Collection: Jeni Calvert
Jeni Calvert is a British contemporary painter from the North of England, she has a BA Hons in Creative Arts and has spent nearly 40 years in the creative and fine art business. She is a recent graduate of the Newlyn School of Art Mentoring Programme where she attended in 2019 in order the re-evaluate her work within the context of current contemporary practice.
Calvert’s work is continually developing as she evolves both her ideas and practise, motivated by her humanist and environmental background the work has evolved from emotive representations of consequences of war and climate change to imagery that reflects our inherent reflex to look away from apocalyptic catastrophe and distract ourselves with beauty. She reflects her own fear for the future as though turning up the volume of beauty, surface and colour to drown out the darkness and symbolises the tightrope walk of humanity through the fragility of flowers.
Whilst keeping themes of historic symbolism associated with traditional floral painting, her new work subverts the floral exploring how flowers can be manipulated and distorted away from their idealised form. She disrupts perfection to reflect the increasingly unstable global turmoil aiming to produce an emotional response whilst still creating an arrestingly beautiful image. Calvert likes the painting process to be challenging and uses multiple dynamic layers of acrylic and oil combining the jeopardy of abstraction with closely observed realism