Under a Cretan blue sky last week, I cycled over Folly Bridge to South Oxford to meet Jeff Clarke, who at eighty eight, is about to open a new show at the North Wall Arts Centre celebrating 60 years as an artist in Oxford. This is fitting as it was in Crete, when Jeff was working as a draughtsman for The British School of Archaeology at the ancient site of Knossos, where he fell in love with the changing patterns made by the Greek sunshine, and the contrasts and tones between light and dark that have underpinned his work ever since.
And as I lock my bike outside, I can see he has bought a little bit of it back to Oxford. His front door is the same colour as the national flag of Greece, there are locally sourced pithoi pots from a Cretan village in the garden, and he has even cultivated a special geranium with a wine coloured variegated leaf from Knossos, that he says is ‘more paintable and distinguished than the English ones’.
But today it is the luminosity of the light that floods into the rooms that is so arresting. This is obviously what made the place so attractive for an artist; it is not hard to see why Jeff purchased the place back in the 60’s. Unlike the other buildings on the terrace, Jeff’s comes with a two storey outhouse. Derelict when he bought it, it had once been a college laundry and a glove manufacturer but now is very much an artist’s workshop, crammed with the paint brushes, etching plates and other tools of his trade.
“I was always interested in drawing,” he tells me as we perch next to a bowl of fruit illuminated by the south facing window of the upstairs studio. “I was bought up on the edge of the downs near Brighton and my brother used to say, ‘I’m going to draw Falmer Village Church, want to come?’ And so we went out together. My brother was very delicate in his drawing, put all the bricks and fencing in and that kind of stuff. I was much more of a smudger. We were both very different. But that encouraged me.”
From school he went to Brighton Art College, where he discovered he had an aptitude for etching, and won a series of scholarships including The Rome Scholarship, where he worked alongside some of the then big London artists like Jo Tilson, Peter Blake and Bernard Cohen. “Etching uses acid to create light,” says Jeff, showing me the zinc plates on which he makes his marks before deciding on the length of time it is dipped in acid – the longer you leave it in the darker the outcome. “The etching room was always the most exciting at college in the 50’s. When you went in at nine in the morning it already smelled of nitric acid, bitumen, molten wax and cigarette smoke. It was a lovely smelly place. And of course everything was highly flammable,” he chuckles. “But I don’t remember any major disasters.”
A teaching job bought him to Oxford, which has been his base ever since. And although many of his pictures reflect time spent in France, Norfolk and his beloved Crete, he prefers to spend his time now painting closer to home, watching the light as it alters the patterns in his garden, his studio, and in the streets around.
“You see the shadows are changing already,” he says pointing to a bowl of quinces a neighbour has bought for him to sketch. “Like our very existence, light is always on the move, constantly shifting.”
And with that I take my leave, and head off into the midday sun. Jeff reckons that when he first moved here, the Oxford skies were not as blue as they are today. Global warming is to blame, he says. Sure enough the sky is the same cyan colour as when I arrived. But after spending time with Jeff you cannot help but notice how the the shapes thrown out by the terrace of houses, roofs and loft extensions have shortened and the buildings have taken on an altogether brighter hue.
SUNLIGHT ON FORMS is on at the North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford.
Tuesday 5 – Saturday 23 September 2023
Photography by John Milnes.
Jeff’s studio
