jeremy Le grice - Artist

1936-2012

Jeremy Le Grice is considered one of Cornwall's foremost landscape painters and he said “ My work is rooted in Cornwall, more particularly along its most westward coastline… I suppose that with my family having been established in the area farming for two hundred years, this was not ever an anonymous or dispassionate place for me.” His use of colour and the delicate merging of disparate elements makes his still life and landscape pieces a joy to own.

He started painting at the age of nine. This activity took precedence over academic studies to the extent that he had learnt to paint in oils and to draw proficiently by the time he left school. His father was killed in the war, while Jeremy was quite young and his childhood had a resulting sense of alienation and deprivation . His commitment to Cornwall was equally strong so that his most relevant work at that time was achieved during holidays from the Slade.

At the beginning of the sixties Jeremy  went to live in seclusion with his young family at St Just, a remote village on the exposed north coast close to Lands End. He painted there throughout that decade, in the process first making his name as an artist. He described himself as having an inbuilt sunny temperament and there is no doubt that this comes through in his work.

A move to the Cotswolds accompanied his subsequent remarriage; he lived there during the seventies , returning to West Cornwall in the early eighties.