Jeffrey Blondes

Originally a landscape painter, Blondes’ last 18 years have been devoted to making high definition films ranging in length (to date) from 9 to 104 hours.

The preoccupation of these films is the point at which landscape and time meet. (This will make sense to anyone familiar with his painting as his primary instinct has always been to watch, wait and record en plein air the subtleties of nature at play in any given landscape). As Drs Bray and Ede observed in their essay on his work: “Although Blondes is still the mediator…, film provides [the viewer] with such direct exposure to his subject that it is as though a veil has been lifted. Nature has essentially been brought inside our domestic space and because we see landscape out of its normal context, the viewer is even more acutely aware of it. Watching the films, time seems to pass inexorably slowly with the effect that one is transfixed when at last we see some movement in the landscape.”

Note: These are not the actual films but a selection of 20 second segments with no transitions excerpted from the original works.

Still Time: The meditative landscape

A collaborative exhibition presented by Eleven Fine Art and GBS Fine Art
Wednesday 8th – Saturday 18th October 2025

Private View: Wednesday 8th October 6-8pm

@ 55 Hollywood Road, London SW10 9HX

Jeffrey Blondes and Harry Cory Wright are two contemporary artists whose meditative practices in landscape art over many years reveal an immersive and time-attuned engagement with the natural world. While they work in different media - Blondes with ultra-long-duration HD digital film and Cory Wright with large-format photography - both artists create contemplative, sensory-rich experiences that lure the viewer into extended observation and reflection. Until now they have been weaving that spell independently of each other; this exhibition provides a welcome opportunity for an audience to encounter side by side their differing approaches to the living landscape.

Jeffrey Blondes, although he began as a plein air painter, transitioned some 20 years ago to HD video, extending his original pictorial engagement with the landscape into real time. His films, often many hours long, are not meant to be watched in straight sittings, but lived with; playing slowly out, sometimes almost imperceptibly, in real time, in domestic or public spaces. All his work, whether shot close to home in France or across the globe, embodies durational attentiveness and scrutiny; observing light, weather and seasonal change unfold with near-scientific patience. His aim is not just visual documentation, but the creation of a temporal experience that aligns the viewer with the natural rhythms of the earth. In this way, Blondes becomes a “mediator” of a landscape that breathes and evolves, engaging the viewer in a slow re-calibration of time.

Harry Cory Wright’s photographs by contrast are grounded in a deep familiarity with the British landscape, in particular the tidal marshes of Norfolk, close to his home. Using a 10 x 8 large-format camera, his method is again slow and deliberate, requiring physical immersion in the landscape and a long process of setup and waiting. His work too celebrates the interplay of elemental forces - light, wind, water - seeking to convey those fleeting transitions in nature, from the gentle shift of tides to seasonal cycles. Cory Wright speaks of photography as capturing “pulses of nature,” and his images reflect a poetic restraint, allowing space, light, and time to infuse each scene. His landscapes, as Rachel Campbell-Johnston notes, are “less places than spaces” - emotive and open-ended, rich with the possibility of imaginative expansion.

DRAWINGS

Prices available on request.