Cressida’s Dream

About

Ordovas presents Cressida’s Dream, an exhibition of works by Bill Jacklin RA (b. 1943), which the artist has created in response to a novella by Simon Astaire. The exhibition will include forty-one works as well as a limited-edition artist’s book. This exhibition is the result of their creative dialogue during the recent lockdowns. Like many people who found new expressive outlets during this period, Astaire and Jacklin both explored fresh creative terrain in their work and conversations. Astaire, who has known Jacklin for many years, was inspired to write a fantasy while spending lockdown in England. Jacklin, who spent lockdown in rural Rhode Island, was intrigued by the story and a long-distance artistic correspondence ensued, culminating in his illustrations for Cressida’s Dream.

This work marks a new direction for Jacklin, who, after moving to New York in 1985, has long focused on painting what he calls ‘urban portraits’ of the city in all its guises, from large scale canvases of crowds in flux to intimate moments in Seurat-like etchings. While the new images display his long fascination with the movement of light and quasi-abstract forms in motion, they possess a more fanciful, colourful quality and a more diverse range of subjects than the metropolitan scenes for which he is better known.