Bill Jacklin, b. 1943

Following his marriage to the decorator and design writer Lesley Astaire in 1979, Jacklin and his new wife moved from Kensington to a large house on the edge of the Cotswolds. The move served to underscore the painter's new identity as a figurative painter, and is associated with a series of paintings of studio interiors, many of which incorporate a window looking out onto his newly green surroundings. Nevertheless, as John Russell Taylor has explained, 'Jacklin is not interested primarily (if at all) in the anecdotal still life, or even the decorative qualities of the arrangement itself. Rather, he uses it as a pretext for an elaborate formal play... The painting is about pattern, and it is about light. It also evinces an interest in repetition, or partial repetition, with the sort of slight variations one might encounter in successive frames of a film... it is also importantly about time, and the rendering of passing time within the confines of a timeless artwork' (John Russell Taylor, Bill Jacklin, Phaidon, London, 1997, p.66).