Recent Work and Experimentation by Stephen Jeffrey
Stephen is a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art and has worked as a product designer, an exhibition designer, graphic designer and an established illustrator for over 30 years. His prestigious client list includes The Economist, New Scientist, Radio Times, The Wall Street Journal and many more. He has also lectured in Art and Design at North Tyneside College, the University of Sunderland and Northumbria University. You can find out more about him and see more of his work here and find him on Instagram here. Thank you for this Stephen, it’s great to hear what you’ve been up to this year and about the things you’re working on.
Although the pandemic has of course been a tragic and strange affair, the lockdowns on the whole have been fairly positive times for the development of my work.
Like many people I experienced a sense of release from the rat-race and almost immediately started to reassess my work, which resulted in a whole string of new experiments in technique and further explorations into art theory.
An unexpected bonus of the lockdown was having my wife and my two grown-up children working from home, isolation has been the opposite of my experience of lockdown.
For some time I had been looking for a more direct printing technique that works in the same way as stone lithography, where the printed image is a straight transference of the drawn image.
Initially I tried to find a way of etching designs into lino, without much success and then had a go at ‘kitchen lithography’ but it was drypoint etching that proved to be most interesting and the technique, I feel, with the most potential for further development.
My second lockdown preoccupation has been an attempt to understand the formal aspects of 20th century art, particularly Cubism, I wanted to understand what is it Picasso does?
I tend to always go back to the same artists for inspiration and direction, the most important being Picasso Paul Klee, Marino Marini, although there are many others, some more contemporary but at heart I guess I'm just an old-fashioned Modernist and my centre of gravity is bang on mid-century.
I was interested in unifying my output by looking for an overarching approach or style that encompassed my interest in the ‘abstract’ and the overtly representational?
That kind of synthesis I think is best illustrated in the work of the ‘big three’ previously mentioned, who (particularly Picasso and Marino) also had a profound interest in sculpture and funnily enough in the art of caricature?
I made a short detour into Primitivism but ultimately found it lacked any sophisticated idea of space, stylistically it still remains of interest particularly the work of TalR, and the Celtic Primitivists Breon O’Casey and Guy Royal.
Looking at Picasso and Cubism also rekindled my interest in sculpture which I believe played a central role in the ‘method' of Cubism particularly Synthetic Cubism. So I spent a few weeks working and reworking some low-relief pieces which were based on crashed aircraft, initially inspired by a Leger drawing of the same subject. The interest here was with the interplay between 2 and 3-dimensions and sometimes even the 4th dimension!
These pieces were always intended to be low-reliefs which is in keeping with the formal aspects of Cubism, this inexorably led onto exploring collage, this time with the spotlight on early collages by Paolozzi, again an example of taking inspiration from the graphic work a sculptor.
I also took the opportunity during the sunny days of the first lockdown to redevelop my small city garden into a place that was more welcoming to wildlife and to make our forced incarceration just a little bit more bearable.
With the end of the pandemic in sight the focus now will be on producing finished pieces for sale once things get back to normal, online selling may be something of a stopgap but it can’t compete with the experience of seeing artwork in the flesh.
I will undoubtedly carry on with my drypoint experiments, simply for their immediacy and I like their scratchy, graphic quality, some kind of 3D collage will probably creep in too, something in the vein of Ben Nicholson, textured, abstracted low-reliefs perhaps combining printed papers collaged onto the surface?
I’ll probably still flip-flop between abstraction and representation, it may look untidy as a body of work but I’ve come to see it as a useful internal dialogue, the balance is towards an intention to represent ‘something’ even if that something abstracted beyond easy recognition.
