- Artwork Details: 61 x 61cm
- Edition:
- Material description: oil and alkyd resin on board
- Credit line: © the artist
- Theme: Figurative
- Medium: Painting
- Accession number: AC 956
Laetitia Picking Blackcurrants
1967
Camp, Jeffery
Jeffery Camp is a painter whose work often depicts the landscape of the UK, particularly the coast of Southern England. Figures frequently feature in his pictures, sometimes banished to the edges of the picture frame, but more often naked and sometimes floating above wellknown landmarks, from Venice to Beachy Head. The latter, steep chalk cliffs near Hastings in Sussex where Camp lives and works, are a recurring theme in his work, representing beauty and mortality, as both a natural wonder and a notorious suicide spot. Camp regularly experiments with the scale and framing of his works and the alignment of the picture frame, creating small ovoid and diamond-shaped pictures alongside large asymmetrical canvases. The painting Laetitia Picking Blackcurrants is characteristic of these strands, featuring a bent figure in a landscape, framed by a triangle and then the round form of the canvas. The figure in the painting is his then-wife, the painter Laetitia Yhap, picking blackcurrants naked in an East Anglian garden. As with much of Camp’s practice, the image contrasts what he sees as the ‘classical’ elements of his work (geometric forms and accomplished draftsmanship) and the ‘lurid, which is more like dream’, evident here in the pastoral and erotic resonance of the figure in the garden.