Jeff Dellow

In painting I have an approach to open-ended composition with a view to integrating various elements into a pictorial field of development. This gradually allows the identity of the work to emerge. It is itself but relationships may also have implications in my experience. The identity of the work, its light and colour arises out of working with the materiality of the paint, the inferences of this process extends my awareness of form and experience.
Jeff Dellow 2020

In a recent catalogue Visual Stream essay, Matthew Macaulay wrote:

Dellow thinks about painting. He sees a parallel between this playful method and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the actual and virtual. He suggests that the ‘actual’ contains alternative possibilities of how the painting could be developed or improved, these are ‘virtual’ ideas and give way to a ‘re-actualizing’ of a developed state. Dellow engages in finding a way to review composition progress, and finds that “this is often a way of refreshing the intention of the work.” He feels that there are similarities in this imaginative process with Karl Popper’s ideas of the growth of knowledge and the process of ‘becoming’ in the thinking of Deleuze.

There is both form and content here; his observations and experiences are knitted deeply into the fabric of the paintings he makes.


Jeff Dellow is a member of the London Group he has been painting for more than 40 years in London. He studied at St.Martins, Maidstone and Slade followed by the Cheltenham Fellowship. He was appointed as a Principal Lecturer in Fine Art and has curated and exhibited internationally. He was a founding member of Art in Perpetuity Trust and his studio is currently based there.

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