Sean Jefferson is undoubtedly one of the most ‘pure’ and accomplished living fairy painters. 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.
Sean Jefferson lives in the ‘Golden Valley’ in Kent much depicted by the landscape painter Samuel Palmer (1805-81). His sense of ‘Britishness’ has been at the core of his work since his earliest exposure at the Portal Gallery, London in the 1980s. During a spell in Cornwall in the early 2000s, Jefferson was mentored by Graham Ovenden, an artist whose work epiotmises 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, with old-gold crescent moons suspended in deep violet skies, or vivid and jewel-like in the sun’s mid-summer ways. His paintings exude a sense of Britain’s ancient mysticism: at once absurd and fabulous.