JENNY WHEATLEY PAGE

Jenny Wheatley is a leading member of both the New English Art Club and the Royal Water-Colour Society. One of the most distinctive of watercolourists, she produces equally fine work in oil and mixed media. Her work is often characterised by a variety of strong coloured pattern worked over the entire surface with sophisticated and playful effect. Apparently undermining or subverting traditional Western notions of perspective and space, this approach has been most sympathetically applied to the cultures of the Orient, such as the Pacific and India, and to the exotic boundaries of Europe, particularly Cyprus and Venice. Jenny compares the act of painting to a process of nature which transforms and overwhelms, such as drifting off into water on the richness of a tropical rainforest. Such a comparison reconciles any contradiction Jenny has found between painting as a mode of representation or painting as an arrangement of colour and sensuous materials. Painting is a compulsion for Jenny Wheatley, an activity as necessary as eating or sleeping. She thrives on intuition and practice rather than on intellect and theory - 'go ahead, select out, and get on with it' is her cri de coeur. Believing that all experience is educative, she is willing to learn by her mistakes and has been happy to pass her accumulated knowledge on to others in the concentrated atmosphere of workshop and summer school.