Jeffery Camp obituary
English painter inspired by the landscape of the south coast, and in particular the drama of Beachy Head
In a world where artists can be judged as much by their celebrity as by their work, Jeffery Camp, who has died aged 96, was reliably unconventional in both aspects. While highly regarded by his peers, Camp seemed undesirous of becoming a household name, and approached life entirely as an artist and a teacher of art.
It was the English coastal landscape, from his childhood home of Lowestoft, Suffolk, to East Sussex in the 1960s through to the 80s, that provided the most fertile source of subject matter for Camp, and the latter was where he produced his best work. His wife during that time, the artist Laetitia Yhap, was also an important presence, both as inspiration and influence.
After the couple moved to Hastings, Camp discovered nearby Beachy Head, and, attracted by its resilience, painted it repeatedly. When asked why, in 2010, Camp said: “It is a spectacular open space, dramatic and high for a person born in flat lands.”
In Beachy Head, Spectacular Drop (1972), the couple are depicted on a circular canvas between a vertiginous rock and a hard place far below. Yhap looks askance toward the sea, half-smiling in the light; Camp is hidden in her shadow, figuratively and metaphorically, his fist held against his mouth. The abstract border in which the two of them nestle also contains them in segmented, horizontal gradations of inspiring blues, left, and contrasting, depressive blue-blacks, on the right.
Sprung Figure (1981), shows Yhap naked and bent over backwards, set against deep waters, one eye directed laser-like towards Camp’s outsized head. To the viewer, the situation in which the artist has placed his model is an impossible one, yet the inspiration for it was, Camp said, merely an Etruscan door handle.
Camp liked to use unusually shaped canvases as part of the composition of his paintings, saying: “My pictures are asymmetrical. The odd shapes more easily contain a variety of thoughts.” The small but brilliant Laetitia and a Cornish Tin Mine (1967), with its vivid colour and stylised composition, says much about Camp’s ability to innovate, and more vibrantly than do his later works, which are defined by a failure of development.
His painting style was diffident – arid and scratching at the surface while alluding to depths that remained unexplored. He had an economy with paint that was pushed and shoved sparingly, dry from the tube, leaving areas of raw canvas that form an important part of the painted surface.
The art historian and curator Sir Norman Rosenthal, a supporter of Camp and his work after meeting him through “the louche circle of Derek Jarman” called him a “Roger Fry-ish visionary” (after the English painter and member of the Bloomsbury group). The artist John Craxton described his contemporary as a “rare poetic painter of delight whose radiant visions never cease to amaze and give pleasure”.
A lecturer at the Slade School of Art from 1963 to 1988, Camp also wrote the instructional books Draw (1981) and Paint (1996). In Draw, Camp observed: “Drawing can open the door and raise that useful extra eyelid which, like that possessed by certain lizards, is in humans the inhibiting, cribbed, confining, narrow-browed, vertical thinking curtain eyelid of conformity.” Among his students at the Slade was the writer AA Gill. In a foreword to Camp’s last exhibition in 2016 at the Art Space Gallery in Islington, north London, Gill contrasted his “lugubrious” manner with his inspiring teaching: “In a counter zeitgeist way … he would look at your work and say ‘Have you ever thought how Matisse might do that?’ Or ‘Copy that Raphael. How does he make that stand up?’”
Born in Oulton Broad, Suffolk, Jeffery was the only child of George Camp, an antique dealer, and his wife. He attended Lowestoft and Ipswich schools of art between 1939 and 1940, then Edinburgh College of Art (1941-44) under Sir William Gillies, whose work Camp enduringly admired. On graduation he received an Andrew Grant travelling scholarship, and other bursaries and awards. In 1955 he painted the altarpiece for St Albans Church, Norwich.
His first solo show was at Beaux Arts Gallery, London, from 1959, and he began teaching at Chelsea School of Art the following year, before joining the Slade in 1963. He married Yhap the same year, and they moved to Hastings in 1967.
Subsequent solo shows were held at New Art Centre, London (1968), the South London Gallery (1973) and the Serpentine Gallery (1978).
After he and Yhap separated, Camp moved to Stockwell, south London, in 1982. He was made a Royal Academician in 1984, and had a solo show at the Royal Academy in 1988. In 2010, the RA, in conjunction with Art Space gallery, published Almanac, a collection of 500 images of Camp’s works, including those done on the backs of old envelopes.
He exhibited regularly until the end of his life, including a solo show at Hastings Contemporary in 2013, and his work is represented in public collections such as the Arts Council, British Council and the Tate.
Camp had a vast knowledge of all kinds of literature and classical music as well as art. Similarly, he “watched everything on television” and this was the one item of furniture that never moved in his typically frayed artist’s living room in Stockwell. The whole house was covered in his paintings, all thrown at the walls with banged-in nails. His largest paintings, done in panels such as the 17ft-tall Fling, were also painted upstairs on the party wall divide.
According to Michael Richardson, the director of Art Space, and his dealer and friend for more than a decade, Camp was hard to pin down and would not venture more than “What do you think?” if asked for any comment about his work. Richardson also made films of Camp painting. While his pictures took a long, cautious time in the making, the films don’t show him either as a reluctant or a wholly closed-off subject. He simply appears absorbed.
Jeffery Camp, artist, teacher and writer, born 17 April 1923; died 5 April 2020
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