About
Jan Gleaves BA (Hons) PGCert Surface Pattern
The opportunity to live and work in the South of France awards me a peaceful and privileged environment from where to practise my art. As a fan of Matisse, Van Gogh and Cezanne, I can appreciate the ‘light’ here, and the energy and inspiration it affords artists. This body of work is primarily the culmination of a year spent in my studio, in a small village, just outside Carcassonne. Surrounded by history, archaeology and everyday village life, I have allowed myself a deep absorption into the freedom of design and composition, creatively working without distraction. To put onto paper through my own language of colour, pattern and movement, abstracted representations from everyday life.
As an undergraduate student in the 1980s, I discovered the textile and wallpaper designs of William Morris. A visit to the Sanderson factory in Uxbridge at the age of 20, to watch the block-printing of Morris’s papers and the hand mixing of chalk paint, had a profound effect on me. The process combined my love of art with my love of history and traditional craft.
Whilst Drawing and Illustration have proved very useful skills over the years, painting and collage remain the most enjoyable form of expression for me, allowing me the freedom to experiment through pattern, cutting and layering. And, whilst I enjoy working in many different mediums, the surface pattern designer in me, returns again and again to gouache paint. It is the medium by which I feel most able to communicate.
As a young graduate I worked at the Royal Academy of Art, Piccadilly. It was here I encountered many of the contemporary RA Artist’s work. This further influence proved creatively life-changing, particularly as it introduced me to ‘abstract’ art. The work of Sandra Blow, Terry Frost, Victor Pasmore and Patrick Heron, held a particular fascination for me. Sandra with her large scale, colourful abstract collages, Terry Frost with his bold, colourful shapes and Victor Pasmore’s more architectural, organic constructions. Their abandonment of representation and their development of composition through abstraction excited me.
Colour and visual spatial imaging has always dominated my own cognitive processes (a perceptual phenomena now recognised as synaesthesia). A world where Words and Sounds are inherently coloured and three dimensional maps involuntarily project into the ‘mind’s eye’. Abstraction made sense to me. Through painting and collage I am able to interpret my own experiences of the physical world whilst still maintaining an element of representation and design.