Figures

"In Jessop's painting, the landscape is combined with the female figure to form images rich in signification. Jessop's series of 5 x 6 foot and 3 x 4 foot canvases invite us into a pastoral world of forests and streams inhabited by a lone female bather. The figure, an anonymous nude, holds equal space and presence with the landscape that surrounds her. Water, leaves, and trees flicker with quick, bold brushstrokes, and the figure, shaped by the same signature strokes, reflects the blues, browns, oranges, and greens of the forest that encloses her.

Jessop,s larger paintings are bright and light, representing the poplar forests of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Cool blues and greens create shaded arbors, while brown washes and sparks of yellow add warmth. The scenes are lit in brilliant sunlight that filters through the thin cover of leaves. Technically, the light comes from the white underpainting that Jessop does not hesitate to leave bare and visible. Like a watercolourist, he allows the white canvas to shine through layers of thin washes and fleeting brushwork. Barely touching down on the canvas, the more opaque brushstrokes create a movement which, like a memory, is rich but only transitory.

These are contented images, of sun and shade on a warm day beside a cooling stream. The presence of a nude female in the scenes immediately suggests the arcadian subject of the bather. Jessop's representation of this theme, however, does not have the classical magnitude of a Corot. or the coquettish eroticism of a Renoir. Jessop's woman is anonymous; her image sketched as rapidly and indefinably as the the trees, leaves, and stream. She is relaxed and at home in these forests of sun and shade. Sometimes she wears a hat or sun glasses; objects which transport us out of the arcadian dream and into our own time. She is, perhaps, most like a Courbet's ample and ordinary country women in 'Les Baigneuses" who, with obvious ease, carry on with their bathing in a familiar surrounding. Unlike Courbet, however, Jessop seems to avoid the sense of voyeurism that typically pervades the bather genre. Rather, his paintings suggest a privacy and a solitariness that should be left respectfully undisturbed. In "The Wait"(1993), the woman sits deep in thought. Her hands rest in her lap and her feet are in the stream as she looks into the woods before her. Her nudity is insignificant and does not seem to elicit unwanted attention. In fact, it is so inconsequential the she seems clothed in a moment of reverie.

Jessop's pictures are not only paintings of land and figure, but images that make us question how we see. The fleeting, broken, almost abstract method of painting that Jessop employs recalls the visual experimentations of the Impressionists. Colour and light exist out of necessity for each other, yet only temporarily. At the same time, Jessop's active surfaces and large canvases suggest the Abstract Expressionists, and to some degree Willem de Kooning's quickly stroked images. Jessop studied for his MFA at the University of Regina in the 1970's and readily admits to Modernist influences. The Regina Five, as well as the watercolour landscapes of Dorothy Knowles, have played a significant role in his painting style.

Regina Five painters Arthur McKay and Ronald Bloore have a specific influence in Jessop's series of very large mandala paintings. Presented alongside the figurative landscapes, the five- and six- foot diameter mandalas take the vision of the land to an abstract conclusion. Each mandala is based on the female image, the colours of the landscape, and the brushstroke patterns of one of his representational works. Recomposed into concentric circles set on a solid square base, the original elements create a totally new image. Cool, calm colours in one ring are countered by the lively calligraphic energy of the brushstrokes in another. Like a pulsating, living emblem of life, the mandalas seem to symbolize Jessop's studies of light and colour, land and figure, churned and recreated into a visual 'primal soup'. Juxtaposed with their more representational originals, these mandala paintings leave us pondering the origins of life, nature, and our very transitory existence in the world."

Jerry Jessop