Exhibition

Jeffery Camp: Some People Dream A Lot

19 Jun 2021 – 5 Sep 2021

Regular hours

Monday
Closed
Tuesday
10:30 – 16:30
Wednesday
10:30 – 16:30
Thursday
10:30 – 16:30
Friday
10:30 – 16:30
Saturday
10:30 – 16:30
Sunday
10:30 – 16:30

Special hours

30-Aug-2021
10:30 – 16:30

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Kestle Barton

Helston
England, United Kingdom

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The first solo exhibition of renowned British artist Jeffery Camp’s works since his death, focuses on two of his beloved subjects: Beachy Head’s crumbling cliffs and the fleeting beauty of cut flowers

About

Some People Dream a Lot is the first solo exhibition of renowned British artist Jeffery Camp’s works since his death last year and therefore the first posthumous celebration of an incredible painting life. The exhibition, on show at Kestle Barton, Cornwall (19 June - 5 September 2021), seeks to find an analogy between two of the great leitmotifs of Camp’s oeuvre: the crumbling cliffs at Beachy Head and the fleeting beauty of cut flowers, not simply as memento mori, but as a joyful embrace of what it means to be alive. His playful invention, his virtuoso painting, his wit, desire, and at times sadness too, still breathe vitally through these paintings. 

Camp spent nearly the entirety of his long life painting and it was landscape and the edges of it that were fundamental to his 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 this landmark became the defining motif of his life’s work, dominating paintings for the next 50 years.

These vistas of Beachy Head 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 in the last stage of his life (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. 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. Exhibiting them at Kestle Barton, when the venue’s own expansive gardens and wildflower meadows are in full bloom, adds an additional sense of place and vitality to the works. As Camp himself said, inspiring the title of this exhibition,
‘Some people dream a lot. Daydreaming is worthwhile but you must really force it and make it happen.’

 

Some People Dream A Lot is curated by Dan Howard-Birt in collaboration with Michael Richardson | Art Space Gallery. 

What to expect? Toggle

CuratorsToggle

Dan Howard-Birt

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Jeffery Camp

Taking part

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