Review of Sean Jefferson’s exhibition ‘Fairy Phenomena’
Trooping Fairies 2 (Detail)
Showing at Messum’s Fine Art Gallery in Central London is an exhibition that is both an imaginative extravaganza and a remarkable body of work. It is the new solo exhibition by Sean Jefferson, an artist who has honed his credentials over the years, developing his unique, visionary expression of the esoteric forces that can be found within the elements of nature. He is an artist of great independence, though would readily value his time in collaboration with the Ruralist movement in Cornwall, and reaching further back, the distinctly British genre of fairy painting and the much wider arch of the European Symbolists.
The title of the exhibition is ‘Fairy Phenomena’ and the project was to take nineteenth-century eyewitness accounts of fairy sightings and using the A to Z of the alphabet as a frame, to produce twenty-four paintings using his own imaginative interpretation of each sighting. A demanding project in itself, made even more so by his need to research each of the metaphysical entities that he portrays. It is, therefore, not only a visual endeavour but also and academic one and his considerable knowledge of esoteric traditions creates an authentic underpinning for the phantasmagorical imagery.
This is work that above else comes from the imagination. The rural features are there in the background and also intermingled with the figures and objects, but the main features are from the mind of the artist. This is imagination on different levels. There is the idea, such a component in the art of the Symbolists: his thought-out construction of a painting driven by his own interpretation of each particular account of a fairy sighting. But these paintings are also spilling out with the imaginative products of free association, a method used so effectively in psychoanalysis to bring the conscious mind closer to the unconscious (or vice versa). In his highly detailed pictures there are a myriad of objects and creatures, some more human than others, that can only come from a free associative method. To observe one of his larger paintings could fruitfully take up as much time as skimming through a whole exhibition. Whether Jefferson can account for each of his often, tiny details, seems doubtful, since they may well defy the normal definitions. It is in the manner of the unconscious that its products in art are often there to help the viewer to let go of the usual conscious and literal controls. The whole effect is to take the viewer into a world that exists far more in the plain of the esoteric. The influences of Symbolism and Surrealism and the fascination with dream create a more evocative metaphysical atmosphere that takes his fairy painting into a deeper level that is usually found in the genre. I would venture that this is one of the most distinctive and innovative qualities in his work.
It should also be emphasised that Jefferson has a most enjoyable boldness in his use of colour, a very distinctive and recognisable quality which allows his paintings to be picturesque as well as driven by detail and the idea.
The fairy work is also accompanied by a selection of paintings influenced by the psychedelic art of the 1960s.
Seed Dreaming
This counter-culture was, of course, substantially influenced by the use and effects of psychedelic drugs, and it produced a distinctive imagery much of which was confined to illustration and the now very collectible lithographic posters of the time. It is rewarding to see Jefferson’s paintings in this style, and the psychedelia overlaps easily with the metaphysics of the fairy paintings.
The catalogue is magnificent with an excellent foreword by Patrick Duffy followed by Sean Jefferson’s own deeply researched and detailed description of the fairies and their symbolism in each of his paintings. The catalogue will even be of value to those who research these subjects and the reproductions of the paintings are excellent.
The Exhibition: Sean Jefferson – ‘Fairy Phenomena’ – 4th March to the 27th March 2026, at Messum’s gallery. 12 Bury Street, St James’s, London SW1Y 6AB. +44 (0)20 7287 4448.
William Rose, for Talisman Fine Art.