Andrew Lambirth talks to Jeffery Camp about the primacy of drawing in an artist’s practice
More than 20 years ago, when I first interviewed Jeffery Camp, he forbade me to bring a tape recorder as he would find it off-putting. ‘I speak slowly enough for you to write it all down,’ he drawled in measured tones. Although born in Oulton Broad, Suffolk, and spending his early years in East Anglia, Camp has a placeless accent but a memorable delivery: you can indeed jot down most of his obiter dicta if you’re nimble with the stylus. Sitting in his kitchen sipping hot chocolate (he doesn’t have coffee) on a balmy spring day, I begin to make notes, but even this, it seems, is inhibiting to his flow. I shall have to be more surreptitious and scribble his bons mots on my shirt cuff.
Now 87, Jeffery Camp is a Grand Old Man of British painting, but still something of a well-kept secret within the confines of the art world.
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