Jenny Grevatte 'A Painter's Progress'

i've always wanted to paint right from being a little girl i suppose it helped that i came from an artistic family my mum was trained as a painter and my dad was an architect and there was always art materials around for me to experiment with and if we went on holiday mum and i would always take our sketchbooks and that was part of the holiday was sitting and learning how to paint light on water that sort of thing i also remember being very aware of color and i thought everybody was aware of color but i think it was particular to me and it certainly carried on through my life so you know right from early days color mattered but for me i really did want to learn to paint that was the challenge for me and so i carried on and got into art school and whilst i was at college i became pregnant and had to take a year out as you did in those days it was very strict you know you and i learned a big lesson by doing that because i i did learn secrets tricks of the trade as it were combining baby sleep times with a session in the studio and my subject matter too was determined by my domestic circumstances um it was still life you know if i saw a jug and a milk bottle on a windowsill and the light behind it that would be my subject it was there in front of me by setting myself challenges for example jim my second child i had an exhibition when he was only three months old and i remember going out halfway through the preview to feed him in an upstairs room that's you know the kind of dedication i gave to it all mad wasn't it now i feel well yes probably it did pay off and of course i've got this wonderful family but it was very hard and there was very little money around so although i was exhibiting the work wasn't selling for very high prices if it sold at all so i set myself the challenge of going down to london and finding a good gallery you know a top gallery and i can remember very well it was a hot august afternoon and i finally got up the courage to cross the threshold of brows and derbies in cork street i thought well i'll start at the top and work down and i was so lucky because lillian brows was there behind the desk and she very rarely was and she said if you go and fetch me that painting and that painting pointing to photographs in my album and bring them down for next week in a nice frame then i'll put them in the summer exhibition and within two weeks she'd sold them both for the grand slam of a hundred pounds you know which was out of this world to me 100 pounds at that stage and gradually they became my representing gallery but it was when we moved here to keep his cottage that i really got into landscape because we were surrounded by it and that's why we moved here because we just had the most wonderful parkland on our doorstep and charmwood forest just up the road and so i thought well i really must get over this nonsense that i can only paint still lives i must get out there and try working from my immediate landscape so i did i started going out regularly with my sketchbook that one day famously set up my easel came back to the house to make a phone call and went back again and the painting that i had started had been completely licked clear of oil paint by the young beasts that were in the field and they licked the oil paint all over my chair as well so this was my first abstract done in roughly park when we started going away on family holidays 12 years ago we discovered cornwall and i'd always been a bit hesitant about going to cornwall the family teased me about this because a gypsy had once told me several things that came true and the final thing she said was and when you die it will be in devon or cornwall well that does put you off so um i got over my fear and we did go down because a very good friend of mine had a converted fish loft and he kept saying just borrow it you know go and have a holiday there and you'll so love it it'll so inspire you and he was right it did not only is it inspiring landscape seascape the light is fantastic but there's a artistic community down there still as thriving as ever which we've now become a part of the sea is so incredibly blue down there when the sun is out you can't disregard those wonderful intense blues but also i think i'd started looking at different artists for inspiration started looking at the scottish colorists and some of these sometimes painters like patrick heron who uses colour very strongly and william scott and i tend to do this throughout my career i've gone through phases of fairly neutral muted colours and then felt i needed a big change so perhaps deliberately change the palette so i would deliberately take away colors that i got comfortable with and put down colors that were unfamiliar just to see the changes that would come about oh do i have creative blocks yes yes terrible ones and the worst are when life's not treating you well you know when you have a really bad time in real life it's very difficult to get in there and concentrate on your work sometimes i'll go back to a favorite comfortable area of work like monotypes they are great for if you've not got a lot of time but they're great for making progress quickly the other thing i love to do is to work in my sketchbook and you can take a sketchbook out on a summer's afternoon and fill a few pages and feel you're making progress making new ideas and also going to exhibitions of other people's work that that can be a great stimulus if you feel you're in a a rut of your own to go and find some new inspiration traveling to going seeing different places i'd done a lot of paintings of cornwall and i felt this is getting too easy this is getting formulaic almost i must stop i must rethink although you