Jeremy Annear

Jeremy Annear is a British Abstract Artist, born in Exeter, UK in 1949.

His family holidays were spent in Cornwall where he met and was influenced by artists and the vibrant and influential modernist arts community of West Penwith in the 1950/60s. From an early age he was determined to be an artist. In the mid sixties he went to Exeter College of Art, it was at this time that he exhibited his first abstract paintings. Whilst raising a young family, he taught art alongside making his own work. In the mid 1980s his work began to flourish and early signs of an assured 'language' of painting began to form, he also moved to Cornwall to paint full-time.

Since these early days Jeremy has exhibited widely and regularly in solo and mixed shows in the UK and abroad. During this time, and for a decade or so, Jeremy was fully engaged in the cooperative community life of artists. He was an active committee member of the historic Newlyn and Penwith Society of Artists (1989-93) and sat on the Management Committee of the Newlyn Orion Gallery.

He formed the Cobalt Group (1994) with contemporary artists Ralph Freeman, Roy Walker, Carole McDowel, Russ Hedges and occasionally invited artists to work cooperatively and experimentally. He was also a member of Group10 (1999) which was started by the legendary Bob Devereux of the Salt House Gallery, St Ives.

"The viewer engaging with Annear's work realises at once that here is an artist who is not merely holding up a mirror to the world, but offering a very individual interpretation of it. Annear's is a language of signs, signs which refer to things which exist in the world, not least as embodied meanings. Thus, to put it as its simplest, a straight or meandering painted line suggests a pathway, while a closed oval or circle suggests an egg... This is how the artist maintains our interest in his work; he doesn't give up all his secrets in one hit, but requires that you return for repeated encounters. This is art you cannot surf or skim, but which gets better on prolonged viewing. Like all art of any real or lasting value, it is not instant."

- Andrew Lambirth 'Encounters with Beauty', February 2013