Converted chapels can make fine studios – none more so than the “Italianate yellow-painted meeting house” in the far-west of Cornwall hailed by John Betjeman in the book First and Last Loves. Jeremy Annear has lived and worked and perfectly fitted here for many years.

In the enchantment of the Lizard Peninsula where deep greens meets download ochre’s - where light floods and over what seems to be a strand of land strung between two oceans – this spirited and spiritual artist paints in a viewless, noiseless and very orderly white room.

He writes in his notebook: “My studio is silent. The silence is deep and tangible like a cathedral chapel or a museum, a grey light of endeavor and commitment illuminates the space that has witnessed my highest human aspiration and the daily pathway of transcendence.”

A lack of sound – striking a note of amazing contrast in a most gregarious household – is all the more vital since music is “an incredibly powerful force” in the life of this artist. His eclectic taste ranges from jazz to choral and as he works “a kind of music” plays in his head and ultimately reflects in the rhythms and harmonies of his pictures.

Indeed, Annear considers each image on canvas or board or paper to be a movement in the single score, which will be a life-long painting.

Such is his seriousness of purpose and sense of creative progression that, though thinking himself an artist when still a teenager, he first exhibited his pictures in his thirties.

Raised in Devon, amid “a heady mix of culture, creativity, classical music and religion”, he experienced an early artistic epiphany. “I was 13, in 1962, when I made my first seriously considered oil painting and vowed that this would be my life,” he says.

“Our family holidays were spent in Cornwall, at a wonderful coastal hamlet a stone’s throw from where I now live. Regular visits to St Ives exposed me to the edge of the Western rush into a new world of Modernism – beat, protest, jazz, folk, abstraction.” The last proved the most compelling.

“I was deeply affected by St Ives’s abstraction without really knowing anything about it,” he continues. “Of course I now know that I was drawn to all those wonderful St Ives’s artists (Nicholson, Lanyon, Hepworth, Frost, Hilton, Heron). From there I started my long love affair with European Modernism.” Braque is his “painting grandfather” and exposure to the works of Klee and Miro also spurred his artistic evolution. He left the 1981 Picasso’s Picassos shows at the Hayward Gallery in London with the message go to it.

Six years later he gave up teaching and other work distractions to live as an artist. He recalls: “Sadly it coincided with a time of deep family loss and personal trauma. But that also gave me a great sense that I couldn’t mess up on commitment to the disciplines of full-time painting."

In the past 25 years Annear’s pictures have been collected from America to Australia (with Aboriginal art in turn adding another strong influence) and he has also worked in Germany and exhibited widely in Europe. Fully at home in his adopted Cornwall – raising a family and partnering painter Judy Buxton, who works in an adjoining studio – he has described himself as a painter, sculptor and print-maker who rarely finds time to make three-dimensional objects. In fact, he sculpts his pictures - building in relief-like layers to produce ravishing textures, surfaces and edges. He says: “I constantly play at laying paint into paint, wet into wet. I have always wanted to throw lots of paint onto my supports. Part of the deepest satisfaction of painting for me has been to achieve exactly what I want with the paint. This skill develops over time after many muddles and messes. My compulsion to paint stems from an obsessive, neurotic need to do it.”

“My crafting process of practiced and automatic movement and gesture can be akin to a right-handed painter left handling the viscous mass of paint to form it into something. That allows sufficient struggle to free oneself into a deeper, broader place.”

His painting generally starts with an earth colour covering the canvas. He then draws into this wet ground - likening the drawing to a ritual dance. And that’s a great analogy because, while many have detected the outlines of still-lives and seascapes, a dynamic momentum is achieved with curved and angular shapes, which might be, stylised bodies. This is the art of the sensual and the celebratory, not the austere and ascetic.

He adds of his painterly dance: “It has rules and motifs but within these its form changes each time. Part of the ritual is never to repeat the pattern and even if one tries, it distorts and develops into something else like a Chinese whisper.”

“Through the ritual release of the dance the mind opens a window into a deeper space and the way becomes clear. This way presents obstacles, challenges and choices that become the journey through which a painting is made.

“To be at one (body, soul, mind) in the process is the silent beat of the music. In the acts of layering - carving and incising, adding and obliterating, reinforcing and changing - the linear often gives way to shape and space, becoming boundary rather than path and sometimes both. For instance a black line giving way to an ochre shape and leaving its traces bleeding from the edge might invite that edge to be met by a violet tinted umber field.”

Such sculptural physicality also has philosophical, psychological and spiritual layers. And it is this chemistry that produces the alchemy of Jeremy Annear’s art.

Ian Collins, September 2012

Ian Collins is an art writer and curator whose recent books include monographs on the painters John McLean and John Craxton