Sean Jefferson

Phantasmagoria

I first met Sean Jefferson in Cornwall in 2002, when I joined a gathering of the Brotherhood of Ruralists – the group of artists that had formed in the mid-1970s around the pivotal figure of Peter Blake. In the late ‘60s Blake had abandoned London and the world of Pop and the fame he had won with his artwork for The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ album to discover a slower way of life in the countryside. His fellow Ruralists included his wife, Jann Haworth, and the married couples Ann and Graham Arnold and Annie and Graham Ovenden. Their friend David Inshaw was another prominent member, and his painting The Badminton Game (1972-3) perhaps best sums up the group’s ‘look’. Though Blake himself wasn’t there that autumn of 2002, it was captivating to sit around a large refectory table in the Ovendens’ kitchen at Barley Splatt, eating and talking and listening and looking. There was plenty to be taken in.

 At that time it seemed painting was no longer much in vogue in England: the early 2000s was still the era of Damien Hirst and the Young British Artists. But neither Sean nor I cared much about that, and nor did the Ruralists. As Peter Blake had explained at the time of the Brotherhood’s foundation,

Simply, our aims are the continuation of a certain kind of English painting; we admire Samuel Palmer, Stanley Spencer, Thomas Hardy, Elgar, cricket, English landscape, the Pre-Raphaelites, etc. … Our aims are to paint about love, beauty, joy, sentiment and magic. We still believe in painting with oil paint on canvas, putting the picture in the frame and hopefully, that someone will like it, buy it and hang it on their wall to enjoy it.

 As young as the two of us were back then, Sean and I both hoped that this might one day again be the future for British art – painting, with its roots in the landscape and the visionary. I had just started writing A Crisis of Brilliance, with its opening chapter exploring the pre-Slade, Cookham childhood of Stanley Spencer, the great twentieth-century British visionary. And Sean was furthering his craft under the guiding eye and encouragement of Graham Ovenden and Graham Arnold. Though Jefferson felt closer to the latter’s more symbolist take on Ruralism, it was the former who taught him how to generate the jewel-like luminosity that pervades both their work.

Yet notwithstanding the fact I had long been a fan of the sad, mad Richard Dadd – Bedlam inmate and painter of the Tate’s ludicrously wonderful Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke (1855-64) – at that time in 2002 Jefferson’s fascination with fairy painting seemed slightly odd to me, and very much against the grain. But moving on seventeen years and I’m meeting him again, this time to talk about his forthcoming exhibition with Messum’s. Over the past three or four years I’ve seen his work in art fairs around London, so l know what he’s been up to, how he has been developing. I know how he’s advanced his fairy paintings and delicate, visionary portraits of animals and nature into something luminous and extraordinary in their own right – longing myself to be able to afford one of his divine little talismanic paintings.

Jefferson left Cornwall around 2009 to be closer to London, and now lives in the Kent village of Farningham – once, briefly, the home of another curiously British visionary, Graham Sutherland. Towards the end of 2019 Sean and I arranged to meet in nearby Shoreham; dressed in thick tweed jacket, leather boots and leather cap, the artist looks for all the world like he might be a great-grandson of one of the Ancients, those passionate young admirers of William Blake who in the 1820s followed Samuel Palmer down to this tranquil little corner of England, this ‘Golden Valley’ of the River Darent.

 We talk about the Ruralists, and about Palmer and Spencer, and about the very real sense of the magical that once pervaded our ancestors’ everyday lives, but that has been lost with the advancement of enlightenment ideas and industrial ideals. We explore Jefferson’s own development as an artist – an unusual story that explains, at least a little, some of the ideas and inspirations that lie behind his strange and hugely original work. 

He was born in Bexleyheath, south-east London, in 1957, and grew up not far from the Red House, the Arts and Crafts home built for William Morris in 1860 and described by Edward Burne-Jones as ‘the beautifullest place on earth.’ The mother of a school friend of Jefferson’s was a medium, and as a teenager he became deeply involved in Spiritualism, attending séances where accomplished mediums contacted the spirit world with startling effect. Séances were something the Pre-Raphaelites had tried, too: Dante Gabriel’s brother William Rossetti kept a séance diary, some of which probably took place at the Red House. As is clear throughout his work and the text that accompanies his pictures in this catalogue, an interest in the occult and folklore runs deeply through Jefferson’s work. Then in 1976 the great German artist Max Ernst died; it was through obituaries and documentaries dedicated to his life and achievements that Jefferson first discovered Surrealism. It would be this encounter that inspired him to eventually pursue the life of an artist. 

Yet it was as a student of Microbiology at Imperial College, London, that he first really learnt to draw. Required to make careful records of plants and small animals and anatomical dissections he discovered how to closely observe the natural world. As he explains,

A fungal infection on the surface of a leaf would look like a painting by [the French surrealist] Yves Tanguy, with the added mystery that it was real. The most important thing about these studies was that the evidence based scientific model was hammered into us until we were hard wired. This meant that on making the decision to become a professional painter, although I had only average artistic ability I would meticulously note elements that worked and learn how to reproduce them at will. This application of a rigid objectivity to an essentially subjective process has meant that the work is constantly being improved on, even after thirty-five years, and has been good enough for me to live entirely off my art for the last thirty years.

For all that they seem to speak of impossible places and impossible things, Jefferson’s work has its origins in science: both scientific observation and scientific understanding of the material world. And science is something that continues to fascinate him. However, as he amusingly notes in his comments on his painting Ivy: Time Spiral, not even science can be relied upon any more as an eternal ‘truth’: for ‘nothing remains true for very long anymore.’       

Jefferson’s work is thus a highly unusual and idiosyncratic amalgam of very diverse influences, with his paintings erupting out of the whole zeitgeist – art, music, literature – of post-Flower Power, pre-Punk, 1970s London. And notwithstanding the influence of Ernst – who was an early member of that ultra modernist, anti-art movement known as Dada – Jefferson explains that he sees his work as being how he thinks painting might have developed had Modernism never happened. Thus it is that – artistically speaking – his paintings have their origin in the nineteenth century: Palmer, the Pre-Raphaelites, the fairy painting of Richard Dadd and fin de siècle Symbolism all play important parts. 

 This much is very clear from his own notes that accompany each of the paintings in this catalogue, which make quite apparent the wide range of his knowledge and the sheer depth of experience that underlies each work. It is difficult, with mere words, to do justice to Jefferson’s extraordinary phantasmagoria.