| Thirty
six years ago, two young British painters were exploring south-west
France when their camper van broke down in the village of St Martin
de Vers. The van being decrepit beyond repair, they were stranded,
however the local Mayor, on learning that they were painters, at
once offered them an apartment in the Mairie. They have been in
the Lot ever since, where their success as artists eventually enabled
them to buy a charming house in the riverside town of Vers.
From this house, with its bohemian garden where flowers scramble
over one another in a benevolent rampage, Jeffery and Sally Stride
have over the years produced a body of work which has brought them
international recognition. Their paintings hang in the Elysee Palace,
10 Downing Street and in private collections throughout Europe
and North America. They have exhibited jointly and separately in
major galleries in Paris, New York, London, Geneva, Gstaad and
Toronto.
Jeffery is best known for his studies of the landscapes of south-west
France. He has a particular love for his home region of the Lot,
its green river sliding in great loops between limestone bluffs
that hide in their caves paintings made 30,000 years ago by unknown
geniuses of the palaeolithic. In these valleys light and colours
are constantly changing and Jeffery’s mastery of hue, intensity
and brushwork lead the eye on a dance around the canvas, subtly
evoking the life that flows through apparently empty volumes of
space. His paintings glow, appear to move. Look out for his series
of seascapes made at Port Vendres where the Pyrenees fall into
the Mediterranean.
Sally
prefers to work, as she says, ‘with the particular’.
To stand before the great ten-foot wide canvas of her garden in
Vers is to be plunged into the silent struggle of plants. You have
almost to fight your way out again. Her pictures, which are airy
yet powerfully physical, characterised by exuberant strokes of
brush and crayon and use of a vivid palette, seek to recreate the
experience of being and seeing in special places. These may be,
as in the pictures she has chosen for this exhibition, rooms in
her house, a pond from which blue lilies spring, or a pile of rocks
left by some unsuspecting ouvrier on the bank of the Lot.
Jeffery
and Sally’s
youngest daughter Eleanor was born in France. Early portraits
by her parents invariably show her engrossed in modelling figures
from plasticine or the red wax that surrounds certain cheeses.
Her passion for sculpture led her from art school in England
to the Institute Nationale des Arts in Bamako, Mali and thence
to the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, Italy where she studied
for five years. Then the Greek National Academy invited her to
spend a year in Athens as an Erasmus Scholar. She was awarded
her MFA in 2008 after a further two years study as a scholarship
student at the New York Studio School.
Impressed
with the power and drama of Eleanor’s work, I
asked her to make a sculpture of Animal, the four-footed youth
who is the hero of my novel “Animal’s
People”.
The statue is alive, I swear it talks to me.
Like her parents, Eleanor has a passion for making art out of
the everyday life that surrounds her. A prodigious series of bas-reliefs
and small sculptures captures the noise and bustle, even the smells
of the New York metro. A new series shows the quiet concentration
of visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from which she was
eventually sacked for drawing on the job and asking for time off
for this show.
Indra Sinha
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