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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Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

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