A Spirit and a Vision are not, as modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing: they are organised and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.
William Blake (1757–1827)
Sean Jefferson lives near Shoreham, Kent, and the ‘Golden Valley’ much depicted by the landscape painter Samuel Palmer (1805–81). Jefferson’s sense of ‘Britishness’ has been at the core of his work since his earliest exposure at the Portal Gallery, London in the mid-1980s. While living in Cornwall in the early 2000s, Jefferson was mentored by Graham Ovenden (b. 1943), an artist whose work epitomises the British Pastoral tradition and who taught Jefferson the parallels between painting and alchemy.
The artist’s paintings are loaded with references and overtones from literature, legend, fairies and folklore, depicting this sceptered isle bathed in long summer twilight evenings, with old-gold crescent moons suspended in deep violet skies, or vivid and jewel-like in the sun’s mid-summer rays. His paintings exude a sense of Britain’s ancient mysticism: at once absurd and fabulous.
The artist explains how he sets out ‘to unveil a separate, more true vision, where conventional notions of space, time and causality break down and strange forces and interconnections persist in, and run between, specific locations. This vision is populated by totemic animals and vegetation, and with the so called 'Grey Folk', it is at one with the ancient shamanist world view.’