Other than Words: A Sense of Release in the Presence of Art

Clare Hall is delighted to host Other than Words: A Sense of Release in the Presence of Art, a new exhibition of recent paintings by Jerry Scott. The exhibition will be open for public viewing Monday to Friday, 9am to 4pm.

Introduction by Jerry Scott, the artist

I was brought up about half a mile from Clare Hall and went past Herschel Road every day on my way to school. My father was a classical philosopher and for many years Senior Tutor at Magdalene so the university was the backdrop to my childhood. I moved to North Yorkshire forty years ago, surrounded by fields, woodland, ancient wetland and our garden in which there are wallflowers roses and dahlias.

My earliest conscious memories are all to do with colour. As a very small child I would gather colourful things that caught my eye in order to revel in them: shelled horse chestnuts, violets, primroses, cowslips, fallen fuchsia blossoms to name just a few. It didn’t take me long to make full use of the crayons and coloured pencils readily available to most children. I would colour anything I could, including the white margins of books and the wall next to my bed.

I was fascinated by the many pictures in my childhood home: a gorgeous flower painting over the mantlepiece in my parents’ bedroom, my uncle’s pale, understated watercolours, a stormy, grey landscape my godfather painted. Long before the internet I gleefully leafed through heavily illustrated books about painters: Matisse, van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Picasso. These days, the web vastly extends these horizons and I post photographs of paintings that catch my eye daily on Instagram. Even so, this has never diminished the thrill of first seeing a painting face to face.

As I grew up it seemed inevitable that I would want to make my own paintings as the ultimate way of revelling in colour. The paintings in this exhibition are an expression of that desire, allowing colour, texture and form to arise out of the joyful act of painting. At the outset there is no preconceived image in the mind’s eye and the structural sense arises out of the process as the paint accumulates. Many different interactions of colour and texture evolve and the picture only settles into a fixed state as it reaches its conclusion, often after weeks, months or longer.

George Braque captures the essence of the process when he writes ‘The starting point of a picture for any painter is a matter of colour and form … I believe that the poetry of art – if that is what one may call it – is a matter of animating these forms and colours’.

Hans Hofmann expresses it like this ‘ … Like the picture surface, colour has an inherent life of its own. A picture comes into existence of the interplay of this dual life. In the act of predominance and assimilation, colours love or hate each other, thereby helping to make the creative intention of the artist possible’.

Finally Henry Vaughan, in this verse from his great poem Regeneration, expresses in words some of the feeling I seek to share in my paintings:

The unthrift sun shot vital gold,

A thousand pieces,

And heaven its azure did unfold,

Checkered with snowy fleeces;

The air was all in spice,

And every bush

A garland wore; thus fed my eyes,

But all the ear lay hush.

Useful information

• Accessibility details: full step-free access, accessible toilet, lift. For accessibility queries, please email our Porters.
• Queries can be directed to Fiona Blake, Secretary of Clare Hall Art Committee.
• Discover more about art at Clare Hall via this page.