Jeffrey Steele (1931 – 2021)

• Name: Steele, Jeffrey
• Birth Date: 1931
• Death Date: 2021
• Biography: Born in Cardiff, Jeffrey Steele was encouraged in his artistic endeavours by his school teachers. After unfinished studies, and a period of self-education while working in other jobs, in Paris in 1959 he encountered the work of artists working in the mode of geometric abstraction, such as Victor Vasarely (also in the Art Collection), and adopted a lifelong abstract approach. For eight years he worked purely in black and white and was identified with the Op-art movement. He incorporated other colours into his work in the 1970s.

  ‘Each work is underlaid by its own set of mathematic relationships that, once chosen intuitively, determines the elements depicted to produce a unified, harmonious whole, which is independent of any outside object (as in figurative art) or the artist’s emotions (as in Abstract Expressionism). Typically, equal vertical and horizontal divisions of the canvas are cut through with intersecting diagonals, and new lines taken from intersections, to produce a system of superimposed grids or nets. On these are built the shapes, lines, curves, blocks of colour or spatial divisions that form the elements of the picture. The elements are repeated but subject to the effects of incremental changes according to logical progressions. They interact and interpenetrate to allow the viewer to make new, multiple connections and see new patterns’.
  ‘While modern in their pure abstraction, purged of references to the world outside the picture, Steele’s works, in their systems of proportion, balance and measurement, in their use of geometric forms (particularly circles and polygons such as triangles and squares), and in their strong contrasts of light and dark (chiaroscuro) in their composition, are prefigured by much older art and architecture, and have a timeless quality’.

  After he had gained a reputation as a practising artist in the early 1960s Steele was accepted by the college authorities with which he had previously tussled and he began lecturing in fine art in Cardiff, Barry and Newport. He then lectured at Portsmouth Polytechnic from May 1968 until December 1989.

  He exhibited throughout Europe and in the Americas.