Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, September 9, 2021:Jill Bray, a British painter and printmaker (#1360)

Thursday, September 9, 2021

Artist of the Day, September 9, 2021:Jill Bray, a British painter and printmaker (#1360)

Painter and printmaker Jill Bray (1936) has over the past four decades created an extensive and unique body of work inspired by her abiding interest in the landscape. In particular she has been fascinated and challenged by the marks made upon it by ‘man’ and also with the edges of the land and landmass. It is both abstract and referential, her layering of marks mirroring the archaeology of ancient sites and traces of land usage that remain in the landscape.

Throughout her artistic career Bray has continued to develop her ideas as signalled in her early work exploring her abiding interest in the textures and colours created by collagraphic means and actual collages of her original prints. Skillfully manipulating carborundum and ink to suggest ‘man’s’ marks on the land, including the scar left by the cutting of the M3 through Twyford Down, near Winchester in the late 1980s-1990s. This ‘scar’ and ‘wound’ as she saw it and the anger she felt at the loss of this unique environment and the eventual sealing up of the surface with miles of tarmac strongly influenced her subsequent work including her expressive Twyford Down Series of collagraphic prints.

These paintings were purchased by two remarkable women: Sheila McCririck and College Principal K.M. Elisabeth ‘Betty’ Murray. McCririck, Head of Art, and an influential teacher inspired the young Bray long after she had left Bishop Otter College. Indeed, it was McCririck’s unerring selecting eye that led to the purchase of some of the finest works in the Bishop Otter Art Collection.

Like many women artists of the period Bray had to wrestle with domestic responsibilities and the bringing up of two sons, supported by her husband Ian who encouraged her artistic endeavours. Her creativity found an outlet through teaching the piano to private pupils, but it was only in the mid 1980s following moving to Soberton Towers, in the Meon Valley, Hampshire that she had her own studio. In addition, she could walk out into the countryside from her front door.

Family holidays afforded opportunities to find material and inspiration for her art. The rock formations of Dorset’s Jurassic coast provided much to marvel at. Like John Piper (1903-1992) and Paul Nash (1889-1946) she was drawn to the topography of Dorset’s dramatic shoreline including the Isle of Portland and its centuries-old history of stone quarrying, the remnants of which are marked indelibly on the landscape by abandoned quarries and caves carved out by the cutting of stone. Holidays to the Gower coast and Pembrokeshire (see Pembroke I, oil and sand on canvas) also provided inspiration as did the foreboding and mysterious Black Mountains which greatly intrigued her. Bray’s Welsh Rock (1979) resulted from one such holiday and points to her growing ability to extract the essence and spirit of a place.

In 1979 Bray gained her Diploma in Fine Art from Southampton College of Art. This marked a turning point in her career as she discovered printmaking having been given the run of the print studio in her final year and the chance to experiment with printing from found objects. Bray’s enthusiasm and passion for the medium led to her attending three annual printmaking Summer Schools in the late 1980s run by Michael Honnor (b.1944) at Wilkey’s Moor Print Workshop, attached to a remote farmhouse on the edge of Dartmoor, where she honed her skills in this unique landscape. She also gained much from attending courses with Michael Griffiths (b.1951) in Winchester in 1990. Bray exhibited widely during the 1990s having work accepted for touring shows to Reykjavik, Duisburg, Amsterdam, Aarhus, Bratislava and Moscow. She had success in numerous mixed and open exhibitions, including The Royal West of England Academy, Bristol where she first exhibited in 1983 and where in 1997 she showed the carborundum print Crossing IV. Bray’s work featured in many exhibitions including at the Flowers Gallery; Curwen Gallery; and the Royal Festival Hall in ‘The Art of the Printmaker’. She also had several solo shows, notably ‘Drawings and Collages’ at The Gallery, Nuffield Theatre, Southampton.

As a member of the Printmakers Council, Bray had work accepted for their exhibitions including 'Paintings and Prints' at the Barbican in summer 1993. She was also involved with the group 2D3D South whose members work in a range of disciplines within the visual arts. It was a busy creative period for Bray, her work continued to be well received and influenced by the cliffs and field patterns of southern England, these interests were reflected in both the titles of her increasingly assured work and exhibitions. For example, 'Land Marks', a solo show at The Old Town Hall, Havant; 'Earth Matters' with Carl Danby (b.1938) and Gill Horn (b.1949) at Bedales Gallery near Petersfield in 1994 which included sculpture, drawings, and paintings by the three artists. Bray was by then living close to the ancient site of Winchester Hill, an iron-age fort, and reference to the topography and history of the area was much in evidence in her prints.

Bray on occasion joined Horn to sketch the local landscape but preferred to use her camera to record marks in the landscape and interpret actual experiences, in her studio. She later used her single lens reflex camera to effect taking photographs for inclusion in ‘textures’, a book (unpublished) about textual beauty and what it meant to her. Her photographs are in intent the same as those of her printmaking eschewing the picturesque, and show how she found meaningful textures in not only rock formations and the strata of cliff faces but also in old walls or in the tarmac of a road.

For Bray, who had briefly taught English, actual words and their meaning could be textural and evocative. Alongside her chosen images sit words largely in the form of poetry,

The following decade Bray had little time for her art as she was much occupied caring for her husband Ian following a major stroke in 2000. After Ian’s death in 2010 she was able to spend more time on her art, in particular making collages often incorporating pieces from older work. It was also a way to help her through her grief. She had inherited a powered press from a friend when they had moved to Fareham, which enabled her to print at home. Bray’s work was first shown at Kevis House Gallery, Petworth in 2016 as part of a show by the 2D3D South group, and Kevis House then took her on as a represented artist.

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