Viva Lewes Issue #120 September 2016

ART
Grant Dejonge
'Explosions of light'
'Red Sunset Looking Towards Scotch Pines'
A good sunset feels like it’s all around you and
above you, and that’s quite hard to get across on
a 2D surface. What I’m trying to capture in each
of my paintings is a transient moment, that quick
explosion of light just before the sunset disappears.
Most of the sunsets I paint are from outside
my back window in Plumpton, looking out over
the South Downs. We’re really fortunate to have
such incredible light here; the flat light in one direction,
the light bouncing up off the sea, and the
rolling Downs in the middle. It’s a very changing
landscape which we sometimes take for granted -
before I moved to Plumpton I had lived in Brighton
for seven years, and I didn’t even know the Downs
were here!
My favourite place to paint is up the road at the
top of Streat Hill. I can drive up there in the car
with my easel very easily, but getting set up at the
top of the hill is like trying to put up a sail in the
wind, with everything blowing around, trying to
hold down the easel with my foot. So most of what
I paint in situ is smaller pieces; for anything bigger
than about 30 x 60, I work from photographs.
I usually get five or six photographs of a sunset
and work from a mixture of different images,
because I don’t like to copy things exactly. Everybody
sees things differently, so one of the challenges
of being a painter is being able to capture what it
is you see and to be able to achieve a dialogue with
your audience and convince them of your vision.
I visited the Frank Auerbach retrospective at
the Tate earlier this year. I’ve always been a huge
fan of his – he lived just down the road from where I
used to live in London and I had painted a lot of the
same buildings as him – but I was still taken aback
by his work, the way you can see his progression
and thought process. He had a way of using zigzags
to express space and dynamism, which inspired me
to start using more geometric shapes in my work.
About a year ago I exhibited my first illuminated
works, which are painted onto light-reflective
Perspex in oil paint. Each piece is set on a lightbox
with a rail of LEDs inside, which alternate between
15 different colours. Getting each piece to look
right is very much a case of trial and error because
certain pigments, like yellow, are weaker than others,
so it can be harder to achieve the colours I’m
looking for. But the way the light diffuses through
the material, creating this beautiful glow, makes it
worth persevering. As told to Rebecca Cunningham
Brighton Art Fair, 23rd-25th September, the Corn
Exchange. brightonartfair.co.uk
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