Current Exhibitions

New Paintings

‘I saw that cloud when I was walking the dog’, Jonathan Leaman recalls, ‘..and I held it in my head for five years’. This in itself was quite a feat, how many of us ever remember what a cloud looks like for any period of time at all? To do so, one guesses, would only be possible for a person with an unusual level of interest not so much in nephology – the scientific study of clouds – as in their physiognomy. What you might think of as their personalities.

Leaman retained this bulbous mound of cumulonimbus, fluffy yet somehow ominous like the discharge from a volcano, in his memory. But he did not foresee what was going to happen to it. He had no idea there was going to be a figure ‘suspended in mid-air in front of it’, Nor did Leaman foresee that this floating man would be holding a forest.

The result was the painting entitled Albedo, one of five works he has completed since 2017. Leaman is the absolute opposite of a fast worker. His works evolve slowly from a mixture of sights seen, feelings felt, memories retained and thoughts thought. For example, the cloud seen while he was walking the dog has been joined by a person who, as it happens, is based on the artist himself but he insists is not a self-portrait. He simply uses his own face and body because he finds this the most ‘unconstrained’ way to work.

To the cloud, and the man striding through the sea with greenery in his arms, Leaman has added the idea which is contained in the title: Albedo. In Alchemy, this is the second of four stages which lead to the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone. Albedo – meaning whiteness – comes after nigredo, which is a phase of darkness, chaos and decomposition. In contrast, albedo represents the coming of light and clarity.

It’s not hard to see this process in the picture: the glow, lowdown in the sky, the airy lightness against which the cloud and the man with his arms full of trees are silhouetted. At the bottom, one can see the ‘filth’ of nigredo, or rather, what Leaman calls ‘symbols of filth’ emerging from a grey, foggy miasma at the bottom of the picture.

But does all this recondite information about alchemy matter? Perhaps, ultimately, not very much. Leaman doesn’t think the meaning of a picture is set by the

creator: ‘I don’t believe the artist has any real role apart from having made it. The person who looks at the picture owns the picture as far as I’m concerned. It means whatever the picture will sustain when somebody wants something from it.’

So, evidently, the viewer does not need to be learned in alchemical theory. On the other hand, a copy of a 17th century handbook of alchemy lies on Leaman’s studio floor. The emblems and ideas contained within obviously provided inspiration and also – so to speak – an armature for his imagination.

‘The pictures aren’t based on alchemy, I’m using alchemy to try and get certain states’. The alchemical themes are mingled with an array of other sights,

references and memories. That’s evident from a related painting entitled Sol and Gel. In the middle of this, as Leaman points out, there is ‘a beautiful alchemical tree’, wreathed in wild roses and sprouting oak leaves.

While painting this picture, however, Leaman rediscovered Krazy Kat, the celebrated strip cartoons by George Herriman. In these, ‘Ignatz the mouse shows his disdain for the unrequited love of Krazy by always landing him with a brick on the back of his head’.

This explains the figure on the left, brickbat in hand, and the brick thudding into the top of the tree, though not the wonderfully startled hare on the left with a human hand, the cardboard box lying on the ground, the fungi or the vintage portable radio set.

Krazy Kat is typical of Leaman’s sources only in that it is so unexpected. He draws his imagery from wildly disparate sources. In the current batch of paintings; clouds and plants he sees on walks near his Gloucestershire studio with, to give a selection from a long list; Boucher, Bosch, Botticelli.

However, the things and figures in Leaman’s pictures are there as much for visual reasons than for symbolic ones. ‘I’m less interested in the identity of most things than where they are, how they work.’ It is no surprise that Leaman was fascinated by the exhibition Victorian Fairy Painting which was shown at the Royal Academy in 1998. As Jeremey Maas wrote in the introduction to the catalogue,‘ Fairy painting was close to the centre of the Victorian subconscious’ Pictures by such artists as Richard Dadd mingled meticulous observation with extraordinary fantasy and drastic discrepancies in scale.

Leaman and his friend Paula Rego discussed painting a picture of a multitude of fairies ‘for years’. Rego, like Leaman, was an artist whose imagination was charged by such subjects as nursery rhymes, but with a disturbing contemporary psychological edge. He feels it was Rego’s death in 2022 which finally set him off on painting Our Mercury.

This is a contemporary fairy painting in which a gigantic, naked winged figure, dark against the light sky, is suspended in the air. He is surrounded by a swarm of other flying figures – some Boschian monsters, some naked people, some insects – while more can be seen among the birds and mice in the undergrowth below.

