Artist Statement
“In my paintings I try to capture the beauty of every day things, building on the Realist painting tradition. I also try to use my art to explore difficult areas of life, looking at ways of enabling the viewer to find some understanding and solace in things we have to endure.”
jeremyfmulvey@gmail.com
About Me
When I left art school in 1971 having studied painting, I went to Spain as a British Council Travelling Scholar. While living in Madrid, I became fascinated by Spanish realism: Velazquez, above all. I liked the swift, accurate technique with which he, more than any artist before him, caught the way things appear to us.
Among other things, I was intrigued by the way Velazquez toyed with a visual paradox central to representational painting. At the very centre of his ultra-realistic painting Las Meninas the mirror reflects the image of the king and queen in the very place where we as viewers should be standing if the painting was reality. The artist seems to deny the very realism he is at pains to depict.
A frequent visitor the Prado Museum, I became more and more intrigued by the work of Goya. I came to admire his searching and very personal depiction of the society around him and the apocalyptic events he witnessed expressed so powerfully in his etching series: the Caprichos, the Disasters of War and the Proverbs. His example helped me when, via painting, exhibitions and talks, I engaged with a group of like-minded artists in the identity politics of the 1990s and early 2000s. More recently I have engaged with the issue of homelessness and the issue child sexual abuse, looking at ways of raising awareness.
In many ways, my writing, represented by a set of tales entitled, Telling Stories’,covers similar ground to my painting: the relationship between truth and lies, observation and fantasy, formed to grasp something illusive yet compelling. My writing, however, comes from another part of me, separate from my art, signified by the pen name Sawn E. Danson. Sawn exists alongside me, or at least, it feels that way and he has, it must be said, a freer spirit than me.
A little about my career in higher education. I founded and was the first Course Leader of the Fine Art Mixed Media BA (Hons) Degree at Westminster University. In the 1990s I ran a men's group in West London as part of the world-wide Re-evaluation Counselling Community. With Roy Trollope, Head of Fine Art at Central St Martins, I went on to lead the Male Identity Group, curating exhibitions and conferences on the theme of masculinity in London, Barcelona and Cape Town. Before retiring to the South West in 2019, I was Director of Research in Cambridge School of Art at Anglia Ruskin University 2004-20014.
I live in Somerset with my wife and have three children, Sofia, Jess and Sam.
