Jeffery Camp was born at Oulton Broad, Suffolk. He studied at Ipswich School of Art before moving to Edinburgh College of Art in 1941. He returned to Suffolk in 1944, to paint the bitter East Anglian coastline: "Fishing life was more dangerous that mining". He was awarded several travelling scholarships and from 1963-89 taught at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. By this time he had his first solo show at the Beaux Arts, Gallery (1959), his preoccupations were unmistakable: the possession of a particular landscape, a landscape of horizons and meeting points, where land meets sea, sea meets sky. In 1963 his marriage to a half-Chinese painter, Laetitia Yhap, defined the focus further: the meeting of finite and infinite, limits and limitlessness, as her Chinese features are explored against the precipitous chalk-face on the South Coast of England at Beachy Head, famous both as a beauty and suicide spot. In 1982 Camp brought out a widely acclaimed book Draw, which emphasised his status as a phenomenal draughtsman. "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". Camp was elected a Royal Academician in 1983 and had a major retrospective at the Royal Academy, London in 1988. His more recent work has featured the river life of the Thames as it flows through London.

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