Floating, suspension in the air, are crucial to the two large paintings, Song of Ascents and The Amends. So too is the way people and things stand out against the sky, contre-jour as the French say. Leaman goes out every morning when it’s still dark, ‘to see the light come, to get that light and dark glow.’

This is where his improbable ‘obsession’ with Boucher comes in. Two big pictures by this 18th century painter hang on the stairs at the Wallace Collection. They depict the rising and setting of the sun and are full – just like Leaman’s pictures – of bodies and things such as bits of tree in mid-air with, at the bottom, the sea.

Of course, Leaman has added many other ingredients including vaguely Botticelli-ish angels with big feet, clunks of gothic masonry, a couple of gigantic severed ears, derived from Bosch and, in The Amends, the pointing finger of the figure in the centre of the beach which comes, he realises from the hand of St John in Crucifixions by Cranach and Grunewald.

There’s much more than that, far too much to list – an aerial pie for example (‘pie in the sky’), and the red spotted handkerchief which is a leitmotiv in Leaman’s work, (it contains ‘secrets that are allowed to be bundled up but not necessarily itemised’) and an air-borne monkey.

Overall, both pictures are, he explains, ‘about generation, thinking of the Earth as being somehow vital’. In other words, the manner in which the multifarious stuff that fills the world comes into being (which is also the underlying preoccupation of the alchemical pictures). But, ultimately, the subject is not the most important thing about them. Leaman insists, ‘“Meaning” is not what a picture is about. There’s got to be something else’.

In the case of these new works, like many others he has created, those extra qualities are beauty and mystery. Leaman’s is a unique talent in the contemporary art world. Just as it takes a considerable time to paint his pictures, so you could ponder and enjoy each of them for a long time.

Martin Gayford
Writer and Curator

1954 Born London
1973-1977 Studied at Camberwell School of Art, London
1977-1983 Teaching at Camberwell School of Art

Solo Exhibitions

1994 Paintings 1989-1994, Beaux Arts, London
1996 New Paintings Beaux Arts, London
1998 Take 3, Beaux Arts, London
1999 New Paintings, Beaux Arts, London
2002 New Paintings, Beaux Arts, London
2004 Ziw, that Light, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel
2006 New Paintings, Beaux Arts, London
2011  As Above so Below, Beaux Arts, London
2017  New Paintings, Beaux Arts, London
2024  New Paintings,Beaux Arts, London

Selected Group Exhibitions

1994 Lineart, Ghent, Belgium
1997 Artist’s of Fame and Promise, Beaux Arts, London
1999 Recent Acquisitions (Collection Display), Tate Britain, London
Summer, Beaux Arts, London
Home Life (Collection Display), Tate Britain, London
2001 Summer 2001, Beaux Arts, London

Art Fairs

1992 Art92, The London Contemporary Art Fair (Featured Artist, selected by Paula Rego)
1995-2005 The London Contemporary Art Fair, London 20/21
British Art Fair, The Royal College of Art, London
1996-1997 Art Miami, USA

Collections

Public Collections: The Tate Gallery, London (A Jan Steen Kitchen purchased in 1997)
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (White Fire Dark Fire purchased in 2004)
Private Collections: Belgium, Ireland, Mexico, Switzerland and the UK

Publications and Reviews

New European Artists (Volume 1), Published by Annual Development b.v. and edited by Edward Lucie-Smith.
Beaux Arts catalogues to accompany solo exhibitions with texts by; Rudolph Nassauer, John McEwen, Martin Gayford and Richard Morphet.
Jonathan Leaman, Rudolph Nassauer, Modern Painters, winter 1993.
Stripped Naked in Arcadia, John McEwen, The Sunday Telegraph, February 1994.
Art in Detail, Julia Weiner, Jewish Chronicle, May 1997.
A Star is Born, John McEwen, Art Review, May 1997.
Welcome a Sensational Modern Master, John McEwen, The Sunday Telegraph, May 1997.
In the Big Time, Julia Weiner, Jewish Chronicle, October 1999.
Glorious Mayhem, Laura Gascoigne, What’s On, October 2002.
Jonathan Leaman, Elspeth Moncrieff, The Art Newspaper, November 2002.
Ziw, that Light, with texts by Prof. Mordechai Omer, Director and Chief Curator of Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Mark Gisbourne, Curator and Art Critic, Berlin & Freda Uziyel, Freelance Art Critic. Tel Aviv Museum of Art Catalogue, Israel, 2004.
How Painting Happens, Thames & Hudson, Martin Gayford, 2024