know you you can do it and there's cell that isn't the reason you're painting it shouldn't be the reason you're painting you're trying to make progress you're trying to develop so as soon as i do feel i'm getting comfortable i do make myself take on a new challenge and thought i would take a different theme from cornwall but a simple one and one that was fairly familiar so i took the tree theme and of course they're all on my doorstep too and i just took that theme and pushed it as far as i could trying different scales working really small really big different media and it worked you know it gradually started to come together and i did produce a whole body of work over that year which went into my exhibition out of the woods i i am obsessed with texture and i think i put that down to my tutor eric hall who gave me this wonderful grounding in colour and paint surface and he made me experiment incorporating texture i can remember using poly filler for example as a base very early on but it was rubbish when i did it but when eric did it it was really fantastic and i was in transpired and he encouraged me to look at artists like brock for example who was trained as a painter and decorator that was the family business prac learned all those marbling techniques and combing through um wood grain designs all those things and i think as soon as i felt confident enough that was a natural direction for me to go after mastering the oil paint i just felt i wanted to explore that textural surface it's dangerous mind you it can get on the verge of a textile design which is not what i'm looking for if you go too heavy on the texture it dominates it's the content of the painting that you've got to keep up the most but you've got to draw the viewer's eye in with the pleasure of the paint surface they've got to want to linger there they want to go back and look at it time and time again whenever i get stuck in a rut with my work you you get to a stage where you're feeling far too comfortable you almost know what the pain is going to look like before you finish it and that is disaster for an artist it needs to be a challenge it needs to be a surprise you need to have this element of happy accidents that's what i think you need not to be visually totally sure of what's going to happen and as the painting progresses the paint itself will interact in a million different ways that you can't pre-empt and you have to be aware of that and make use of that when it occurs and when you can see that actually doesn't need any more doing to it during that year out i approached the richard attenborough centre and the new museum with an idea for another exhibition which would involve a residency at the museum because i felt i needed yet another new challenge especially with this big birthday coming up and to work directly from other people's work in the collection at the museum has been a tremendous new discovery and a real honor as well i feel great privilege that i can go in there and i can have the work of some of my greatest heroes right in front of me and i can closely look at them and digest them and i do my sketches on the spot in the conservation studio there so that's very new territory for me and has surprised me with how different the results have been because i'm now even working with the human form which and faces which have not been in my work at all before i've always taught um right from in my twenties when it was a necessity i started evening class teaching and i then discovered that i really loved this teaching thing you know it was almost as interesting as the studio practice for me i love the interaction i love helping people because being in your studio all day is a very self-indulgent activity but if i can go and teach and share my discoveries with other people and help them become better artists and i know what rewards that brings so i can open people's eyes and that is just as rewarding for them as learning how to paint sometimes and i did a very interesting project on shared sketchbooks and each sketchbook had a theme and each student would contribute maybe four or five pages each week the standard of the work was just terrific because there was this little element of competition and rivalry they wanted to do it as well if not better than the person before them and they are going to be on exhibition alongside my work which i think is just a lovely way of bringing together my teaching and my own work and how important the two are they feed one another we were delighted when jenny gravatt first approached us at the new water museum and art gallery with the idea for a residency and in fact it turned out to be a joint project between embrace arts and the museum extending her practice to look at some artworks in the permanent collection and among those that she chose were concrete cabin by peter doyg the prisoners by katy colvitz and also a woman's life by evelyn williams these enabled jenny's style to be fully explored in a deeper fashion and her responses have delighted and amazed us the reaction to the exhibition has been absolutely amazing people have really looked more closely at jenny's work and then compared her response and we hope that we'll be able to do further residencies along these lines maybe i won't do quite as many solo shows maybe i'll do them every two years and a little more leisurely and always allow myself this time out for development i think that's the lesson i've learned you

Channel: Jenny Grevatte

Views: 93,272

Keywords: Jenny, Grevatte, Artist, Painter, Cambridge, Contemporary, Art, Film, Studio, Painter's, Progress, Alex J. Wright, Filmmaker, Leicester Museum, New Walk

Id: 15qjvBwpUeY

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2010