Jeremy Annear

Jeremy Annear (b. 1949) is an abstract painter who was born in Devon and has since moved westwards into Cornwall. There he lives in a converted chapel on the Lizard Peninsular with his wife, the painter Judy Buxton. Like Klee and Kandinsky in particular, Annear is interested in synchronicity of the visual arts with music, and is fascinated by the ambiguity of language that can be used to describe music and poetry as well as painting. A line of music or poetry has a certain rhythm similar to the cut, meander or thrust of the lines in one of Annear’s paintings . These concerns are brought to the foreground in a number of his titles, titles that he often repeats: Line Song, Silent Rhythms, Dawn Song and Maritime Blues. In these works musical rhythms merge with the distilled shapes of the Cornish landscape. While the same essential marks and forms may be found in the paintings comprising each series, there are numerous subtle shifts and transmutations taking place too, making each work a staging post on a continuing artistic journey. Annear applies paint with mantra-like concentration—surface on surface on surface. For the viewer, this leads to a sense of the archaeology of the painted surface, a suggestion of what lies beneath and what otherwise might have been. To celebrate his sixtieth birthday, which takes place in 2009, Jeremy will publish a screen print in an edition of sixty. Though known primarily for his satisfyingly object-like paintings, Annear draws everyday and the immediacy of the graphic mark is something that may easily be lost in the painting process. He sees printing, therefore, as a natural extension to his practice as a draughtsman and Line Music captures the natural vivacity of his drawings.