|
“So ‘life begins at 40’, eh?”. Colin
Jellicoe replies with a wry, accommodating smile. He’s heard
it all before in forty years of painting in the city of
Manchester. In today's terms of multiple shifts along short-lived
career paths, forty years along the anxious road of the artist is
no mean feat. But a brief recce reveals that Jellicoe had found
his calling early in life and stuck to it.
Born In Rusholme, sketching since childhood, Jellicoe spent some
of the swinging ’60s with an easel in Platt Fields. That’s
either dedication for you or just childhood, but either way his
enthusiasm was, and is, evident. By the next decade he was settled
in his current space at 82 Portland Street. So what keeps Mr.
Jellicoe going? He cuts to it: “I get ideas from the movies.
It started way back in the ’70s”. Odd that a painter
would be inspired by the very medium which is often referred to as
the cause of painting’s demise in the cultural firmament. But
Jellicoe is unfettered by intellectual claptrap or the flirtatious
tastes of the twentieth century. He candidly directs attention
through the details of one of his older paintings, “That came
from some source, these came from other sources, but the overall
idea came from another movie”.
He talks with impressive knowledge of the Western genre,
delivered with the natural, laconic grace of a filmic cowboy. Thus
he keeps on going, making plain sense - a bit like Richard
Farnsworth’s character in David Lynch’s The Straight
Story. Sure enough, the artist and his work seem to exude the code
of life on the range: a metaphor suggesting the committed
endeavour of the artist perhaps? But that would be reading a lot
into it, and this is where the cowboy allusion ends. His is not an
obsession with those lone rangers of celluloid, even though the
contemporary works include cowboys. Jellicoe explains that he is
drawn to “their theatricality, they’re all playing a
role”. He moved on from the movies long ago, and started
taking photographs of his friends and himself to springboard
ideas. Of picturing himself in his work he simply adds, “I’m
just playing a part”. The influence of celluloid seems to be a
stylistic mechanism: the landscapes are like Hollywood backdrops or
the real wilds of the West; the cowboys highlighting certain
feelings writ large in such environments. His painting has not used
the photograph for faithfully realist representations. It’s
rather that film has played its part as catalyst, inspiring Jellicoe
to translate an immediacy of feeling within his subtle but emotive
works. Visually anonymous, semi-abstract figures appear as if
captured at solitary, introspective moments. Overall, the canvases
are like a series of antinomies - or conflicts of authority -
familiar to the cowboy: the individual over community, freedom over
restriction, integrity over compromise, nature over culture.
pragmatism over idealism. But then that’s just reading into
things again. Jellicoe pragmatically corrects, “I just see
these moments”. Those moments have added up to his Forty Year
Retrospective, opening on 7 April. It's a special moment, but once
again Jellicoe is forthright in his analysis, “I’m
fortunate having the retrospective. You can see how the work’s
progressed over the forty years”. Here’s to another forty!
City Life, April 2000 |
