A great individualist

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. He studied at Lowestoft and Ipswich Art Schools, and then at Edinburgh College of Art (1941–4), where he was taught by the celebrated landscapist William Gillies. As a young professional artist, Camp gravitated to London, first showing at Helen Lessore’s famous Beaux Arts Gallery in 1959. Among his friends and contemporaries are Patrick George and Anthony Fry, the late Craigie Aitchison and Euan Uglow. Between 1963 and 1988 he taught at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and exercised a benign and sympathetic effect on generations of students who vie to speak well of him. So concerned was he to ensure the continuance of the principles of what he saw as a proper art education that he undertook the mammoth task of enshrining the essence of his approach in two ‘how to do it’ manuals.