It's Only Natural

While most artists of her generation talk – and work – in a language of video, found objects and spatial practice, Jelly Green chooses to quote Constable when explaining her inspiration to paint: “Still, Nature is the fountain’s head, the source from whence all originally must spring – and should an artist continue his practice without referring to nature he must soon form a manner.”

She is only 26, but a consummately assured painter of the old school. And just like her renowned 19th century antecedent, her roots lie in deepest rural Suffolk and her subject matter is the natural world. Green was just 15 when she won a painting prize judged by the acclaimed British artist Maggi Hambling CBE. “Are you serious about painting?” Hambling asked her, and suggested Jelly attended her weekly painting class at Morley College in London, to which people travel from all over the country. A decade on, Green still studies with Hambling (she also had a stint at the Royal Drawing School), and when we speak,she does so from the class’s annual painting trip to the Isle of Wight. “Maggi has a unique way of teaching,” she says. “It’s about training your eyes and your hands.”

It was Green’s engaging portraits of dairy cows (like the Sussex Charolais overleaf) that first caught the art world’s eye. The owner of the Rowley Gallery in Kensington was on holiday in Suffolk and saw one of Green’s cow paintings in a shop window for £50. He asked for her phone number and took her on when she was just 18. Why cows? “Well, my granddad is a dairy farmer. And I like the fact that they’re so curious and characterful, the way they pop their heads up and stare.” The cow paintings have the lush brush strokes and bold, direct gaze of much contemporary human portraiture, which Green has also done quite a bit of. “It’s a very special process,” she says. “Nerve-wracking beforehand, but then you spend all these hours together and you find people really talk and open up.” A little more chatty than the cows, perhaps.

It is landscape, however, to which she returns again and again. Her lightbulb moment came after periods of living in Brighton and London, and feeling estranged from her real source of inspiration – hence the importance to her of that Constable quote. She knew she had to get back to Suffolk and spend time immersed in nature, really absorbing what she saw and felt and translating it into paint. Woodlands are a particular passion and she has recently been painting in Puzzlewood in the Forest of Dean, where JRR Tolkien found his inspiration for Middle-earth in Lord of the Rings. “I love the way the light changes and the mysteriousness. In the summer, the light and richness and in the winter, these big, quiet skeletons.”

She has also spent some time recently in the jungles of Borneo, painting some of the biggest, most ancient trees imaginable, creating artworks that will be shown early next year at an exhibition at Blenheim Palace. But it is to Suffolk and her rural studio there that she always returns. “I’m a country girl,” she says. “I need to be outside with my easel. The light changes, the painting changes. It’s all about looking.”

This article was taken from the Autumn edition of the Goodwood Magazine.