Jill Bray retrospective as part of Petworth Festival

The exhibition at Kevis House, Lombard Street, Petworth presents 50 paintings, collagraphic prints and collages by painter and printmaker Jill (b 1936), created over the past four decades.

Jill has exhibited in numerous shows in the UK and overseas, was a member of Printmakers Council and has work in several public collections.

Yet she has remained overlooked compared to some of her contemporaries working in a similar vein, the gallery says. They hope this major retrospective exhibition will redress the situation (Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm).

Gillian Clarke, biographer and art historian, former visiting professor and guest curator, the Otter Collection, University of Chichester, said: “Painter and printmaker Jill Bray has over the past four decades created an extensive and unique body of work inspired by her abiding interest in the landscape. In particular she has been fascinated and challenged by the marks made upon it by man and also with the edges of the land and landmass. It is both abstract and referential, her layering of marks mirroring the archaeology of ancient sites and traces of land usage that remain in the landscape.

“Throughout her artistic career Bray has continued to develop her ideas as signalled in her early work exploring her abiding interest in the textures and colours created by collagraphic means and actual collages of her original prints.

“Skillfully manipulating carborundum and ink to suggest man’s marks on the land, including the scar left by the cutting of the M3 through Twyford Down, near Winchester in the late 1980s-1990s. This scar and wound as she saw it and the anger she felt at the loss of this unique environment and the eventual sealing up of the surface with miles of tarmac strongly influenced her subsequent work including her expressive Twyford Down Series of collagraphic prints.”