibition since Camp’s passing in 2020, following a very long painting life. Posthumously, these works seem to meditate more decisively on the impermanence of our vitality, but they do so with joy and an undiminished desire to look and to exalt the simple and profound beauty of light animating a body. Some People Dream A Lot is curated by Dan Howard-Birt in collaboration with Michael Richardson | Art Space Gallery. Image : Jeffery Camp South Downlands , 1990. Oil on canvas, 170 x 292cm. courtesy Art Space Gallery