STILL LIFE THROUGH THE WINDOW
An unmissable creative workshop with beloved British artist Jacqui Mair
8th - 14th June 2022
Les Soeurs Anglaises, Dordogne, France
“Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.”
Jacqui Mair has spent the last 35 years balancing her life between the world of Fine Art and Illustration whilst teaching all over the world.
After studying at the Royal College of Art in London she realised her love of paper and collage through print. Travel has been paramount and influenced many of her commissions and exhibitions throughout her career. She now lives and works from her studio on the south coast of England.
About Les Soeurs Anglaises, the workshop hosts and venue
Les Soeurs Anglaises opened their beautiful Maison de Maitre for the first workshop in 2007, offering creative residential workshops in the Aquitaine in South West France. Since those early years, they have hosted many celebrated artists, crafters and performers such as Janet Bolton, Roger McGough, Robert Race, Julie Arkell, Patricia Roberts, Silvan Zingg, Marion Foales, Rosalind Wyatt, Åsa Sōderman and Lori Seibert offering the perfect mix of traditional and cutting-edge accommodation, heartfelt hospitality, delicious cuisine and a huge, inside/outside, light-filled studio space to which participants return year after year.
In this gloriously safe environment, everybody is free to shed the stresses of everyday life and concentrate on discovering (or re-discovering) their creativity - a highly enriching opportunity to learn new skills, make memories and form friendships that will last a lifetime.
Be quick as only a small number of places remain for this wonderful creative workshop!
We are HUGE fans of Jacqui Mair and it is a treat to delve a little into her story.
In conversation with Jacqui Mair
Jacqui: I am a child of the 1950’s - the land of Mad Men - I have an identical twin and my happiest memories were of living in two small caravans joined by a wooden walkway. Five children who were all rather wild, our household was resourceful, messy, a little chaotic, and we were never without crayons and paints.
My mother had creative talent in her knitting needles and my father made mad sculptures and would have liked to have been a graphic designer. Looking back, games and laughter did feature in times of great stress when money was short. My parents were very very young and looking back I am not sure how they managed.
Our Dad instilled in us the love of a good party and we learned never to lose the art of silly. I spent a short time in a children’s home and it has had a lasting impact on me. When your clothes are communal and the space is sparse, the need to live with warmth in a beautiful space with objects and clothes that are mine is really important.
As a family we never went anywhere much, holidays didn’t seem to feature, there were always too many of us, I always dreamed of magic carpets which would take me to lands far away, the exotic was only gazed at in the photographs of encyclopaedias. I knew I wanted to go and study art and would send off for prospectus for art schools from the age of twelve.
My passion for drawing never dissipated and I went on to study Fine Art and ultimately printmaking. I was one of the first students who benefited from the Erasmus scheme to study abroad for three months. I was catapulted into Marseille with three huge suitcases and it really changed my life.
My earliest memories of creativity
We always had paints and paper and crayons in our house, I remember getting a stationary set for Christmas when I was about five years old, it came with pretend stamps for thank you letters. I loved everything about it. At school we had craft afternoons on a Wednesday, I can be transported quite easily to that place by the smell of the shocking pink powder paint. There was something exhilarating about the mixing of colours and making something from nothing.
“I went to a clairvoyant during the hottest summer of 1976 who saw me smoothing papers, ‘’you will always be smoothing papers” I don’t think I have stopped.”
My Creative Process
I think my major love is still paper and I am at my happiest with a very sharp pair of scissors and a glue pot, cutting and pasting. Printing papers and painting and creating with them. I am happy either being commissioned to make objects for clients or spending time creating for myself.
My sketchbooks are my best place I wish I could replicate the pages, they are starting points for the final pieces, I am constantly afraid to begin, the sketchbook offers the private safe space, the page that allows me to be myself make mistakes try out ideas, to write to tell myself off, they are the jumping-off point and the work begins.
I make my own papers, either paste papers with cornflour and water or I print papers with a gelli plate or a piece of glass. At home, I have so many suitcases bursting with old papers, ledgers, and ephemera. As I have developed my collages I prefer the papers now to be mine. I realise I am painting more textures on the papers which have pushed the most recent pieces in a new direction. I am building shapes, constructing images in isolation and then assembling the pieces with these, it gives me licence to move shapes around and test the composition.
I do photograph the pieces to record where each piece sits and when I am happy I will stick them down. I have continual moments of self doubt, sometimes it is so huge that I wonder why I put myself through such anxiety. It is ridiculous but I am my own worst critic and I am striving always for the next piece which will be better. It may take me two years to realise that the work is good.
Who do you have in mind when you sit down to create your work?
Jacqui: I make pieces ultimately for me. I have the utmost need to make, I know I feel physically uncomfortable and low if I spend time away from the making, I need to be drawing, I need to spend time just being me in my studio. I hope there are other people who share the same enthusiasm I have for the surfaces, the subject matter and the colours.
What informs and inspires your work more generally?
Jacqui: I visit exhibitions regularly I am particularly in love with Pallant House in Chichester UK which holds many old favourite paintings, I can visit it over and over again, it’s like going home to a favourite Georgian house every time I visit.
Our National Trust is a great source of inspiration, and allows us to spy into other people’s worlds and experience how life was - especially in the gardens. My own home is full of stuff, I love my house, it’s a repository of objects and I am the custodian, I am the curator if you will, who moves the stuff around and I can regularly set up little scenarios which become visual starting points.
I can spend hours moving and shifting bits and pieces making three-dimensional paintings. I am slightly addicted to flea markets, junk shops and books which are important to be able to dip into. As a student, I was next door to the V&A in London and could happily spend hours drawing in the ceramics section on the top floor.
I am also inspired by teaching and what students can offer me and how they make me think ‘sideways’, it’s a reward beyond all measure to see people who come to workshops believing they have no talent and go away with belief in their own creativity.
“I try and inspire everyone not to lose the art of curiosity, if you don’t poke around, keep uncovering what might excite you, learn always from others life is not as rich.”
What is the best advice that you have been given?
Jacqui: “If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door”.
My brother Andrew Mair has always been a great sounding board, he always manages to guide me towards what is right in life. I have sought guidance on jobs and he always says, “when it’s not fun anymore think again”.
My friend Les Buckingham would always say, “Just do it Jacqui”, he is an old dear friend (and former director of Aspex Gallery), and he could always spot my fear of making work. I repeat his words often when I am attempting to move out of the safety of the sketchbook.
What books, articles, or readings are on your nightstand right now?
I am reading Stolen Focus: Why you can’t pay attention by Johann Hari. I wanted to figure out why my concentration is so poor these days and it’s not just the pandemic.
I’m also really enjoying the podcast ‘How to Fail’ with Elizabeth Day, where she celebrates (with her interviewees) the things that haven’t gone right and what surprises that might bring.
I’m also listening to ‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf on BBC Radio 4 read by Sian Thomas. I have tried to read this book so many times - and it is a gift to have it read so beautifully and it makes so much more sense to me read aloud.
