Tess Jaray
St. Stephen's Way, 1964
Following her studies at St Martin’s School of Art (1954–57), and the Slade School of Fine Art (1957–60), Tess Jaray travelled to Italy and France, where she drew influence from Renaissance architecture. Jaray’s paintings of the 1960s are often suggestive of an interior, with simple lines, repeated forms and flat zones of colour employed to delineate space, structure and scale. As the artist explains: ‘St Stephen’s Way (1964) was titled after the Cathedral in Vienna, which I saw for the first time in 1957, when I was 19 and just before I went to the Slade. The colour makes some reference to the tiling of the roof, and the faintly Gothic feel to the painting was in part, though in part only, my memory of the power of the Gothic interior of the cathedral, particularly arresting in those days when it was barely lit. It has remained in my mind.'