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For the love of Bristol Jayson Lilley’s new exhibition From London to Bristol is a celebration of two relationships: his love affair with a city (guess which one!), and ten years of working with Anna Smithson of Smithson Gallery
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crolling through Jayson Lilley’s website, you’re struck by a number of recurring themes. First, it’s obvious that he’s strongly drawn to urban icons: in his London pieces he’s featured the Oxo Tower, Battersea Power Station and the GPO Tower; in Bristol, it’s often the Suspension Bridge, M Shed, and panoramic harbourside views. Secondly, Jayson clearly loves a sunburst, and a lot of gold leaf, which he often combines with nostalgic tinted collages. Also evident is his love of early20th-century architectural styles, from Art Deco and Bauhaus to post-war Brutalism. There’s often a strong compositional structure and a limited palette in his work; there’s a lot of highly contrasted light and shadow; form and silhouette are defined by clean lines and large areas of flat colour. There are frequent touches of wit, too; in Single Handed Sailor, for example, a giant Lord Nelson pops up from the skyline next to Tower Bridge. West Country born and bred, Jayson worked as a book cover designer before becoming a professional artist. Today, his paintings are represented by galleries worldwide, and his screen prints have been reproduced and published extensively. While many of his prints show classic London views, one other city holds a place in his heart. Over the years, Jayson’s relationship with Bristol, and with Smithson Gallery, has provided a natural inspiration – though, since his first collection, much has changed both in his own style and the city itself. “This new collection of works is really trying to communicate the vibrancy of Bristol,” he
says. “When I come back, I always get a sense of excitement; it feels cosmopolitan and youthful, and I’m trying to capture an element of that in the bright colours and loose pen work that I have introduced into this new collection.” Jayson’s cityscapes have a heightened sense of reality, often with gold leaf skies; yet somehow the views seem utterly familiar, thanks to meticulous prep work.
scale of important buildings by about 20%. It’s about finding the detail of a cityscape, finding the interesting things in a skyline.” Reducing iconic buildings to their simplest forms, while still remaining fully recognisable, is a distinctive technique of Jayson’s; and it’s all in the detail. “It’s about finding what parts of an image symbolise what it is,” he explains. “The details in the buildings are what makes that building; what lines, what windows, what shadow makes that building. It’s simplifying, while picking out exactly what makes it that building.” Today, Jayson says he’s working in a more painterly way. “I have bought some new paint pens to hand-finish my prints, and I am getting looser and freer with the application of the ink. I want my prints to be a bit more like original paintings; they are still editions, but the prints within the edition will be more varied. “The painterly aspect also helps with perspective, and giving the pieces a more 3D feel. The thicker, painted lines are in the foreground and the thinner printed lines are further away. I am screen printing but trying to do everything a screen print isn’t!” His favourite part of the whole process, he says, is the design. “Designing on computers is what I trained for and I still love it. I’m a perfectionist, and the printing is a real challenge; there are so many variables and things that can go wrong beyond the computer. I’m not a printmaker, I’m an artist – printing is just the way of achieving the aesthetic I want.”
“Bristol feels cosmopolitan and youthful, and I’m trying to capture an element of that in this collection”
40 I BRISTOL LIFE I www.mediaclash.co.uk
“I take a panoramic photo of the cityscape or scene, and then recreate that photo by redrawing it in high definition multiple times, so everything is detailed,” he explains. “My panoramas are made up of about 100 shots in order to ensure everything is in focus, and I also increase the
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