Born in Sweden, Jeannette Hayes’ childhood was spent living in several different European countries before her move to the UK to train at Kingston University. She is President of The Pastel Society and has exhibited with them regularly at the Mall Galleries in London. An award-winning artist, she won the Unison Pastel Materials Award in 2000 and 2002, and the Deborah Manifold Memorial Award in 2005 and 2008.
A love of the exquisiteness and drama of the natural world conveys itself in the drawn marks, gestures and accents of colour. Colour plays a central role - titles often contain a colour: Spring Green, Orange Mousa, or Blue Snowing - setting an ambient mood to the recording of her experience of a place. This gives the works a poetic quality that is in keeping with the way they were conceived.
A work often starts in a figurative way, becoming more abstract as its scope and meaning are defined. Pressure of mark has tremendous range to it, at times heavily wrought and indicative of solidity and mass in the natural landscape, at other times sensitively diffuse and expressive of air or vapour. Pastel, a favoured medium, allows direct sensitivity of touch.
The structural composition holds everything in concert; the whole is unified, as if the variations in weight and pressure have come about in the same series of movements. Even the lines so often drawn to echo the edge of the picture emphasise completeness. In animated paintings of great vitality, where superfluous detail is omitted in favour of expression, there emerges a moving vision of the landscape, full of life and sound.
Hayes has an impressive exhibiting profile in galleries in London and across the UK. Recently she has exhibited at the Nadia Waterfield Fine Art Gallery, Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Thompson’s Gallery, Lime Tree Gallery and the Royal West of England’s Annual Exhibition in Bristol.
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Sold to benefit Marie Curie.
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