Stories of Success: Oliver Jeffers

 As he describes his career to date, Oliver explains how he began to understand his own art, and began to use painting and drawing as a way of exploring the world around him. “When I was looking back at early paintings of mine, they were suggesting a story. Maybe they were a beginning, middle or end,” he says. “You might be looking at something that is full of energy and about to happen, or the aftermath of an event. You are connecting the dots in your head. You can paint kinetic energy on a 2D surface that has momentum or movement. I thought that was really interesting because the viewer can decide where it goes in their head.”

It’s these fragments of stories that have helped Oliver develop his career along two parallel paths. He firmly believes that a successful story lies in its structure – there must be a beginning, a middle and an end, but the extent to which you supply all the ingredients depends on what you are trying to achieve. “It started when I was making these individual images of a physical impossibility. Which was trying to capture something as intangible as a star. I thought these are series of really interesting images that hint at bits of a story. At one point it occurred to me the images sit better together than alone, and that I was making a book,” he explains.

That book was How to Catch A Star and the pursuit of the impossible, the drive to try and make sense of this sometimes nonsensical world, is apparent in his artwork. “There was a paradigm shift for me. My wife went to university to study engineering. When we first met and were discussing our university experiences she was just really bemused by the fact there is no right or wrong answer at art school. ‘Who says your work is right?’ she asked. ‘It’s all subjective, it’s all about the bullshit you come up with to back it up. There is no right or wrong answer.’ It just didn’t make sense to her,” he says, chuckling. “I realised there are two equally valid, but entirely opposing ways of viewing the world. Logic or emotion. Science or art. I started going off on a tangent to see if you could look at one aspect of life using both filters at the same time.”

Inspired by the perceived tension between unbridled creativity and art, Oliver started to place mathematical equations into his paintings, effectively telling a story or conveying an idea using emotion and logic on the same canvas. “I decided to make a still life painting of something that is very typical of Renaissance-style figurative painting. A picture that people would say effectively communicates emotion. Then, for logic, I thought let’s use a mathematical equation – because gestural brush strokes on a painting mixed with cold, clinical, precise numbers and mathematical symbols are the absolute opposite of each other,” he explains. “Rather than choosing something random, I decided to use an equation that would fit somewhat. Except, I don’t know anything about maths, I failed maths at school, I was an illogical thinker. So I went through an old set of encyclopedias that I had. I looked under light, and found an equation that represents light then chose an equation about the refraction of light going through glass.”

 

The painting was subsequently bought by a quantum physicist who assumed the painting was about Bell’s string theory. Oliver met with the buyer and his foray into philosophy and mathematics stepped up a notch. “The process of creating is helping me to understand. Otherwise the artworks wouldn’t be about questions, they would be about answers. I enjoy making objects that aesthetically pleasing – it’s not exactly the most efficient way of finding out things, but it’s enjoyable.” Ultimately, this understanding led to Oliver’s most ambitious and intriguing works to date: his dipped paintings.