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Jacqueline Mair's work
Jacqueline works in a variety of media, but mainly on paper. Most of her illustration work is a mix of painting print and collage. The work is usually built up in layers, which gives depth and detail to the finished image.
The following extract about the Italian Series of designs for Roger La Borde is taken from the catalogue of Jacqueline's retrospective exhibition and is written by Les Buckingham, Director of Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth.
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Mair’s reputation as an artist has been considerably enhanced by her association with the publisher Roger La Borde. In 1990 she was commissioned to make a set of five cards and a wrapping paper called The Italian Series, the artwork for which is a tour de force of visual organisation. The vibrant pages of collage with their intense greens, reds and ochres represent the culmination of her achievements to date. All six sheets of hand-made Fabriano paper are painted and collaged with great dexterity. Tissue has been pasted on to form large swathes of gorgeous colour, bold fields interrupted by passages full of superb detail. If collage and detail were not enough to demonstrate Mairs manifestly tactile aesthetic, the collaged photographs themselves are left in their raw state, not cut too close to the outline leaving areas of paper visible. The figures too, such as The Griffin, have been heavily worked with pencil and ink. Nothing is hidden from the viewer. Spatially the series is extremely sophisticated. The floating collage fragments of the border come from all periods of the artists life, and the combination of painting, drawing and prints cut from old architectural manuals animates the edge of each picture in the series. Wherever Mair wants to frame a major motif, these become tiled courtyards (The Griffin), rich carpets or curtains (Still Life). These surfaces are placed in the picture to give maximum impact and dynamic effect. Mair is never afraid to interrupt one gorgeous surface with another, as in the tiled terrace in The Horse with its three separate overlapping patterns. In The Italian Series Mair’s overlaying techniques become kaleidoscopic; it is as if we were travelling through all our memories of Italy at once, glimpsing light through an arcade, silhouettes of buildings, domes in the distance. There is a mirroring here of the way we remember what we saw. These are the fragments of memory. The chaotic spread of motifs comes together in the mind’s eye as if the tourist’s camera had snapped a thousand details. This is how we remember what has been seen. On the back of each of the cards is a vignette of symbols and details which counteract the representation of kaleidoscopic vision. These simple but subtle arrangements are very calm and rational. They are ordered, beautifully constructed and extremely satisfying to the eye. The pleasure here is not only visual. The precise antique line drawings remind us of the intellectual rigours that were part of architectural practice in the Renaissance and the manifold influence of classical architecture. Mair’s cultural tourists always carry a Baedeker or Pevsner on their travels. Here are also the physical pleasures of eating and drinking, Cubist jugs filled with wine and bowls laden with figs and other fruit. And it may not be too wistful to implicate Cupid in The Face, with its Renaissance virgin and floral tributes. Les Buckingham 1997 |
