Jeff Clarke: 'Composer Herbert Howells said "the themes which work best, are those that choose you." 'Light and shade' have certainly laid a long, exciting and often heavy hand over sixty-seven out of my eighty-one years. It's a very old theme in Art History - 'chiaroscuro', surface vibration, time passing, metaphor, good and evil, you name it. Not exclusive by any means given the independence of line and colour if required, but egged on by early years in sunny Italy and Crete, I've been involved in recurrent bouts with light's perpetual motions, life giving angles and continually shifting shapes which develop into a chess game, a dialectic of illumination and camouflage full of apparent surprise. Working in places of classical and romantic history is a powerful stimulant, but my real job for a long time has been to try and capture some sense of the precious irradiation of the everyday, just south of Folly Bridge.'

Jeff Clarke's collages, prints and oil paintings explore recurrent themes. He is drawn to his subjects as planets are to the sun - brushes in a jug with fruit and flower pot, washing on a line behind his studio, perhaps a particular scene glimpsed through the garden door. Although Clarke has spent many years painting in the Mediterranean, the location and his chosen subject is secondary. His preoccupation is light and shade and how to articulate the impact of light, in that moment, on form. He describes the dialogue between light and dark as inescapable in every sense.

Approaching his 'game' through different media, Clarke creates collages in clean-cut colour, the light cutting diagonals across shadowed corners multiplying at once the possibilities of movement of shape, dimension and time. Flat planes of colour construct corrugated panels of barns and tin roofs, playful in their juxtaposed geometry and precision. By contrast, his prints celebrate the syncopated patterning created by light and shade, a distinctly cooler and tonally based approach. Informed by the exuberant colours of his collages and the linear expression of printmaking, his oils are vibrant, infused with light and rigorous form.

Although the conversation between light and shade may be the essence of painting for Jeff Clarke, the overriding impression that the viewer enjoys is the physicality and dynamic of vital colour extruded by the light. This exhibition is the culmination of a lifetime's journey toward that prize.