Tribute to London Group member Jeff Dellow by Angela Eames LG
Jeff Dellow – Painter
“I am interested in the exploration of an extended field of vision. It leads to openness, a mobile feast rather than a fixed format – an invitation to the viewer to enter a contemplative visual terrain, one where the viewer can see the thinking in painting. I like the idea of a moving focus, a space for traversing a lateral scroll of elements. The variables in painting have always interested me and are a natural source for learning about the rightness of touch and preference of facture. Painting is a way of learning and doing. The purpose of making my works is to achieve an expansion of feeling through the physical range of touch and colour in composition.” Jeff Dellow
Jeff Dellow was first and foremost a painter. Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, he studied at St Martin’s School of Art, Maidstone College of Art and the Slade School of Art, before receiving a Cheltenham Fellowship in 1974. Prior to this, he began his career as a raw materials analyst for Rohm & Haas developing the new acrylic paints of the 1960s, an entirely appropriate course of action for a man dedicated to the activity of painting!
Jeff was a London-based artist who from 1977 had a studio within the Greenwich Artists Studio Association (GASA). Though the studio was forced to close in 1994, it carried on in the form of the Art in Perpetuity Trust (APT) in 1995 and in that year, many of the original artists, including Jeff, moved to the new premises at 6 Creekside in Deptford. Like Stockwell Depot, both GASA and APT are synonymous with a particularly close circle of painters and sculptors who have been both active visual practitioners within the art world and prolific within fine art education across the UK. As in the case of many artists during the 70s and 80s, Jeff worked part-time at many art schools across the country, before becoming Head of Painting at Humberside in 1987 and in 1988, Head of Painting at Kingston University.
He was an Athena Award prize-winner in 1988 and exhibited in the John Moore’s 1976, 1989 and 1991 where he was a prize-winner. He has exhibited at the Hayward Gallery, the Whitechapel and shown work in Europe, the USA and Africa. He has had solo shows at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, Todd Gallery, deli ART, Berlin and the Gallery Standort, Frankfurt and New Cut Arts, Halesworth, Suffolk. His paintings live on in both public and private collections around the world.
In 1978, young painters including Mali Morris, Clyde Hopkins and Jeff Dellow became part of the touring exhibition Drawing in Action, organised by John Clark and focussing on younger artists who were determined not to operate either as purely abstract or as purely figurative artists. This exhibition was followed in 1979 by the exhibitions Open Attitudes and Seven Painters (both featuring the work of Graham Crowley, Jeff Dellow, Clyde Hopkins and David Wiseman LG). At the time, these exhibitions in particular, highlighted the concerns of painters wanting to transcend the limitations placed on painting without being classified as belonging to a particular orthodoxy.
My abiding personal memories of Jeff stem from the early days, particularly on one of those ubiquitous college trips, specifically a trip to Barcelona. Over the ten-day period Jeff and I had many evening conversations around the topics of film and painting, lubricated by sundowners on hotel balconies. It transpired that we both had succumbed to the filmic genius of Andrei Tarkovsky and in particular his film, Stalker and we also had common interest in the work of Frank Stella. In the film Stalker the protagonist describes a place (the Zone) as one where “our moods, our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings can bring about change” and he adds that where “old traps vanish, new ones take their place; the old safe ones become impassable, and the route can be either plain and easy, or impossibly confusing”. The scriptwriter might as well have been referring to the activity of painting in Jeff’s case or in my case – drawing. There was always much to debate – quietly! In his understated manner, Jeff had that uncanny knack of being able to calm the mood allowing for contemplative and ruminative discussion! As his many students would affirm, Jeff was a quiet and exceptionally generous man with an insatiable curiosity and a particular talent for listening and absorbing before letting rip with unforgettable kernels of wisdom.
“Dellow’s paintings have a power about them, a layered experience that rewards the viewer through their revisiting. These are paintings that seem to be re-created each and every time that they are seen. The abundance of visual devices highlights the incalculable possibilities that are present within painting; through the building up and layering of these elements, the viewer is offered an opportunity to partake in a kind of visual detour. Instead of being strongly urged towards an amplified focal point, the viewer embarks into a rich visual space that offers open-ended dialogue.” Matthew Macauley
The true reflection of Jeff’s legacy is in his painting. Each painting seems to present to the viewer an aerial view as opposed to a conventional landscape where the viewer is given the opportunity to survey the intricacies of sequence and/or interruption of elements of colour and shape. The viewer stands on the ground but is simultaneously looking at or rather down on the painting. Each painting calls our attention to substance, matter, structure and elemental formation. There is the inevitable reference to microcosm and macrocosm as painted mark assembles into determined bandwidths and variable shapes which travel across the surface and are contained within the frame, the edge of the canvas. The realness of each painting occurs within the four sides of the rectangle. Nothing traverses the edge. The activity on the canvas or substrate is contained within the boundaries of the picture plane, though the visual content might extend beyond the picture plane to a neighbouring painting or perhaps into the consciousness of the viewer. This framing of the painting only increases the probability of an extended field, referencing perhaps, the possibilities within human experience. The works can flow on ad infinitum; they are fragments, parts of an unseen whole, presenting moments of manageable focus, clarity and perception.
Jeff’s earlier paintings tended to be large but more recently he has concentrated on smaller works, his reasoning being, that he might be able to cover more ground in terms of facture, knowledge, physical capacity and not least, available time. In his studio, he would set the parameters for the start of a series of paintings by treating the entire painting wall as a grid system wherein multiple small works could be positioned and painted. In their proximity to each other, each painted panel would act as a catalyst for its neighbouring panels and essentially enable a cross-fertilisation of ideas between paintings via either empathic or challenging interaction – a tiny example of the innate intelligence embedded in his painting practice.
Perhaps Jeff says it best himself…
“Painting seems to me to be a medium for active interpretation of what is shown and what is implied. Like other visual experiences in life, they may stimulate a sense in the viewer of calm, awe or even threat. In every aspect of life, we have to read situations and make an appropriate response. We have to be able to use an instinctive awareness of our environment to survive…” Jeff Dellow
Jeff was first elected to The London Group in 2004 and has been a regular exhibitor with the group. He was and is a deeply respected and popular member and we are all saddened that he is no longer with us.
Angela Eames LG, 2024
