Magical ruralism | Sean Jefferson at David Messum Fine Art

Bottled Moonlight, A Ruralist Enigma, oil on board, 24 x 30 cm, courtesy Messum’s

In April 1976, Sean Jefferson, a 19-year-old microbiology graduate with an interest in the occult, psychedelia and spiritualism, and a passion for the prog-rock album cover designs of Roger Dean, watched a TV news obituary for Max Ernst.

He recognised common ground – Ernst’s visions resembled psychic perceptions revealed to him during seances – and he soon paid a visit to the Tate Gallery to view Salvador Dali’s 1937 work Metamorphosis of Narcissus to further explore the surrealist genre. This experience persuaded him that he should become an oil painter, despite having had no art training, beyond producing intricate drawings of biological specimens during his science studies.

Jefferson worked hard on developing his technique, while researching painters who shared similar philosophies and interests to his own: 19th-century visionaries William Blake and Samuel Palmer; Victorian fairy painter Richard Dadd; symbolist George Frederic Watts; the (early-era) pre-Raphaelites, among many others. He developed a style based on ‘automatic drawing’, creating mystical worlds from his well-informed imagination, crowded (occasionally, perhaps, overcrowded?) with figures inspired by Celtic folklore and medieval mythology, largely in bucolic, sylvan settings.

There’s no evidence of the 21st century in these works, and precious little, if any, of the 20th, either. Each painting demands a careful reading, though few viewers will be able to decipher all the folkloric and spiritual symbols. Unless, of course, Jefferson is there to take you through them, as he was at David Messum Fine Art St James last Wednesday, for the private view of his second show at the friendly London gallery (the first being in 2020).

This exhibition included twelve small frames interpreting the 18th-century Christmas carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas, which, on view in the gallery window from the street, were immediately bought by a collector and have already been whisked off to adorn their walls in time for the festive season. No matter, there’s plenty more to see on the two floors of David Messum Fine Art Bury Street premises, with scores of Jefferson’s works, many of them produced in the last twelve months. It’s a feast of fairies, sprites, jesters, druids, winged dogs, ominous ravens, runic symbols, gnarly trees, medicinal herbs and slivers of moon in yellow skies. He’s extremely fond of stripy trousers, too. The pervading mood music is Midsummer Night’s Dream, with anglicised hints of Hieronymus Bosch.

Jefferson was brought up in Bexleyheath on the outskirts of London, but has gravitated to rural settings more sympathetic to his style. He has in recent years returned to his native Kent, to a village near Shoreham: Samuel Palmer country. Before that he lived in Cornwall, becoming involved in a revival of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, initiated in the 1980s by Peter Blake and Graham Ovenden, among others. It was Ovenden who taught him to achieve the luminous quality that so brings his paintings to life.

‘Bottled Moonlight’, Jefferson writes in the Messum’s catalogue, of the painting that illustrates this piece, ‘recalls the mood of those years… The Ruralists existed in the fading light of 1960s Psychedelia with its undercurrents of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Victorian Nonsense and pastoral alternative living, not forgetting, though, that their musical influence was very much Elgar’. A very pre-modern, very English style of magical realism, then: magical ruralism, perhaps?

Sean Jefferson: The Twelve Days of Christmas and Other Works runs at David Messum Fine Art St James until December 22.